I know it’s March, the greening season and time for renewal. It’ll be a while coming yet in the north and west, but winter’s gruff countenance is, day-by-day, begrudgingly giving way to the smile and fair grace of spring. Down South, deep in Dixie, the dogwoods are...
It was boots and chaps. Gents and hats. Shotguns and spats. It was dog-folks gentle and gay. It was dignified old live oaks, bearded grizzled and gray. It was a lazy old mule wagon, creak rattle and sway. “The Lord’s own symphony,” my Grandma Betts would say, “in the...
Fine and decorative sporting art can gather up your soul, bringing happiness to you or whoever else might come to own and cherish it. Life is life, and even in the theater of our greatest passion the difference between a laugh and a tear is as capricious as the...
I could go on and on; the bill of laden is interminable . . . all the things that can displace or render to anguish a joyful day of hunting or fishing. But it’s quibbling over pocket money. Folks who’ve lived past yesterday will tell you life is...
Man ponders by coincidence. Nature knows better. The difference can sometimes be unfathomable. Late December . . . The Maryland Shores. . . Snowfall. . . Mystic, mesmeric, beckoning. Almost eight decades along for this wayfaring, wildfowling warrior — and still, when...
Islands in the stream…eras in the flow of a man’s lifetime. Days lapse January meager now, and this one is dying. In the twilight of its wake, snow is born. Death to one, life to another. Waylaid at my threshold by the magic, rescued from the zephyr of...
A fella posed a question the other day that caused me pause… He asked, “When’s the last time you did something for the first time?” Not when’s the last time you did something again for the first time in a long time. But the last time you did something for...
On a May morning, in the glad renewal that is spring, two lives collided. One was that of a young man who knew and loved wildness, but was not wild. The other was that of a child, five weeks from newborn, who was. In the moment they met, he was so fascinated by her...
And where do you find tranquility? A restoration of spirit, a calming of your soul? In a place so quietly unobtrusive, yet so deeply profound you will never find it so perfectly any other place on Earth? A reprieve of being that is so unwavering, so wholly...
The spaniel had lived beyond her time. But strangely – to the last – she had acted almost as a puppy. He had felt the turn of the tide three years before. Felt it more than in the 73 years before them. It pulled against him now, receding rather than rushing in. He...
