A Southern Christmas Hunt
South Carolina’s first poet laureate recounts a holiday hunt on the family plantation.
Black-Horn Buck
Toward the close of a glorious day in late September, I had gone down to the river from home to roam the wilderness of a neighboring plantation. The noble house that once stood on the bluff overlooking the lower reaches of the Santee was burned more than a century...
Grouse of the Little Hills
I have always felt that the ruffed grouse is the wariest, the swiftest and the most beautiful gamebird in the world. The bronzed magnificence of old gobblers allures me; so does the gleam of sunlight on the tall and craggy antlers of the whitetail. Yet a hunting...
Patsy & the Princes: A Classic Story by Archibald Rutledge
The daughter of Carolina Frank is a princess by right. I became Patsy’s when she was only four weeks old, and she already showed her blue blood and all it means in a pointer pup. Sensitive, patrician and affectionate, she was not happy unless she could curl up...
The Specter of Tiger Creek
After passing the winter on the plantation, we moved, in the spring, down to a house on the coast, where we spent the summer, safe from malaria and other swamp-fevers . . . It was there that we did our salt-water fishing, and there that we had this adventure with a...
Our Gobbler
I suppose that there are other things that make a hunter uneasy, but of one thing I am very sure: that is, to locate and to begin to stalk a deer or a turkey, only to find that another hunter is doing precisely the same thing at the same time. The feeling I had was...
Quail of the Kalmias
These birds of the hills develop both a speed of flight and a finesse of dodging that are superior to anything the field birds can show.
A Fox and a Conscience
Conscience,” the negro minister had solemnly said in his sermon that Sunday, “is sho’ going to keep a man good. It will make yo’ ‘fraid to lie, or steal, or bear false witness.” Ben, the old negro who had outlived his generation and who was sheltered in his desolate...
An excerpt from The Kings of Curlew Island
It was Richard who showed me the huge antler—a dropped horn from a whitetail buck. Massive to a degree rarely seen, not less than five inches it measured around the handsome beading. Moreover, there were nine clear points, none mere craggy excrescences; they were...
Pair of Mallards
An essential tale by the South Carolina legend.