The Last Of the Outlaw Gunners
Or they were going to be, until a gator got in the way.
Zane Grey – High Seas Prophet
So what can we say of Zane Grey, this dentist turned novelist turned outdoor writer? He was a dentist and photographer and a storyteller. He was one hell of a baseball player. He was husband and father and perpetual wanderer and a hunter and fisherman who once held...
Dead or Alive: John Wesley Harden and the 44 Schofield
I was once a wanted man, a man on the run with a woman in hot pursuit, one of my exes with a .44. It was for a trifling indiscretion, or so it seemed at the time. All I had was my overdue Visa and a quarter tank, but my Ford was faster than her Volvo. Never assume the...
Prospect Hope
A Colonial road, a looted grave and a deathbed promise. You don’t want to fall off your horse in the middle of Prospect Road. It might look like dirt, but it’s hard as concrete, paved with shell, packed solid by 250-odd years of feet, hooves and wagon wheels. A...
This Blessed Rage to Order, Pale Ramon
Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stephens, Mark Twain and a Cock-eyed Consideration of Time and Space Wallace Stephens wrote an obtuse poem, “An Idea of Order at Key West,” wherein this gal was singing on the beach at sunset, about 1934 near as I can figure, and Stephens was...
Just Another Love Story
She was married when I met her but I took her fishing anyway. She was a fender-bender, a well-put-together willowy blonde with beer sign blue neon eyes. But she was wired for 110 and plugged into 220. When she shucked her jeans, the inseam read, “Lucky You.” Great...
Ghost Light on the Land’s End Road
I was suddenly awash in pale blue phosphorescence and I briefly reckoned poor ventilated Private Quigley had his chilly arms around me! Right turn at Frogmore, south down a dozen miles of two-lane island blacktop, through woods and swamps and fields, to old Fort...
Little Windy and the Wingshooting Woman
She was a green-eyed freckle-faced redhead, long of hair and limb, married a couple of times before I met her but neither lasted too long. Her name, literally translated, meant “the daughter of an angel of bright shining light,” and it was true, mostly....
Ernest Hemingway: Angler, Fighter, Lover
Ernest Hemingway fought in two wars, battled huge marlin and tuna in Bimini and Cuba and then survived two plane crashes and deadly encounters with lions and elephants in Africa – all while creating some of the greatest sporting literature ever written.
Big Empty Encounter
A long stretch of dark, empty woods stood between them and the truck, and the big bear kept edging nearer, so close now they could hear his nasally whine and the soft rumbling in his throat.