By William A. Sodeman, Jr., MD, JD
A Hunter's Road
A Journey with Gun and Dog Across the American Uplands
By Jim Fergus
Henry Holt and Company, 1992, 290 pages, softback
Jim Fergus is a writer who took to hunting and hunting dogs late. He did not grow up with the sport. This book is a novelization of a 17,000 mile trip by camper that he and his lab, Sweetzer, made around mostly upland coverts in the West, Midwest, East and South. Each stop is a short story/essay that records the character of the dogs and hunters he met and the character of the land as well. He uses his cachet as a writer prudently to meet and speak with giants in the upland bird hunting sport: Gordon Gullion, George Bird Evans and Russell Chatham to name a few. He tells a fine story and it is not possible to identify where fact stretches into fiction. This is a reprint of an earlier, 1992, edition but it is too good not to review.
The book will not tell you how to shoot better. Shotgunner, reviewed elsewhere in this issue does that. It shares with Shotgunner instruction about how to hunt better behind dogs, and in the company of bird hunters of all persuasions. Scott Smith offers the rules of civility, and Jim Fergus focuses on how these rules are implemented. Also involved is the process of becoming one with the environment. “He showed me a place where the Huns had been dusting, the delicate pattern of their wing feathers in the dirt. He pointed out coyote scat, composed almost entirely of grasshoppers, and the tiny frail skeleton of a baby coyote—seemingly unimportant things that only a good hunter would bother to notice, or care to know, but that make a day afield infinitely richer.” It is possible, as Jim Fergus shows us, to hunt without killing a bird and still feel fulfilled.
Some time is spent on the hunting/anti-hunting issue. It is a balanced presentation. “It might occur to that majority of dead wood, commonly known as the “Public” of which the narrator is one, that it would behoove us all to be somewhat more tolerant of the tiny 7 percent among us who enjoy the hands-on activity of procuring their own dinner from the field or forest, even if that activity, no longer strictly necessary for survival, has been ritualized into sport.” A case can be made for the Greens protecting us. This is not a dog book per se but with Sweetzer along there is hardly a story without a dog. The range of working dogs seems as broad and varied as the persuasions of the humans who hunt with them. There is no doubt that dogs are as important as guns and birds in upland hunting. This is an entertaining book. If you read it you will grow in your appreciation of field sports.
RWOL
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