River of Many Returns

River of Many Returns

I must tell you a story. A story of old Argentina. A story older than two centuries, but as young as yesterday. A story within a story, for one would be untold without the other. A story of many things, though at its core the strength and soul of a woman. Not of Evita...
The Lasting Legacy of Nash Buckingham

The Lasting Legacy of Nash Buckingham

Regrets are scratches on the furniture of our lives that can never be polished away. The scars of fate that shoved aside dreams, the wounds of choices ill-chosen, the lesions of opportunities lost or dreams abandoned. Some are shallow; some are deep. Some settle...
A Healing Place

A Healing Place

It was the day of his birth, the genesis of his sixty-third year, and it had been a good one. It could have been celebrated anywhere in the world, as so many times before it had. But not today. Not this time. Today, it had been spent on the small streams near home,...
Dog Eyes: Windows to the Soul

Dog Eyes: Windows to the Soul

Gaze into the eyes of a dog. When they are deep and clear, when they pulse for the hunt like bellowed coals and the reflections in them flash like lightning with the restless lights of life on fire. And where do you find tranquility? A restoration of spirit, a calming...
Training Across

Training Across

Those of us who spend lifetimes hunting and fishing learn in time that skills attained wild serve very efficiently in the struggles that eventuate in tamer, but trying, environs of modern living. Attributes of stoicism, self-discipline, perseverance, determination,...
A Thousand Rebel Yells

A Thousand Rebel Yells

It was black dark and there was the disarming gush of the swollen, little stream, and I could only sense the rise of the earth above me. But I had done battle here before. I could feel it in my bones, as in the ghostly lines of Mary Fahl’s “Going Home,” from Gods and...
Blindsided

Blindsided

It had been a chain of thrills. First, the answer of one bull from the top of the darkening ridge, screaming, rolling into a chorus of chuckles, earnest and deep. Then a second, 200 yards right, angry and urgent. And yet another, in the canyon below, maybe a half-mile...
The Treasure of Simply Belonging

The Treasure of Simply Belonging

For restless years I harbored an unrequited craving for a 28 gauge. It came from reading too much Mcintosh, and misconceptions, perhaps, of life and love. In a hundred fantasies, the little 28 would come as breathlessly to shoulder as my high school heartthrob, a...
Clayton Flowers

Clayton Flowers

Never said nothin’ to nobody,’ folks said of Clayton Flowers. But he’d talk to me, about livin’ and even about dyin’. I’ll tell this the way Clayton Flowers told it once to me. Clayton was an old man himself then, the deeper side of his 70s. Never talked to nobody...