Cooking on wood is like blowing a goose call or a trombone. Showing you is easy, telling you is hard. The scud stacked up over the northeast, a gray washboard above the sea, to the horizon and beyond. Too late for a hurricane, but the wind didn’t care. Raindrops big...
A scent can conjure up emotions and even specific memories. In the brain, smell is the closest to memory; in the heart, the closest to love. She meditated. She would not eat the venison I brought her. She worshiped some Hindu holy man whose name I wish I could forget....
The hurricane roared through like a runaway train, like a Seaboard freight with a stuck throttle. Fifteen inches of rain in fifteen hours, wind a-hundred-plus-Jesus, tornados on the back side, it tore hell out of the piney ridges and swamp-ground hardwoods in between....
How many good dogs you gonna bury before one buries you? Blue weighed 90 pounds, with webbed feet big as biscuits, long legs and a deep chest, the biggest Lab bitch I ever saw, out of Tomahawk, Wisconsin, from a kennel of field champions. An undertaker gave her away....
All writers are liars, whether reef-fishing miles offshore on the Atlantic or fishing through a hole in the north country ice. The smokestack of the hulk gloomed from the depths, barely visible when the July sun ricocheted off the surface of the sea. Halfway to the...
Fifty years later, the old men were boys once again. I suppose there was a time when the Captain and I did not know one another, when he did not call me a smart ass, but neither of us can recall when that might have been. We are about half senile now, or at least we...
When the shark hit the end of the line, it came up, shook his head just like those mahi did. The dock bowed, creaked, groaned, sagged. Clink, clink, clink. I was bent over the gunnel of Maggie C, a 26-foot Maine lobster boat rigged for ocean-running. Six weeks, 600...
You can cuss wild hogs, just don’t cuss them with your mouth full You can run them with hounds and chase them on horseback or on foot. You can wade into the slashing, squealing, howling melee and kill them with a blade if it’s too tight to shoot between...
The unlikely life, art and death of legendary artist and adventurer Peter Beard. Peter Beard was a hard man to peg. A photographer of wildlife and beautiful women, a writer, an ethnologist, explorer, hunter, naturalist, conservationist, ladies man, married man, wise...
Man or woman, dog or gun, you never know when you might say goodbye. Fixing to write this down before I forget, the days and years slipping away the way they do, that blaze of autumn to water the eye, the flames of maple and oak and the dry-bone rattling aspen, that...
