Throughout Robert Ruark’s career, the North Carolina-reared author penned what are, without a doubt, among the greatest stories ever written about the outdoors. While Faulkner and Hemingway would subsequently enjoy wider readerships, Ruark was the true master of the form, offering unparalleled insight into hunting and setting a benchmark for writing about the subject.
Last year we highlighted the finest passages from The Old Man and the Boy, undoubtedly Ruark’s most essential work, but now we’ve featured nine essential lines from his other classic books, such as Horn of the Hunter and Use Enough Gun.
Somehow, the sound of a shotgun tends to cheer one up. —The Honey Badger
Already I was beginning to fall into the African way of thinking: That if you properly respect what you are after, and shoot it cleanly and on the animal’s terrain, if you imprison in your mind all the wonder of the day from sky to smell to breeze to flowers—then you have not merely killed an animal. You have lent immortality to a beast you have killed because you loved him and wanted him forever so that you could always recapture the day. —Use Enough Gun
You will rarely find a dedicated quail shot who is not a pretty nice guy. He has to be a nice guy, because he is performing for the benefit of his dogs, himself, and his companions, and all are expert in the detection of fraudulent behavior in the field. —”The Brave Quail”
Deep in the guts of most men is buried the involuntary response to the hunter’s horn, a prickle of the nape hairs, an acceleration of the pulse, an atavistic memory of his fathers, who killed first with stone, and then with club, and then with spear, and then with bow, and then with gun, and finally with formulae. —Horn of the Hunter
Man…can understand a lion, because a lion is life in its simplest form, beautiful, menacing, dangerous, and attractive to his ego. A lion has always been the symbol of challenge, the prototype of personal hazard. You get the lion, or the lion gets you. —Use Enough Gun
Nothing in war terrified me as much as walking up to my first elephant, and I was reasonably terrified during the war. —”In True”
The gauge of the gun is an index to the ability of the man to prove his manhood…If it is a 12-gauge, he is so-so. If it is a 16, he is pretty good. If it’s a 20-gauge, he is excellent, and if it a .410 he is bragging. —”The Brave Quail”
I never knew a man that hunted quail that didn’t come out of it a little politer by comparison. —Use Enough Gun
I regret a kind of thinking that regards hunting as shameful, if not sinful. I do not admire a concerted attempt to sell the idea that the killing of game is cruel sport, because no game dies a natural death and preys as naturally upon itself as man upon man. And above all, I deplore a substitution, via movies and television, of the bloody deaths of cops and gangsters and the Western bad men as high adventure, notably heroic in the mind. We may have slain innocent rabbits, but we were not taught by sponsors to applaud the wholesale slaughter of people in order to peddle merchandise. —”People Like Us Never Grow Up”
Cover image from Robert Ruark: The Lost Classics edited by Jim Casada