Folks talk about it still. The nights were the blackest anyone could remember. But there was not a star in the sky. Mountain hollows rang with banjo music. Yet, no one could be found. Each evening at midnight the bell at Humphrey’s Chapel tolled … the rope...
An insensible threat was at fore, a primordial evil. The calico dog stopped dead-still, using the dusky shadows of the bush to secret himself from the revealing glimmer of the building moon. He had the fragile night breeze in his nose. On it had been borne the...
We would hunt one last time in the morning, one last time before he went away. I would gift that to myself. How swiftly and irreversibly, Danny’s season had arrived. From the day almost 10 years before, when first I had invested a portion of my heart in a...
The wisdom of the father, the wonder of the son, Wander together, ’til this life is done- And comes time to remember, all that was one. As I lie dying, if I’ve yet the mind to know, Where I’ve been, and how I came, and why I’ll hate to go, Then...
It is at the edge of dark, that pandemonium erupts. One day, I want to shoot a buffalo. With paces between us, facing his dare. I want to know for once before I die, even if on the day I die, the tremble of doubt and the taste of fear. It is only just, before all I...
It is important for a man to do a thing well, even if it is killing. The honor of a feat is the measure of how you do it…And what was the truth of me? To hell with Bob Ruark. To blazes with Hemingway, Capstick, Percival, Boddington, the whole and bunch of them....
Remarkable, really. Not the first of my hunting or fishing companions, even the zaniest, admits to regular outdoor dreams. I’d suspect subterfuge, collusion, even amnesia. Dreams do have a short shelf life. How many can you remember from last month? Or, for that...
“And the boy…was he there, Bill?” I hauled off and went squirrel hunting the other day. Not so remarkable, I suppose. Except that the whitetail rut was in full blaze, and bird season was in and it’s been a hell of a long time since I’ve...
She had made it all possible. She was the melody of his song. And ever she watched and waited for him, in a warm, yellow kitchen. It is dark below. Raindrops clamor helplessly at the small window by his shoulder, driven in itinerant streaks across the glass by the...
If tomorrow you were suddenly, despicably rich, what would be the first thing you would buy? “You can’t buy happiness” must be the oldest prank in the aphorism boneyard, but we all know Gene Hill dispelled that myth when he remembered, “they forgot little...
