What is writing, if not the sharing and resharing of life itself?

It’s done.  

Finished.  

Written and designed; printed, bound and finally shipping out to a host of readers, both old and new…this latest book that’s been growing from my head and heart and fingertips for the past half dozen years. And now that it’s complete, there’s nothing more to do except watch and wait, and pray it finds its stride. 

Ever since it led me down the rabbit hole yet again six years ago, it’s been a constant companion as we urged one another to completion—me, open and eager to receive and shape each word and phrase and sentence as they presented themselves; the book always there in return to provide purpose and reassurance during all those nights when sleep would not come, or in the midst of a long road trip or interminable flight or unexpected layover in some dark and soulless airport, or on one of those calming midnight walks along some rain-glistened street or moonlit ridge, or beneath some starry desert sky.  

It has drawn me to places I might otherwise have never dared venture—as well as back to places I already knew and loved.  

There was the great Huron forest in northern Michigan and the thick palmetto swamps of Old Florida, Little Current and Cape Hatteras, Tres Rios, San Huberto, the east and west forks of the Brazos and Rio Piedra Plantation down in southern Georgia where the Atchison family always welcomes my friends and me back to what forever feels like home and where the quail are prolific and fly like rockets.  

The memories that were reawakened as I worked on the text and photographs conjured up the latent scent of that big elk herd I stumbled into one cool summer morning while fly fishing high in northern New Mexico along with the reassuring pressure of the finely sculpted grip of my old recurve bow as I drew on that monster buck up in Michigan, and the exquisite sting of the fine, wind-driven sleet that bit into my face during those final few minutes on the Rio Malleo as I brought to hand one last trout from Patagonia.  

My first encounter with the volcano Lanín is still firmly cached in my memory—as permanently as the photograph that Marcos shot of what is surely the most elegant expression of altitude and ice I have ever beheld, thrusting her snow-shrouded shoulders and summit into the clear Argentine sky as I took a break from fishing to scrawl a few impromptu impressions in my little pocket journal.  

I can still taste Adrian’s stuffed zucchini, milanesa and smoked boar that was prepared and waiting for us as we sauntered into the old stone corral that sat so comfortably in the middle of the Olsen family’s Estancia Loncoluan on that blustery afternoon when we came in off the river.  

The ethereal sound of the woodcocks’ skydance out on the edge of Kenner’s Woods still resonates through these recently printed pages, as does the almighty roar of the Great Falls of the Potomac tearing through Mather Gorge.  

And now that the book is complete and I am slowly reemerging from the process, I’m having trouble figuring out what to do with myself and wondering what comes next. But I hope it doesn’t come too soon. 

For I am tired.  

Tired of the road, tired of the sky, tired of the leaving and returning and leaving again and all the deadlines that grew ever more insistent as the time to take the book to press drew near.  

But it’s a good kind of tired—patient, warm and healing; the kind of tired that comes only after you’ve put all you have into something this meaningful and are gratified with the result.  

Please be assured, the stories that make up this book were not written to be mere chronicles of what occurred, nor as a simple record of time or place or geography or any particular order of events to be dutifully reported to those who weren’t present in real time to experience them for themselves.  

Rather, they were written so that you, Dear Reader, might somehow see and hear and smell and taste and be a part of the experiences in present tense. Is that not, after all, a writer’s task: to share and re-share life itself in all its gore and spectacle and splendor? 

For a book belongs exclusively to its writer only so long as it is still taking form in his or her mind and soul, until it seems you are doing little more than taking dictation as it assumes a life of its own and tells you what it wants you to write. 

And when the words are finally in their proper order and the chapters have been sequenced, and the book is typeset and designed and produced, and all the photographs have been shot and refined and incorporated into the flow of the text, you walk it to the pressroom in its still-embryonic form and oversee its birth in paper and ink. And the pressmen are your friends, and are patient and understanding as they make the delicate adjustments you request: Add three points of yellow to the front of the dust jacket; a tad more black in the sky that looms above the borderlands on page 27; a little darker along the arrow-pierced shoulder of the big whitetail buck on page 121 that fell to your old recurve bow on that cold, still, birch-and-maple evening up in Michigan.   

And when the book is printed and bound and ready to take on the world, it’s like watching your child fly the nest and you desperately hope it will fulfill the purpose for which it was intended.  

Does any of this make sense?  

I pray it does, for this is the reality of the creative process when it is alive and flowing, as the seed that’s been growing inside you for so many years begins to bloom and blossom and you realize that all those miles and minutes and days and decades spent gathering the impressions that make up its content were simply preamble to the time when it might take wing—back when you were the only channel through which it could claw its way into the world as it grew and evolved and found its reason for being.  

But now that it’s complete, there’s this sudden and abrupt void, and I’ve been trying to figure out what to do next. 

So I spent Christmas morning high on Roan Mountain in the tiny headwaters of the Watauga with my little 1-weight fly rod, and New Year’s Eve up above Shady Valley for grouse.  

In late February I made my way south once more to Rio Piedra with Annie and Bill and Sam and Beth and the kids for bobwhite quail.  

My pal Bob has invited me down to Old Florida for Osceola turkey in spring, and there’s been some discussion about Atlantic salmon in Ireland come early summer.  

In late July I’ll be heading back into the high country of northern New Mexico for trout, and September will bring doves over on Danny’s farm. In late October I’ll bear west to Chama for elk, then west again for winter bison in December.  

And just between you and me, I think I’m beginning to sense the seed of yet another book attempting to send out a few exploratory shoots somewhere deep in my synapses and it’s entirely possible I may soon be tripping back down that old, now-familiar rabbit hole one more time to see if anything has taken root. 

But please…PLEASE!…don’t tell my wife and daughter.  

Not just yet.