Ep. 777: 12 Books Every Hunter and Angler Should Read

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your guide to
the White Tail Woods presented by first Light, creating proven
versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First
Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Mark Kenyon.

Speaker 2 (00:19):
Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. This week in
the show, Tony and I are discussing the top twelve
books that every hunter and angler should read. These are
books that will make you a better hunter and angler,
books that will make you think, and books that, through
the page, will take you on some of the wildest adventures.

(00:40):
Imagine them all right, Welcome back to the Wired to
Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light in their
Camera for Conservation initiative, and today we'll hear my buddy
Tony for a different kind of post. Today. We are

(01:01):
not going to be telling you about how to kill
a deer. We're not going to be telling you about
how to do timber stand improvement or hang a tree stand,
or be a better conservationist or anything like that. We're
going to talk to you about something that requires very
little physical work. Tony. It's about as easy as it comes.

(01:23):
You can just kind of take your fingers and pull
a page and pull it to the next one and
there it is. That's all the work you gotta do.
We're flipping pages today talking books. This is something that
I do sometimes on social media. I've written articles about this,
but we've only we've done few podcasts, a few where

(01:45):
we've dabbled in talking about books. But I thought today
the idea would be to talk through the top books
that we think that every hunter and anglers should read.
And this is this is on my mind right now,
and I think it's on your mind too, because I've
been getting ready for some trips and I know you're
getting ready for a trip. And one of the most

(02:06):
important things for me when I'm heading out on a
you know, a week long trip anywhere hunting or fishing
or camping or anything, I spend in an ornate amount
of time picking what books on to bring. My wife
thinks I'm crazy, Like she gets mad at me because
I end up I can't ever just bring one because
like the worst thing is to bring one book and

(02:26):
then finish it and then not have anything else to read, right,
So I end up bringing like two three. I've been
known to bring four books on a week long vacation before,
so I don't know, I might have a problem, but
that's that's kind of my idea, Tony, is to kind
of talk through some of our top book recommendations, since

(02:47):
we need some book recommendations leading into our trips.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
Right right, I'm good with it.

Speaker 2 (02:52):
But you're heading, you're heading where soon?

Speaker 4 (02:54):
I am flying down to Florida hearing about eight hours
and i'll be tomorrow morning. I'll be fishing the salt
and I cannot freaking wait.

Speaker 2 (03:03):
Ah. Yeah, I'm very jealousy I have from our recording today.
I have nine days until I leave for Florida. So
we're gonna be crossing paths. We're gonna be almost intersecting
while we're.

Speaker 3 (03:15):
Getting away from the plane windows.

Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah, so what all, what all do you have on
the itinerary? You said, like tomorrow's offshore, like deep water fishing.

Speaker 3 (03:26):
Yep.

Speaker 4 (03:27):
So almost every time I've ever been down well, I
shouldn't say every time I've ever been down there, the
weather has not allowed to go out on the big water,
and so we've fished inshore, you know, fish the lagoons,
the rivers, whatever, And we just have this like unbelievably
consistent forecast and so we're heading out to catch you know,
big spinner sharks and all kinds of stuff tomorrow and

(03:49):
that's gonna be really fun. And then after that we'll
have a canoe to go paddle around in the mangroves
and try to target snook and trout and you know, whatever,
drum whatever else we.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Can find, and it's gonna be really fun.

Speaker 2 (04:05):
Do you have any advice for me on some of
that inland kind of stuff, because because we're gonna be
down in nine days and we're gonna be doing some
like fishing in the flats, like for tarpin, bone fish,
that kind of thing with people who really know what
they're doing. But we're also going to be doing a
little bit of stuff in the Everglades, and we're gonna

(04:25):
be checking out some of these like canal systems and
these backwaters, and I'm thinking we might be able to
catch a bunch of random stuff in there on a
fly rod. I even saw someone catching peacock bass in
one of the spots that I know we're gonna be
exploring anything that you've experienced doing some of that, because
I know you've you've got a little more experience than

(04:45):
me on that side. Of things.

Speaker 4 (04:47):
Uh man, there's there's two things. That all those fish
eat live shrimp. So anything anything that you have that
looks like a shrimp, uh, it's gonna work well. And
then small minnows. I mean it's crazy down there. We
don't we're not we're not fly fishing on this trip.

(05:07):
Like we'll go, we'll go throw little two inch swim
baits that would look like a white streamer, you know,
I mean like just a minnow pattern and you catch everything,
or you know, if you we if we go buy
a couple dozen live shrimp and throw them around, everything
eats it. You know, it's like it's just like a
universal food source down there. So anything that looks like
that is gonna get chomped on. And I have you know,

(05:32):
if you're around I'm not exactly sure where you're gonna be.
But the other thing that if you're around any of
the trout, any you know, jack some of that stuff,
anything with like a streamer with like gold tinsel, something
that looks you know, gold, and it seems to work
really well. Okay, but I just I go a little
and just try to match you know, what everything's eating.

Speaker 3 (05:53):
You'll catch all kinds of stuff.

Speaker 2 (05:55):
That's the thing I'm excited about, maybe the most is
just like the random diversity of stuff you could get
into yep, like Castle Line and who knows what's going
to be down there. So yeah, I mean that's pumped.
That's what makes it fun. I mean that is I
mean it probably sounds so.

Speaker 4 (06:11):
Stupid, but that mystery of like not knowing that environment
very well and not knowing what you're going to catch
and like learning as you go. Sometimes we forget that
stuff when you're really used to, you know, hunting in
the back forty or hunting the farm you grew up on.
Is like, you know, the deer come out here, they
walk through here, the turkey's strutt in this field. It's

(06:31):
kind of like you you know, it's there's comfort in that,
but it's also there's not a lot of mystery. And man,
you know, when you live in the you know, close
to Canada and then you get to spend some time
in the salt, you you discover some cool stuff.

Speaker 3 (06:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
Nice change of pace, that's for sure. Uh So do
you have a book picked out for the trip yet?

Speaker 3 (06:53):
So? I'm not sure yet.

Speaker 4 (06:55):
I I was this is you know that experiment they
do with kids where they're like it's a psych logical
experiment where they're like, hey, you can.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
Have one marshmallow. Now I know this one or two
in an hour.

Speaker 4 (07:09):
I was trying to save Cormack McCarthy's last books, Tela Maris,
just because it's it's a short book. I knew it
wouldn't take very long. It's a good vacation book. But
I finished it last night, and so because I started
to get into it and I just really liked it,
and so now I'm not sure. Sometimes and we'll talk

(07:29):
about this on my list, but sometimes on trips like this,
I like to go back to like an old favorite,
Like I might bring Blood Meridian, or I might bring
some book that I just know I love, And because
that's what I do sometimes in the spring, when I'm
turkey hunting, if I'm bow hunting specifically and sitting in
a blind all day, sometimes I just go run through
a few of my old favorites because it's just like

(07:50):
a kind of like a comfort thing.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
You know, do you like to read books about something
in season when you're doing the thing. So I guess
what I'm getting is like, are you reading books about
hunting during hunting season where you're out there, or do
you read about fishing when it's fishing season or is
it like the opposite, like during the winter, you're reading

(08:14):
about fishing because you want to go fishing, you know.

Speaker 3 (08:17):
I just know I don't.

Speaker 4 (08:19):
I don't structure it season seasonally, like I don't really
care about that, and I honestly don't. You know, most
people will get this from my list, but I don't,
like if it's September October, I'm not seeking out hunting books,
you know. And honestly, the stuff that I like so
much of it is kind of adventure stuff from the

(08:40):
past or something, you know, Like I really love a
lot of the gun writer books from Africa back in
the day, even though it's like just to look into
like this machismo functioning alcoholism.

Speaker 3 (08:55):
Fill up your trophy room. But I just I love.

Speaker 4 (08:58):
That the idea of back then of those guys would
be like, you know, we're we're going from New York
or wherever they live to some part of Africa and
they're going to go on like a three months afar,
you know, And like I just at a time when
it was so much more wild and so no, I
don't I just I like, I like books that just

(09:20):
they bring you somewhere and there's like a like a
real feel for the place.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
You know.

Speaker 4 (09:26):
It doesn't have to like jive with my life at all.
I kind of like it when it doesn't, you know,
although there's I did put one author on my list
that does right about a lot of stuff that's pretty
familiar to me and probably you two, I would.

Speaker 2 (09:39):
Guess, hmm, Yeah. I have a couple of different things
when I when I'm reading books that are related to
hunting fishing. Number One, I do find like there's certain
times of the year when I'm just like craving the thing.
I kind of look at books are like my TV.
Like I don't I don't watch a whole TV, but

(10:01):
I like flip the station a lot based on what
I'm feeling, you know what I mean.

Speaker 4 (10:05):
Give me an example of that, Like, what's the time
where you're like, I gotta seek out this kind of book.

Speaker 2 (10:11):
Yeah, So like in the middle of the winter, when
I'm you know, you're stuck in it's kind of just
that dead of the night kind of short days you're
socked in, and that's when I'm definitely reaching for a book.
That's going to take me on a fishing adventure or
like you know, an Alaskan expedition or something just like that.

(10:35):
When I'm craving adventure because I've been stuck not doing it,
That's when I reach for those books that take me
far away to do the thing I want to do
while maybe in the summer, when I'm out doing those
kinds of things already. That is more often when I'm
picking up a book that's going to make me think
maybe a little bit more, like a slightly more philosophical
book or a book that's maybe more about conservation or

(11:00):
hunting ethics or something like that, like a little bit
more of that kind of thing, because I don't need
to scratch the itch of adventure or fishing because I'm
doing it. You know. Now, in like July or August,
I might pick up some kind of hunting material again
because now I'm like really amped up and I want
to be in the woods but I can't yet. So

(11:20):
like August is when I'll buy North American Whitetail Magazine
again or something like that, you know, where it's just
like I just need to see some of this stuff
I need to read, like the cheesy, how you kill
the big Buck story just because I so badly want
to be out there. So that's how a lot of
my reading revolves. Is like I'll have like a craving

(11:42):
and I have to scratch that itch with a book,
and I am not I do I'm not in a
What am I trying to say here? I used to
feel like I'd start a book and I had to
finish that book before I could touch anything else. I
used to do that, but now I look at books
as like, like I said, like a TV. And so
any given night, even in the same night, I might

(12:03):
change the channel a couple of times, I'll just go by.
Feel like, if I feel like digging into something heavy,
then hey, I'll pick up that one book I was reading.
It's kind of heavy. But then, you know what, at
the end of the night, maybe I just want to
go to sleep thinking about some adventure or whatever, and
so I'll read for the last half hour, just some
adventure story or a fishing book or whatever it is.
And I don't feel guilty about that anymore. I don't

(12:25):
finish as many books because of that, because I'm kind
of bouncing around right now. I could grab like five
or six different books that I'm part way through and
I don't care about that anymore. That's fine by me.
I'll get through them eventually. I also have given myself
permission to stop reading books and not read them at all,
like life is too short. I've decided to feel obligated

(12:48):
to read a crappy book. I used to be like,
you don't quit, like if you start something, you finish it.
And I thought that with books. So I grab a
book and i'd be reading it and I'm like a
third of the way through or halfway through, and like, man,
this is just not what I was hoping it would be.
And I would power through just to say I did it.
And I've stopped doing that because there's just like not
enough time to do that anymore.

Speaker 4 (13:09):
Does that I'm getting like vicariously nervous when you say that,
because what that makes me think is like you can
when you give your self permission to quit. It makes
me think about running, you know, like when you go
for a run a lot of times and like the
weather changes or something, You're like, you want to give
yourself permission to quit, you.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
Can't, yeah, And so do you do that? Eventually?

Speaker 4 (13:32):
You're going to have, you know, a hundred books on
your bedstand and you've only read two chapters each one.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
I don't think so, because this is like the one
place I've given myself permission to quit every just about
everything else, I'm pretty dead set.

Speaker 5 (13:45):
I'm not.

Speaker 2 (13:46):
But but it comes down to like reading, I think, uh,
I think I've gotten to a point where I can
trust myself in assessing something, whether like I'm going to
get out of this book what I thought I was
going to get, and I just think, like like going
for a run, I know I'm going to get in
what I put out, or I know I'm going to
get out of it what I put into it. But

(14:07):
a book, you are dependent on what the author put
into it. And if I can sense halfway through the hey,
he didn't put into this or she didn't put into
this what I'm hoping to get out of it, then
why am I going to waste another week of my
life on that when there's another really good book waiting.
There's so many books in the world, there's more books
than all everybody will be able to read, so many
great books, many great books on that bookshelf behind me,

(14:27):
that I still haven't gotten to or haven't quite finished
that I know I'm going to want to. So I'm
trusting myself now to sense when something is like, you know,
I'll give it a good shot. But sometimes, at least
from where I'm at now, Yeah, you get to pull
the plug sometimes and move on to the next, do you.
But I mean, hey, I'm still finishing you know, fifty

(14:48):
plus books a year, so yeah, all right, well I'm
quitting on too many times.

Speaker 4 (14:53):
Well at you slide mark. Do you so you're working
on a book, your own book right now? Do you
do you cater your reading at all when you're like,
do you use that as inspiration when you're writing, like
when you're in a deep writing phase or not?

Speaker 3 (15:09):
You do?

Speaker 5 (15:10):
Yes?

Speaker 2 (15:11):
Yes, So there's two. There's three kinds of reading that
I do while writing a book. I'm doing research for
my book, So a certain amount of my reading is
like reading that I'm taking notes on and studying the
topic that i'm writing about, finding out new sources, finding
new ideas, et cetera, building my wealth of knowledge. And

(15:33):
so I've been like reading slash researching for this book
for years and it's still ongoing now. And then there's
some reading where I do I read stuff about writing.
I don't know if that's something you do at all,
But I've got like, I've got a big section of
my books off behind me. But then I have a
small lineup of books right in front of me right
now on my computer desk one, two, three, four, five, six,

(15:56):
and like fifteen books in front of me. And whenever
I find myself at the desk and I get like
writer's block or I'm hitting some kind of speed bump,
or I'm struggling or something, I will give myself a
five minute break and I'll reach for one of these
books and open to the bookmark or open to a
random page and just read a little bit, read for

(16:18):
a couple of minutes. And it's kind of like having
a mentor, like having a writing mentor there and they
might just have a good nugget for you today, or
they're a little bit of inspiration or something. So I
found that very helpful because I don't have like a
writing background as far as like an educational background. I
just picked it up myself over the years. So I've
I've depended on the published works of other people to

(16:38):
kind of guide me and mentor me. So I'll read
that kind of stuff, and then the last thing I
will read is I will just try to make sure
that while I'm in the writing process that some portion
of what I'm reading is just like writing that I
really really like, like the voice, the tone, someone who
just has it figured out that I can just kind

(17:00):
of read and like swim in that world and and
and let that kind of kind of marinate in that
kind of thing that I enjoy so much. And I
think that kind of transfers into you a little bit
and helps you write well when your when your mind
is full of good writing, I think it helps your
body create good writing. So I would say that's that's

(17:23):
how I read during the writing phase. Does any of
that resonate with you?

Speaker 4 (17:28):
Yeah, man, I mean I I have a ton of
books on writing too, But I there's just certain books
that there's there's certain authors who have a style where
it's usually somebody who's like there's they're so good that
I just look at it and I'm like, there's no
way I would ever get there.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
But it's kind of inspirational.

Speaker 4 (17:50):
Yeah, this is going to sound dumb, but there's certain
things that I run across in my life, like certain
books you know that that's one of the reasons I
like McCarthy so much. But like, there's a you know
who Tom Morello is from Rage Against the Machine, right,
amazing guitarists, amazing. There's a performance with him and Bruce
Springsteen where they cover the Rage song Ghost of Tom

(18:12):
Job and Tom Morello plays two guitar solos in there,
and the first one is incredible, but the second one
is like just it's something that's like so unique. There
might be one person other people could play it. There
might be one person in the world who could have
written that, and it's him. And so sometimes when I'm

(18:33):
like I'm looking for inspiration for stuff, sometimes I'll be like,
I got to just pull that up. I just got
to watch that performance. And it's the same way I
feel sometimes when I go back to like I mentioned
Blood Meritian or you know, some other book that I've
read a billion times, but I just like it just
does something for me, and so I'm not necessarily like
I need to copy their style or try to emulate

(18:54):
them or whatever. It's just like just seeing how freaking
good people can be at stuff is enough to just
get you to just be like I'm gonna just keep
plugging away at this.

Speaker 2 (19:04):
Yeah, because it makes you want to make your own
version of like something that would make someone feel that way,
you know, like that's that's inspiration. Like if you could
somehow create something even a tenth of that good, how
specialill that be?

Speaker 3 (19:17):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (19:17):
My god, tenth of that good? If I could play
guitar or tenth that good, I wouldn't be talking to
you right now.

Speaker 3 (19:23):
I'd have a different career. Bro.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
Well, on that note, why don't we Why don't we
get into some of our recommendations. I thought we could
kind of go back and forth and we each have
a list of at least five books getting us to
our top ten, if not more. We might cover more
than that, but you want to start with one and
give me a spiel, tell me about it and see
if it's one I know.

Speaker 4 (19:57):
Well, I'm gonna start with one that it just I
just had to put on. And you and I actually
talked about this book in in Michigan, you know, trout Bum.
It's just John Guarrock is just one of those books
where it's like his style is just he's so incredible,
and it's an easy read, kind of adventure kind of

(20:17):
just you know personal essays on you know, fly fishing,
but more just life and his Like that book is
one that I just go back to a lot, and.

Speaker 3 (20:29):
You wouldn't have to.

Speaker 4 (20:30):
If you know fly fishing, it would help, but you
don't have to, Like you could just read.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
I was just gonna say, even if you're just an
angler of any kind, I think you would still enjoy it.
It's a he is a master, like he is someone
who is just a master storyteller. And it's it's so
full of of of like life and bigor like it's

(20:59):
just it's a lie on the page. You feel like
you're there. It's these little nuggets of like profound observation
where you're just like yes, like that's just so true.
But it seems effortless. Like at no point during any
of his books do you feel like it's overwritten. It's
never like overly flowery or like a drag. You're just

(21:20):
like there, but it's so beautifully created. He's really really
really good.

Speaker 4 (21:27):
Yeah, I mean his that style is it seems so
simple and accessible, but it's that's the like mastery of it.
You know, when when people try to write like writers,
they don't sound like him, you know, I mean and
and when you talk about his observations there, I'm sure

(21:50):
it's in that book, but he talks about seeing a
trout flash and pick up a nym for a something
he was drifting through a pool and seeing the yellow
belly of a brown trout and how the color is
like butter in a saute pan or in a frying pan,
and you're just like, that's like, that's like a perfect
description for that color. And I know there's another part

(22:13):
in there where he talks about how subtle a take
can be, and it's like when a dog walks by
and your guitar is on a stand, like a like
a Golden retriever specifically, or some kind of like long
haired dog, and its tail just brushes the strings and
most people wouldn't even register it, but you hear this
like very soft, subtle thing, and I'm like, that's like

(22:33):
such a good comparison to seeing like that. Just you know,
it's like an eighth of an inch tick in your
line where that where it picked up your nymph and
the like being tuned into that.

Speaker 2 (22:43):
So good man Man, there's there's something about really really
good writers that I think they begin to see the
world in metaphor. By that, I mean like just through
their daily life. They they're always kind of noticing things
and connecting those dots between oh that things kind of
like this thing, and that's such like a magical power.

(23:04):
I heard a story once about f Scott Fitzgerald and
oh god, who was it? It was another famous writer
at the time, wasn't Hemingway.

Speaker 5 (23:15):
It was.

Speaker 2 (23:17):
F Scott Fitzgerald and someone else that if I said
the name, everyone would be like, oh, yeah, we've heard
of this guy. They would drive around in the countryside
and they would point at different things and they would
play a metaphor game. They'd point it like a tree,
and then they'd have to fare who could come up
with the best metaphor, like on the spot about that
tree is like this, you know. And they did that

(23:38):
just to like flex that muscle because of how important
that is as a writer to be able to help
paint those pictures in people's minds by connecting this thing
that you're trying to describe to another thing that people
have a resonance with. And John is a master at that.

Speaker 4 (23:52):
Yeah, So you mentioned Hemingway. Did he make your list?

Speaker 2 (23:56):
He did not make my list, but almost did. I
thought about including The Old Man in the Sea. The
Old Man in the Sea is a short one, but
but a really good one and uh, you know, kind
of one of those classics. But but no, he's not
on the list.

Speaker 3 (24:13):
Man.

Speaker 4 (24:14):
I've read a lot of his stuff, and it just
I just don't like his style. I mean, everybody likes
The Old Man in the Sea, you know, and I
like forced myself to go through. I think I read
everything that he wrote at one point, and I was
just like, for whatever reason, I just don't like his
stuff very much.

Speaker 3 (24:36):
I don't know why.

Speaker 2 (24:37):
I'm definitely not like a Hemingway obsessed person, like I haven't.
I have not read all the stuff I've read, you know,
Old Man the Sea I read back in high school,
a couple of the classics. I've read the Nick Adams stories.
I've read Oh, what's that Africa hunting one Green something

(24:58):
Green Green Hills, A yeah, yeah, and it's like it's good.
I actually like some of the essays. I found some
of those essays that were like published in like Esquire
or something like that, and so that stuff's pretty good,
like some blue marlin fishing and stuff like that. But yeah,
some of his books are just kind of actually slow,

(25:18):
you know what I mean?

Speaker 3 (25:20):
For whom the Bell Tolls. When I read that, I
was like, oh my god, this is like waterboarding.

Speaker 2 (25:25):
Yeah, so you said trout bum by John. I did
not list trout bum but I did list another John
Gearak book, so I think it's worth mentioning since it's
a different one. My favorite Gearraq book I've had to
pick one is actually At the Grave of the Unknown Fishermen.
Have you read that one?

Speaker 3 (25:46):
Yep?

Speaker 2 (25:47):
Yeah, So what's cool about this one? A lot of
his books are kind of random essays, scattershot about all
sorts of different kinds of stuff, and this is the
one book he did that describes one single year from
the beginning of the year to the end of the year.
And I kind of liked that, just you know, following
chronologically what his year of phishing looks like. So all

(26:08):
the things we talked about trout Bummer true for this too.
Just that kind of more focused narrative and each essay
kind of connected back. So he would mention something in
chapter eight that references something chapter one, or that happened
in chapter one or two that's not used to the
case of his books, So it is kind of unique.
I liked it a lot. So many good like one

(26:31):
liners and like quotes in this Like I've got a
little book that I've sometimes do better, sometimes do worse.
But I've got like a little book that I try
to write down like little quotes or little excerpts and
books that I really like, so I can go back
and you never know when you might need a quote
or a little something. And there's so many from this book,
and one of them I pulled out speaks exactly to

(26:55):
what you were talking about about his level of observation.
So I'm a you just a little bit here. It's
just like so true. He's talking about birding while he's fishing.
So he goes out fishing, but then he ends up
looking at birds and noticing all this kind of stuff
around him. So he was talking about watching for birds.

(27:16):
He's a visual birder. YadA, YadA, YadA, And I'll pick
up here. I was using the straightforward method for learning
bird songs that an old bird watcher friend recommends, namely,
when you hear birds singing, go see what it is.
And this is the same kind of thing you do
in fly fishing. You pay attention piece things together, learn
to actually see what you've been looking at all along,

(27:38):
and sooner or later you no longer have to be
beaten over the head before you understand what's going on.
This can take a long time, longer for some than
for others. I've been at it for better than half
a lifetime, and there are still days when I think
I miss more than I see. Although how much you've
missed is yet another one of those things that you
can never know for sure unless there's someone there to

(27:59):
point it out. So there's like these little kind of
blurbs in there where he is talking about what he's
seeing on the water, and then he talks about something
else is actually about life or you know, I don't know.
I just love it. There's so many different things like that.
Such a good book. All of them are so good.
He's got like sixteen now, so you can, you know,

(28:21):
spend years working your way through his library. And we
could probably do a whole podcast just about his different books.

Speaker 3 (28:27):
So good. What's next for you? You know what? On
that vein?

Speaker 4 (28:33):
So when you when you texted me about this podcast,
I was like, I'm going to pick the books that
either the entire book was like just stuck with me
no matter when I read it in my life or
the ones that there's like something I always want to
go back to, even if it's not the entire book.
And so this is this is probably a weird choice

(28:54):
because there's way better writers out there.

Speaker 3 (28:56):
Uh, but I put.

Speaker 4 (28:57):
Gene Hill on the list, and I don't I don't
know if you've read a lot of his stuff. You know,
he wrote the Hill Country backpage for Field and Stream Forever,
but he he has a couple of different essays that
are like I just love him so much. But he
has one that's not about hunting at all, called the
Gentle Giant of Time, and it's in it's in a

(29:18):
couple of his different collections, but it's like him. I
don't even really want to talk about it too much
and spoil it. It's only like, you know, a three
page reader, four page read, but it's him kind of
like realizing his own mortality through a very like unconventional way.

Speaker 3 (29:33):
And what I love about him, you.

Speaker 4 (29:36):
Know, he's a he's a bird dog writer, known as
a bird dog writer, even though he wrote about fly
fishing and a lot of other stuff. But what I
love about him is like had this like little personal
connection to him through working through Field and Stream with
an editor who also edited his stuff before he died.
And I remember talking to him on a hunt one

(29:57):
time and I was like, what what's it like to
work and Jean Hills stuff? And He's like, it's a
freaking nightmare. He sends in handwritten pages that are full
of mistakes and just full of grammar errors and stuff,
but the structures like so sound and so accessible, and

(30:18):
I always I don't. I used to go back to
him a lot. I don't as much anymore, but I probably,
like once a year, find a reason to recommend that
essay to somebody to maybe get them hooked. Because if
you love I mean, he's kind of he's like a
couple other authors that I have on my list. But
if you love somebody who's like just very relatable, like

(30:40):
very average, but can write so much better than you think,
and like, you know, if you have a real bend
toward dogs like I do, and some of the things
that he likes, he's just it's just fun, thoughtful writing.

Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah. What was the name of the essay again?

Speaker 3 (30:58):
The Gentle Giant of Time?

Speaker 2 (31:00):
A gentle Giant of Time?

Speaker 4 (31:02):
All right, it's like that little bun. It's like that
little Tom Morello sol. I just go back to it
because it's just it's so good, and it's like how
you know, how this is when you're writing, you know, books, whatever,
you got to write a mediator article or something. Inspiration
comes in weird places like it come you know, it

(31:23):
doesn't come a lot of times from you picking up
a book and reading it and be like, oh, I'm
gonna I'm going to break off on this topic here.
It's just sometimes that stuff falls into your lap. You know,
you're out walking with the boys in the woods or
something and like an idea hits you. You know, it
just like yeah, it just shows up in your brain.
And I think that that's just the way that he

(31:44):
writes a lot of times is like that, just being
out there and being like, oh, this thing is like
this this is a part of what we do. But
it's also a reflection on life somehow.

Speaker 2 (31:56):
So another essay that kind of is like that for
me is one called The Heart of the Game by
Thomas mcgway. You know that one.

Speaker 3 (32:05):
Yep, I didn't put him on my list, but he
was real close.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
Yeah, The Heart of the Game is an incredible essay.
It's in his collection of essays called Outside Chance. It's
also I think Outside Magazine published it as well, and originally,
I think it was published originally in Sports Illustrated way
back in the day in the seventies or something when

(32:28):
that was more of like a literary outlet. But that
essay is one that's it's very long, and it's winding,
and it's it's all these different scenes. Some he's out hunting,
some he's at his cabin, some he's just thinking about

(32:50):
hunting or about the outside world. But all of these
different little vignettes paint a picture without him really saying it.
It paints picture of kind of how he views hunting
and its intersection with his life and the seriousness of that.
And it's it's it's profound. It's really really good. And

(33:13):
that essay is also in one of the books that
did include in my list, which is called A Hunter's Heart,
which is a collection of essays. It's the subtitles Honest
Essays on Blood Sport and it's edited and collected by
David Peterson. Have you read this one, Tony.

Speaker 5 (33:33):
Man?

Speaker 2 (33:33):
This book I think should be required reading for like
every hunter. It is so good, and it is. It's
a collection of essays from all sorts of amazing writers,
all tackling different viewpoints and different perspectives and different experiences

(33:57):
with hunting. So there's people talking and hear about why
they hunt. There's people talking in here about why they
used to hunt but they don't they don't or can't anymore.
There's people talking about their concerns and reservations about hunting.
There's talks of there's essays in here about ethics and

(34:17):
morals and how we hunt and how we use the
lives and animals that we harvest. It is. It is
like a crash course in understanding the why and how
behind our hunting. And it was. It was a book
I read when I was in my early twenties that like,

(34:40):
profoundly changed how I look at what I do as
a hunter. Not every single one of these essays, I think.
I think different essays resonate differently, and some you'll be like, ah,
this isn't for me. But I think, without a doubt
there are someone here that will just like leave you
floored for a while and thinking for days. And I'll

(35:02):
read a little excerpt from the introduction from the editor
David Peterson. He's talking about how, you know, he's got
a lot of friends that hunt and a lot of
friends that don't hunt, and how oftentimes those two groups
of people are always talking past each other. He described
kind of the idea that, you know, there's a mental
picture of a group of people sitting in a circle

(35:23):
of chairs together, but all the chairs are facing out,
And that's kind of how he feels hunters and non hunters,
you know, interact. And so the goal of this book,
in a certain way, was to try to help those
two parties come together and better understand each other. And
so he says, like, unlike my urban friends, I am
rural and blooded to the elbows. I've been hunting and

(35:45):
fishing and thus killing for nearly four decades. Even so
I am no less torn and confused about so called
blood sport than they. It is an exceedingly complex issue,
and not as self appointed spokespersons for both sides would
have it simply right or wrong, often is not. It's both,
so much so that I sometimes think, were I not

(36:06):
a hunter myself, lacking that intimate perspective that hunter's heart,
I suppose I could become an anti hunter the line
is that fine? And he goes on to and all
these essays go on to describe this like complex soup
of emotions and motivations and experiences that is hunting and

(36:31):
in just magical ways. So folks including this book.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
Sorry good, Oh he's isn't he from Colorado? Yeah? You know? Yeah? Okay, yeah,
I know.

Speaker 2 (36:42):
Ye he lives he lives up in like the San
Juans I think.

Speaker 4 (36:46):
So, uh, what's interesting about that that take? If you
if you say the line is so fine between me
being who I am and me being an anti hunter,
a lot of people are going to listen or read that,
listen to it here, I guess, and go after him
like I know people have gone after him for views

(37:08):
like that, and it's so it's so interesting to me.
Just just randomly yesterday, I don't know when it published,
It must have been very recently, but Pat Dirkin published
a piece on the meadeater dot com where the title
was like should the FEDS be managing our deer al
Kurtz or something like that?

Speaker 3 (37:26):
Yeah, and yeah.

Speaker 4 (37:28):
So I was working my dogs and one of my
buddies texted me and he's like, how does Dirkin still
have a job? With meat Eater and I and I
texted him back, I go, what are we talking about here?
And he goes, it's like he's just siding with the
anti hunters on that latest article on the meat eater,
you know, the medeater dot com. And so I was like, Okay, well,

(37:50):
I'm going to read this when I get back, because
I hadn't.

Speaker 3 (37:51):
Read it yet.

Speaker 4 (37:53):
And he laid out a case with a bunch of
biologists and researchers, very very well done journalism, like you
don't get the sense that Pat's taken aside either way.
And he just said, you know, a lot of people
are concerned that we're managing for as many animals as
possible to the detriment of some of the natural you know,

(38:16):
plant life out there, and that it's not not the
best way to be doing this. And it's hard for
state game managers to buck that trend when the voices
they hear are hunters and the money that they're receiving
is from hunters, even though game populations are supposed to
be managed for the entire you know, everybody in the state.

(38:39):
And so he just laid out a very clear case.
I mean, he had Jason Sumners in there from Missouri,
who I had on you know, we had on ware
to Hunt last year or two years ago, and I
read it and I was just like, this was just
like an objective reporting of this thing that's that's going
to come into our life, like this is going to
be an issue at some point.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
But my buddy's perspective.

Speaker 4 (39:00):
Was just he's just advocating for us to have all
the deer and elk killed off and not have enough
of him.

Speaker 3 (39:06):
And I was like, man, what.

Speaker 4 (39:08):
A weird what a weird little like place we live
in where you know, we're so biased toward wanting easier opportunities.

Speaker 3 (39:19):
And more deer.

Speaker 4 (39:20):
And I mean, I get where he's coming from, but
I'm like, you're in His interpretation of that was so
vastly different than when I got out of it. But
that's like what Peterson's talking about in that intro is like, man,
we even though we're all kind of we're all here
because we love the same thing, we love it for
a lot of different reasons, and we see a vastly different,

(39:43):
you know, viable paths for how to continue on this thing.
It was like a like a weird eye opener to me.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
It's complex stuff, And I think it's so easy to
get stuck in echo chambers where all we listen to
is our own people with the same talking points, and
we just like hammer those same talking points and over
and over again. And these days, like cancel culture is
just as alive on the conservative side, as just as
alive in the hunting and fishing world as it is
on the other side, and the anti hunting world or

(40:11):
the liberal whatever world, like cancel culture is everwhere, And
it's so easy to hear something that doesn't jive with
your talking points and then just be like, if that
person shutting him down, how does this guy still have
a job. He's willing to bring up an uncomfortable possibility,
an uncomfortable different viewpoint than I've been told, how dare he?
I think we need to engage and take in those

(40:35):
different ideas and viewpoints, even if we don't agree with him,
if only to just better understand these other ideas and
these other people so that we can maybe make our
own case met better. That's why I think, like man,
especially today, when there's all this stuff going on with
ballot box biology and people coming for different hunting opportunities,
right there is momentum behind some of these anti hunting measures,

(40:58):
and I think most people don't want to like. The
approach I see from a lot of people is they
want to like slam down the gates and like they're
building barriers. It's like they want to arm like grab
all the guns, pull down the gates, batter around the hatches.
It's time for war, you know, screw these other people.

(41:20):
And sometimes maybe that's the right approach. But sometimes actually
a more effective while it doesn't seem like what you
want to do, the more pragmatic, effective perspective is actually
walk across the drawbridge, rock, across the moat and talk
to these people, shake a hand and say, hey, I
hear what you're saying, but I'm not sure you understand

(41:41):
what it is we're actually doing it. Maybe I don't
understand your perspective too. And if we actually, like understood
each other better, we might realize that eighty five percent
of the time we want the same things. And if
there was more of that going on, I think there
would be a whole lot fewer of these problems. And
this book is like that to a t like this
book would be the perfect for every hunter to read today,

(42:02):
as we're facing more and more of these challenges. This
is the kind of stuff that's going to lead us
to have more useful dialogue when it comes to making
the case for why we should be able to hunt
still today, the value we bring why our way of
life is necessary and useful and an important part of
this culture. There's folks in here like Richard Nelson, Ed Abbey,

(42:28):
ab Guthrie, Terry Tempess, Williams m R. James Bruce Woods,
Jim Posowitz, David Peterson, Thomas McGuane, Thomas McIntyre, Rick Bass,
Jim Harrison, Steve Bodeo, Dan Crockett, Ted Williams, Russell Chatham,
Guy Adela Valden, Ted Karasop, Pete mcthiason, Barry Lopez. Like

(42:51):
big time writers talking about really important stuff. So this
is like a book that you have to like, chew on.
It's not a book that you read for fun. It's
a read. It's a book you read and like it's
going to make you think. And I think that's a
good thing to do sometimes. So Hunter's Heart, I cannot
recommend that enough.

Speaker 5 (43:11):
Nice What do you geah?

Speaker 4 (43:24):
So you had a you listed off a guy in
there that I had to put on here Jim Harrison, Yeah, man,
And you know he doesn't have like a he doesn't
have like a typical here's your hunting fishing book really
like he has he has books that are laced with

(43:45):
the outdoors. And so I did a it's it's going
to drop next week. But I have a Foundations episode
called touch Grass bro like coming up about how we're
generally pretty rest out right now anxious like people are
just they're keyed up, man. And there's so much scientific evidence,

(44:09):
there's so much research data about how good being in
green spaces is for it being outdoors. And so I
kind of tie that together and I think, you know,
so the book that I put on here is True North.

Speaker 3 (44:23):
I just love it so much. I love all of.

Speaker 4 (44:25):
Harrison's books whatever, like they're all great, but True North
is like, you know that kind of like he lives
in Michigan, that struggle of like being kind of a
trust fund baby but like not being happy going out
into the woods over and over and over again to
try to figure out how to just like keep muddling
his way through life. And it's like so relatable where

(44:49):
it's just it's it's not like a it's not like
a writer's trick. It's like he's like, I'm writing about
a character who's going through whatever he's going through, and
the natural thing to do would be to go wade
into a trout stream for a few hours, or go
walk a two track to try to shoot a grouse

(45:09):
for dinner, and just kind of like, you know, take
that medicine, like you know, it's always available for you
and recognizing when you need it. So it really probably
wouldn't have mattered what I put on there. But I
do really really love true North, But I just love
his style of just kind of like stream of conscious
writing that's very seems like it would be easy to

(45:33):
emulate and is like impossible because you might get one
paragraph that describes, you know, like the migrating habits of
some little songbird somewhere that he saw while he was
standing in a trout stream thinking about this chick that
just dumped him.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
Kind of thing. Just mastery so good.

Speaker 2 (45:51):
What's the name of his essay collection that is that
has like hunting and fishing essays in it? Something dark
just after Dark?

Speaker 3 (46:00):
Maybe?

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Is that it just before dark? Yeah, that's it just
before dark. Yep, that's a collection of nonfiction essays, which
there's there's some that are specifically hunting, some specifically fishing,
and there's some just like eating in food. You know,
he's obviously he's very into food. That's another one that
i'd recommend to folks, because yeah, he's you can in

(46:25):
his fiction, so much of it feels like subtly autobiographical,
don't you think it.

Speaker 3 (46:31):
Has to be?

Speaker 4 (46:32):
I mean it, yeah, yeah, And I mean he has
other stuff too, you know, I mean probably his most
well known, you know, Legends of the Fall. It's like
general population why it is pretty well known, which is
obviously not autobiographical, probably, but a lot of his stuff
is Michigan based where he grew up, and feels very like, yeah,
this definitely happened to him.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
Yeah, for sure. Great great stuff. So so my next
recommendation is very different than what we've been talking about.
This one is not a thinker. This one is not literary,
This one is not fancy, none of that. This is
this is the one book on my list that is

(47:15):
like a white tail bow hunting specific book. It's even
got a little bit of how to in it, but
it is the one white tail hunting book that I
have picked up multiple times in read because I enjoyed
the story too. You ever read White Tail Access by
Chris eberhart Man, This is just like, this is a

(47:38):
great fun book. It's it's you know, like I said,
not it's not Jim Harrison, but uh, but Chris takes
you along with him on a ride as he takes
a hunting season, traveling across the country, living out of
a van, hunting by permission or on public land across

(48:02):
North Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, Michigan. I think of the
states he hits, and you know, you're hearing about his life,
like literally getting out of his van in the morning,
pouring a gallon of water over his head to get
cleaned up, seeing a pheasant cross the corn rows in
front of him. And then he's talking through like thinking

(48:24):
through where's he going to hunt for the evening hunt,
what's the weather, what he's thinking, how he's struggling being
out there for his eighth day in a row. And
then he talks through his hunting strategy. You hear the
stories of his hunts. There's some diagrams in here of
hunting locations and stuff, so there's you can read this
and learn stuff that will help you become a better hunter,
for sure. But it's also just like a fun story,

(48:45):
like how many folks have dreamed of taking three months
off of work and traveling the country to hunt. It's
it's a cool book. It's it's the one of these
that I'm going to recommend people that will definitely help
you as a her. And it's also just like a
good easy read that's gonna give you something to dream

(49:05):
about too. And uh, Chris is uh. Chris has written
some for me in the past. He wrote for me
some of the past for Wired to Hunt. He's no
longer with us, which is which is really sad, but
he was a good guy. And uh he wrote a
great book here. So I can't Uh, I can't recommend
this one enough. And I understand it's hard to find
this book now, I think because it's I don't know

(49:27):
if it's in print anymore. But if you can find it,
it's worth it.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
Yeah, he's he did a good job with Alan.

Speaker 2 (49:34):
Yeah, I've always thought that would be a I'd like
to write a book like that someday because that just
seems like a fun way to do a white tail book.

Speaker 3 (49:43):
That was such a sad deal.

Speaker 2 (49:45):
Yeah, it was, uh, what do you get next?

Speaker 3 (49:50):
So I had to put Robert Ruark on there somewhere.

Speaker 2 (49:55):
Just had I wondered if he would be in the list.

Speaker 3 (49:56):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (49:57):
I love Ruark so much even, you know, like you
want to talk about hardcore alcoholic who went and killed
everything in Africa? Yeah, I mean it's amazing their stories
right like then when they're when they'll recount it, kind
of like Steinbeck.

Speaker 3 (50:13):
I don't know if you ever read.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
Uh on the Roads No, uh.

Speaker 4 (50:19):
See if Cortes it was he went with some biologists out,
so you know, it's it's what he actually did. You know,
it's not East of Eden type of stuff. But he
went out on a boat out in California off the
coast California somewhere I think, and they were studying marine
biology and he was kind of hanging on, but he
was just like running through the amount of alcohol they

(50:39):
went through on their trips, and it's like such a
central you know. Harrison was like that too, I mean
it was yeah, it was always wine typically well not
always wine, but a lot. But it's anyway, side note,
rue Arc, if you want to talk about somebody who
can put you somewhere and like the smell of the

(51:00):
ocean and you know, the taste of the oysters they
just caught. It's it was hard for me to pick,
Like I wanted to go with like Horn of the
Hunter or something like that, but I think if you
want like a rock solid introduction to him, you can't
beat the old Man and the Boy, Like you just
can't beat it. And it's very you know, I mean
you could give that to like a eleven year old

(51:22):
and they would probably love it just as much as
like a sixty year old person. Like it's a very
accessible writing, but just his dynamic of like growing up
with his grandpa, you know, like teaching him how to
hunt and fish everything, and like the the like ethics
lessons that are just woven throughout his stories about how
you know, like he made this decision to you know,

(51:45):
shoot the quail on the ground or hunt the hunt
the covey the only trail, train the dogs on or whatever,
or like you know, people out of his grandpa punching
a guy for swearing in front of women at a
boat landing one time, Like just stuff like that where
you're like, it's so it's an old school look like
you know, because this happened decades ago, but you can

(52:05):
still there's so many echoes of it that just work today.

Speaker 3 (52:09):
And it's so it's just it's like a masterpiece. Man.

Speaker 2 (52:14):
I haven't admission to make you've never read it. I
own it, and I've read the beginning of it, but
I've not finished yet. That's a book that my finishing
problem has been bad. I need to I need to
take that back down. Just read that sucker.

Speaker 4 (52:29):
That It's a when you were when you were talking
about how like as you get getting real deep into
winter and maybe you can like see the light at
the end of the tunnel with spring, and you're like,
I gotta just read stuff that puts me in a
place that like Adventure, that book that was what popped
into my head. Is I get like a craving for
that book sometimes in like February, where you know it's

(52:49):
I mean, it's a it's an easy read, it doesn't
take very long, but it's all, you know, get you
down on the coast in the Carolinas and get you
out in the swamps and stuff, and it's like, I
don't know, it just puts you there.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
Man. His his imagery is like I think unparalleled.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
So you mentioned his his Africa books. Do you have
a different Africa book on your list?

Speaker 4 (53:13):
Uh, nope, I have. I have one based out of India.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
Okay, interesting, Well, I was just gonna say one of
the Africa related books, don't. I don't really have any
desire to hunt in Africa, but I've still found books
about that time period, you know that you're talking about,
like twentieth century, those early hunts out there, like those
are just fascinating books to read, and some well done ones.
One I enjoy that, you know, is a little bit

(53:40):
over the top sometimes, but uh, I think it's Death
in the Long Grass by Peter Capstick Halfway.

Speaker 3 (53:45):
I think Peter Halfway Capstick.

Speaker 2 (53:47):
Yeah, thank you, Yeah, you've read that one.

Speaker 3 (53:50):
Then I read all of his stuff.

Speaker 2 (53:52):
Yeah that's pretty good too.

Speaker 4 (53:54):
You know, so I read all my dad had all
those books grown up, I have a whole bunch of
They're so entertaining and hunting, you know, calling rogue elephants
and hunting man eaters, and like his stories are wild,
and I you know, I grew up.

Speaker 3 (54:11):
I was like, those are the best. They're the best
books I've ever read.

Speaker 4 (54:15):
And then I met a few old school writers in
the industry who told me that his stuff was total bullshit.
And I have no idea whether that. Yeah, I have
no idea whether that's true or not, and I kind
of don't want to know. I kind of like I
kind of got the impression that they were just jealous,
or maybe I just wanted them to be. But that's

(54:36):
always like when Capstick comes up, Like that's always in
the back of my mind, like they just kind of
like it's like when A sixth Sense came out, that
m Night Shyamalan movie. I was in a I was
in a college class and this dude across the table
from me was talking about it and he told the
whole table that Bruce Willis was dead, and I was like, you,

(54:57):
so I never got to enjoy that.

Speaker 3 (54:59):
Yeah, total spoiler.

Speaker 4 (55:01):
And I feel the way like when that you know,
obviously that movie doesn't come up that often in like
general conversations, but every time it's mentioned, I'm like, God,
dang it, the freaking guy ruined it for me. And
I feel the same way about Capstick a little bit.
But even if it was even if he made up
ninety percent of it, it's still so good.

Speaker 2 (55:20):
Yeah, it's uh, it's enthralling. It takes you out there.
You feel like you're on a pretty grand adventure, that's
for sure.

Speaker 3 (55:28):
So you would you wouldn't go to Africa.

Speaker 2 (55:31):
No, I want to go to Africa, just not to hunt.
I do not think. I don't think I want to hunt.
Maybe maybe someday, maybe after I go visit once, but
I'd like to go once with like the family and
just see these creatures and see this place. I don't
know if the first time I want to see I
don't know, a kudu or whatever. I want to shoot it.

(55:56):
I kind of want to experience that place and just
kind of I don't know, I don't know. I just
don't feel the need to go and hunt those animals
right away. I just want to. It seems so rare,
and so I know they're not all rare, but it
just seems like so other And also many of them
are threatened, and I know there's a need for hunting,

(56:19):
and I know the conservation value of the dollars that
all that brings into. So I'm not saying I've got
a personal vendet against any of that kind of stuff.
It's just maybe not for me, but I would like
to go there and experience that place and that culture
in those animals, and hoping to do that with the
kids at some point here in the next decade or so.

Speaker 3 (56:35):
The hunting over there is weird, man, you know, I
did it one time.

Speaker 2 (56:40):
Did you do it?

Speaker 4 (56:40):
Yeah? I don't know, man, I get every side of
the Africa thing. Like some people love it, some people
want to go fill up their trophy room. Some people
just love the environment. And then you know, like there's
a lot of reasons to do it. The hunting is
at least the hunting I experienced was really not my thing,

(57:03):
like I but I know there's hunting over there that
you can get that would be like if you if
you know, Steve Verneller called me up and he's like, Hey,
we're gonna go spot in stock Kpe Buffalo, I'd be
like I would.

Speaker 3 (57:15):
I would do that in a heartbeat.

Speaker 4 (57:17):
Like there's certain kinds of hunts and certain animals that
would be a real challenge, but a lot of it,
you know, like you mentioned threatened animals, Like dudes like
us are never hunting anything that would even be perceived
as threatened. Yeah, you know, like you just if you
know you want to talk about like lions or something
like that. You know, most of the lions that you

(57:37):
see that are shot over there, especially like in South Africa,
those those lions were never wild, you know, like you're
not taking from the wild population.

Speaker 3 (57:44):
You see the.

Speaker 4 (57:45):
Koodoo in Paula, warhogs, whatever, like the planes, game stuff.
There's tons of that stuff over there, but it's not
it's like a domestic animal trade over there. Everything's high fence.
So even you know, they're huge places, but they're all like,
well we're bringing in more im Paula because our population
is a little lower or whatever. It's a it's a

(58:08):
weird situation, and so you know, it's easy to kind
of sit here and be like, well, we have tons
of public land and we have a lot of big
game animals small game animals to hunt and look at
look down on that. But that's just the system they have,
like they you know, like they they there are reasons
behind that, but it is a weird. There's some stuff
over there where. I was like, you know, Kudu, for example,

(58:31):
you brought up everybody wants a great big spiral horned
Kudu and I when I went over there, I was like, yeah,
I want to shoot a kudu, And as soon as
I had them in front of me, they were just
where we were.

Speaker 3 (58:42):
They were just dumb.

Speaker 4 (58:43):
They weren't on their a game, like, they weren't paying attention,
and I just was like, as soon as I watched
them for a little while, I was like, I'm probably
not going to shoot a kudu, and I didn't, And
so you kind of but then you have like something
like a games buck where you're like, maybe that thing
and then they kick your ass over and over and
you're like, Okay, now here's a challenge. So there's a
lot built into it. But you're right, like I would

(59:06):
I would go back to photograph animals and be there
like almost probably more likely to do that than I
would be to hunt, unless it was a very specific
kind of hunt.

Speaker 2 (59:16):
Yeah. Yeah, it seems just kind of murky, like just
it's so different, so outside of our norm Yeah, that
that's hard to really wrap your head around any of it.
And I think it goes back to some of the
stuff we were talking about earlier. It's so easy for
folks to make assumptions, to take sides on issues when
they don't really fully understand it, right, until you actually

(59:40):
get out there and see it for yourself and talk
to people involved in it themselves. It's it's really hard
to have an educated stance on anything. So I guess
I want to be able to wrap my head around
a little bit more before I figure out how I
want to fully engage, you know.

Speaker 4 (59:54):
Well, and I mean, if it were being like totally honest,
Africa is a rich man's you know what I mean, Like,
there's a certain kind of person who's going to go
over there, and it's not the dude you're going to
bump into on public land in Michigan, you know. And
so there's there's a catering to that crowd, you know,
kind of like the Argentina Dove thing, Like there's a

(01:00:15):
certain kind of person who can afford to go do
that and who also has the desire, and it's just
really not we're living in a different world, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:25):
Yeah, that is very true. So that is a perfect
segue to one of my next book recommendations, which is

(01:00:46):
a book full of stories and from a perspective that
is very much like the everyman. It's very much stuff
that's relatable to the best of hunters and the worst
of hunters and everything in between. And this author and
writer has a number of books. I wasn't sure which
of them to pick, so I grabbed his latest one.

(01:01:08):
But the person I'm talking about is Bill Heavy, another
fellow Field and Stream writer, and Bill is hilarious. He
wrote he still writes the back page column for Field
and Stream and you know, so I think his first
collection of essays was if you didn't bring jerky? What
did I just eat? And then the next one was

(01:01:31):
You're not lost if you can still see the truck?
And then his latest is should the tent be burning
like that? And so all these books have you know,
it's collections of his last page essays. So they're relatively short,
probably eight hundred word thy word twelve hundred word type
essays that are, you know, funny observations on his hunting experiences,

(01:01:55):
his fishing experiences, different adventures and things. And he's like
the stumbling, bumbling, you know, making mistakes, doing stupid stuff
out there in the woods, are in the water. That's
a lot of his stuff. But then he also sprinkles
in the kind of stuff that John Girrak does, like
profound observations, deep heartfelt insights, emotional truths. There's longer essays

(01:02:21):
in these books too. He has feature stories in there
as well, where you like, man he speaks about hunting
or fishing as eloquently and as truthfully and is like
down deep to the bones of the issue as anyone
in the in modern literature at least really good writer.
So like, don't let his humor overshadow the fact that

(01:02:41):
he's very, very good at what he does, and like,
there's so many fun, interesting adventures to read about. So
there'll be some quick laughers, and then there'll be some
that make you think. Then there'll be some fun adventures
that are like super relatable because he takes you like,
I'm looking at one right here where he goes on
a trip to Anacoste Island and you and I were
just talking about this the other day. So there's a

(01:03:03):
big feature piece about him going on this hunt that's
like an adventure hunt that so many people would like
to do. But then his experience is that of the
average hunter. He's not the expert David Petzel kind of guy, right,
He's not Tony Peterson showing up and killing a big
giant buck like it's a piece of cake.

Speaker 3 (01:03:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:20):
It's like it's like Mark Kenyan trying to show up
and kill a deer, all sorts of stupid things going on,
maybe make a miss or two. Uh, It's it's really
really good. His stuff's great, and it's it's a great
mix of like the thinking man's writing about hunting and fishing,
mixed with like, hey, let's just have a good time
and laugh and enjoy the thing too. So I highly

(01:03:44):
recommend all three of those collections.

Speaker 3 (01:03:47):
You know what.

Speaker 4 (01:03:48):
One of his essays that I go back to a
lot is Lilyfish, the one about his daughter who died
of sids, his little baby girl, and how he goes
fishing afterwards.

Speaker 3 (01:04:01):
That one is. That one is heavy, but just so
well done.

Speaker 2 (01:04:08):
It's it's incredible that one person can write both sides
of the emotional scale so well. He can write so
seriously and emotionally about such a heavy topic like that,
and then you can flip three pages later and there's
something so silly and laugh out loud funny. His range

(01:04:29):
is wild that he can.

Speaker 3 (01:04:30):
Do that well.

Speaker 4 (01:04:32):
Right, And I mean, this probably seems crazy, but humor
writing might be the most difficult form. I mean to
it's way up there it's way underappreciated. I think for
somebody to be able to write something that actually makes

(01:04:52):
you laugh out loud is very difficult. And to do
it consistently, you know, and to do it over years,
years and years, it'd be It's so that's a skill
that is just very very few people have it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:08):
Yeah, yeah, and it's it's awfully enjoyable when you find
someone who can do it.

Speaker 4 (01:05:12):
Yep, all right, you want another one from me, So
I'm gonna I'm gonna throw this in here kind of
on the same note that we've been talking about a
lot of stuff. There's a fellow named Sidney Lee. Have
you ever heard of his? Heard his name?

Speaker 2 (01:05:27):
I don't think so.

Speaker 4 (01:05:28):
So you you brought up that David Peterson collection of essays,
and there there's I think this was in the best
Hunting Stories ever told. But I ran across Sidney Lee.
It was just a collection of essays and there was
an essay in there called Mercy on Beeson's Partridge and
it was so good. In fact, I reached out to

(01:05:49):
him and I was like, man, I've read tons of
hunting stuff in my life, and I was like, this
is some of the best wordsmith thing that I've ever seen,
and we ended up going back and forth a little bit.
Super good dude. I've read a bunch of his stuff.
He's got a book called Hunting the Whole Way Home.
Lives out in the northeast somewhere. I can't remember if
he's in upstate New York or somewhere, but just kind

(01:06:12):
of you know how like sometimes you know, Spotify or
YouTube will feed you a song and you're just like,
oh my god, this is this song is so bad
ass and it's a band you've never heard of. They
never you know, they didn't they didn't fly as high
as like you think they should have. I kind of
felt that way when I started reading Sydney Lee's stuff.
I'm like, there's so much talent here, like so much,

(01:06:33):
And I'm not like minimizing his career because he sold
a lot of books and I think he did just fine.
But when I read that Mercy on Beeston's Partridge, I
was like, man, there is a skill level here that
is so good. It's such a very uh, you know,
kind of gear Rack style, kind of Harrison style where

(01:06:53):
it's like, you know, he's talking about grouse hunting or
something else, but it's really about the divorce or about
the fight with the kids or whatever.

Speaker 2 (01:07:01):
So good Man, what was the collection that was a
part of again the best Hunting Stories ever told?

Speaker 3 (01:07:07):
Yeah, I think J Cassell put it together. I had it.

Speaker 4 (01:07:11):
I have it on my shelf somewhere, but I think
that was where it is there. That was where I
ran across it. But I ended up getting all of
his books and read them, and he's got some good stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:07:24):
I'll check that out.

Speaker 3 (01:07:25):
So a little under the radar, fellows, is.

Speaker 2 (01:07:27):
That is that four or five from you?

Speaker 3 (01:07:29):
Now? I think that's five.

Speaker 4 (01:07:33):
I do have one more, but we can get to
that's a totally different one, all right.

Speaker 2 (01:07:39):
Mine is going to seem like I'm trying to cozy
up to our boss for promotion. But but do you
do this?

Speaker 3 (01:07:51):
Mark? I knew it.

Speaker 2 (01:07:52):
I can't help it. Steve our our our founding father.
Mister Ranella is one hell of a writer, and I
can't help but recognize two of his books that are
really three that I really really liked. But I was
torn between a factially including Meat Eater, but the Meat
Eater Book or American Buffalo, those are two of my

(01:08:14):
favorite books, really really really good. All the Steve Steve
stuff's great. I wish you would do more like this, though, honestly,
I wish he'd stop doing the cookbooks and the activity
books and get back to some of this stuff, because
I just selfishly so much enjoyed this kind of writing
from him. But Meat Eater is so tied into hunting

(01:08:35):
and fishing that I included this one. It's a series
of stories from his hunting and fishing life that, you know,
I think, though he doesn't explicitly say it, you know,
these different experiences taught him something about how hunting and
fishing fits into his way of being a human. I
think that might be how I described this book, and

(01:08:55):
his wrestling with what that means, how to hunt, how
to fish, how to live on this landscape with wild
animals and eat them and do that in a way
that felt right to him. I think that's in a
certain sense, what this book is about. And as we
all know, Steve's a great writer. Great stories in here.
And I started reading it back whenever it first came out,

(01:09:18):
and I read like the first chapter or two, and
I actually got bored with it, Like the first chapter,
like squirrel hunting, and then like trapping otters or something,
and it just wasn't like, for whatever reason, I set
it aside. And this goes back to my quitting books.
I guess I set it aside for a while and
then somehow came back to it like a year later
and picked it back up. It's like I really got

(01:09:39):
to I really got to push through and just see.
And then like as soon as he got past that,
it was like, whoa, this is really really good. And
I think all that stuff was good in the beginning.
I just wasn't as into squirrels, but it's very good
as you go on. There's so many different moments in
there where it just resonates with you and you're like, yes,

(01:09:59):
like he's speaking truth to something that I know deep
in my bones. So that's great. American Buffalo is another
really really good one. If you haven't read that, If
anyone's not read that, it's it's it's a natural history
of buffalo in America, but told through the story of
him hunting a buffalo in Alaska. So it's a hell
of an adventure. You learn a lot. You know, some

(01:10:21):
of Steve's very best work there too. So not a
plug for me. It based uh books well that wasn't
supposed to be, but I guess it is.

Speaker 3 (01:10:31):
Yeah, I would.

Speaker 4 (01:10:31):
I would throw in here about how much I love
Steve Ranilla too, just in case he might be given
out extra raises. But he's temper to listen to this,
That's true.

Speaker 3 (01:10:39):
Steve's not sitting down listening to a wire to hut.

Speaker 2 (01:10:42):
Yeah, unfortunately not so.

Speaker 3 (01:10:43):
Speaking of weird dudes, isn't it wild when you're around him?

Speaker 5 (01:10:47):
How?

Speaker 3 (01:10:48):
You know?

Speaker 4 (01:10:49):
Like how when you and I are together, we talk
a lot about certain kinds of fishing, and we talk
a lot about white tails. We just do like it
just comes up over and over and over again. When
you're with Steve. He's like that with squirrels. He's like
he's like that with trapping. I mean when I was, uh,
when I was with him in Oklahoma last year. You know,

(01:11:10):
like how if it's October, you're gonna pull your phone
out one hundred and twenty seven times a day to
look at your your cell camera. You're like, see if
you got any pictures showing up. Steve's got, dude, Steve's
got cameras on like pond banks to like get fur
bearers going by, and he'll be oh, look at the
raccoons or look at the otters or whatever, like the

(01:11:32):
same level of enthusiasm for something that's totally unrelatable to me.
But it's like it's just a different thing for him,
Like he would never do that with white tails, but
he's like geeked out of his mind about his trap line.

Speaker 2 (01:11:45):
Yeah. Man, he's got a different, different set of tastes
and it's worked out for him, no doubt about that.

Speaker 3 (01:11:51):
He's doing all right. I guess he is. Seems to
be not struggling too much.

Speaker 2 (01:11:57):
Do you do you have a final book doing?

Speaker 4 (01:12:00):
Yeah, dude, I threw one on here just because do
you know who Jim Corbett is?

Speaker 3 (01:12:06):
You ever? You know that name?

Speaker 2 (01:12:07):
Yeah? Yeah? Right? What tigers?

Speaker 3 (01:12:11):
Right?

Speaker 4 (01:12:12):
Tigers and leopards. So he's got the man eaters of
like kums or something. No, that's a different one. Uh,
the man eating lions Ofsavo or whatever that one is. Yeah,
Ghosts in the Darkness based off of that. But he
has one about a man eating leopard that he was
tasked to go hunt called the man eating Leopard of Rudraprayag,

(01:12:35):
which is a region of India, I guess. And you
want to talk about like badass people, right, this is
this is a long time ago, right, Like they're walking
between villages in India, chasing down stories of a leopard
that got so good at at killing people that it

(01:12:56):
could like tip toe through a hut where a whole
family be sleeping, grab one person in the corner, take
him out, and nobody would wake up.

Speaker 3 (01:13:05):
And I don't remember the number.

Speaker 4 (01:13:06):
I think it was like one hundred and sixty people
or one hundred and sixty eight people. So this this
leopard went went deep and his job was like you
got to go find this thing and kill it. And
it wasn't like he could get a text and they're like, hey,
grabbed a villager over here. It was like they would
be like, oh, it's a three day hike to go

(01:13:27):
to this village where we heard rumors that somebody saw
a leopard. And it's like a very kind of like
point A to B recount of hit, like like almost
like a hunting journal of just what he did.

Speaker 3 (01:13:41):
And it's like it left him.

Speaker 4 (01:13:43):
I read that I might have been in like middle
school or high school, and it left a mark on me,
just as like how quickly things change, Like how different
the world is now than it was one hundred years ago.
And just like to them, that was just like, okay, well,
the government needs me to go take care of this

(01:14:03):
problem that's eating a bunch of people.

Speaker 3 (01:14:05):
And here's how I'm gonna go about do it. And
you look at it and it's like such.

Speaker 4 (01:14:09):
A badass dude, and that some of his tiger stuff.
I mean, they would literally go out for a man
eating tiger. This is this is a smart apex predator
that has figured out how to eat people real effectively.
And they go stake out a little goat and then
build a tree stand out of sticks up in a

(01:14:29):
tree and sit there all night in the dark with
an open sighted rifle, hoping a tiger came into the little,
poor little goat down there. That's like, oh shit, this sucks,
Like this is not where I wanted to be in life,
over and over and over again. While you you know
that that man eater knows you're hunting it, he knows you,

(01:14:50):
he knows you're after him.

Speaker 2 (01:14:51):
And it's got a taste for man dude, So bad ass. Yeah,
that's some intense stuff. So there's a book, there's a
couple books related to that that I got to throw
out there. One is called No Beast So Fierce, and
that's a recent book came out in twenty twenty. The
subtitle is the Terrifying True Story of the Champawatt Tiger,

(01:15:12):
the deadliest animal in history. And so this tiger killed
four eight, four hundred and thirty six people and it's
the story of of of Jim Corbett going and hunting
this tiger and the whole thing. But it's kind of
a more modern take on it, which was very well
done and super interesting. And then another one called The Tiger, right,

(01:15:36):
the Tiger, Yeah, The Tiger by John Valiant.

Speaker 3 (01:15:40):
Oh yeah, Yeah, that's yep.

Speaker 2 (01:15:42):
And that one's about a Siberian tiger out in Russia
and uh just I mean it talks all about kind
of the natural history of the Siberian tiger and then
how this thing happened and the the hunt for it
and all sorts of stuff. Just that one was terrific too.

Speaker 3 (01:15:59):
So that.

Speaker 4 (01:16:02):
The way that that ended, the way they finally get
that tiger is wild.

Speaker 3 (01:16:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:16:09):
Definitely recommend those books. Okay, one last one. I won't
take too long talking about this because I've recommended it
a thousand times, but you know, if we're talking books
that hunters and anglers should read. Just as a reminder
once again, everybody should read a Sand County Almanac by
Aldo Leopold. This is a great set of stories set

(01:16:33):
in the natural world from one of our best observers
of wildlife in the natural world, and it ends with
a terrific kind of meditation on conservation, wilderness, hunting, developing
a responsibility for taking care of these things and being
a part of this community. Not looking at wildlife and

(01:16:55):
wild places is like this other thing that we can
just use and take from all the time, instead beginning
to look at it as something that we are a
part of, that we share with and that we need
to steward if we want to be able to keep
doing these things we love. So that should be on
everybody's bookshelf.

Speaker 3 (01:17:11):
Isn't it amazing how good that book holds up?

Speaker 2 (01:17:14):
Man, It's been around a long time and people still
keep coming back to it. It's a man one of
the best for sure. So those are our ended up
being I think twelve, but our top ten or twelve
books that every hunter or angler should read. And man,
I love talking about books. I don't know if anybody
else does. But I really like it.

Speaker 3 (01:17:37):
There might be eight or ten people who listen to
this all the way through.

Speaker 2 (01:17:40):
You know, we're getting these We're getting these newsletters now
from our podcast team breaking down metrics like how well
our topics are doing and how well like our episodes
are doing. And I think I'm purposefully going the opposite
direction doing podcasts about books that no one's going to
listen to.

Speaker 4 (01:17:57):
Dude, But yeah, we're we're gonna get We've been joking
about this a lot, you know, kind of behind the scenes.
We are gonna get a lot of pressure to put
out fifty two rut Hunting episodes a year, and it's
not gonna go well.

Speaker 2 (01:18:12):
No, man, We're gonna We're gonna continue to chase our
curiosities and our passions and the things that light us
on fire, truthfully, and I think in the end that
will make for the best product for people listening, regardless
of what the numbers tell us. Sometimes that's my belief, Tony.
So we might get fired, we might get fired for it, But.

Speaker 4 (01:18:31):
Dude, I was when we got that email. I was like,
are they really going to go through those Foundations episodes
and try to categorize those.

Speaker 2 (01:18:38):
Like, well, This is the problem is that people are
going to finally start listening to what you're putting out there, Tony.
When they realize what you're putting out there into the world,
you might be in real trouble.

Speaker 3 (01:18:47):
They're going to be.

Speaker 4 (01:18:48):
Like, we don't know what to tell you to do,
because none of these make any sense to anyone.

Speaker 2 (01:18:53):
We've been we've been paying this guy to do what.
And on that note, out you should go fishing and
I should get working on the next thing. All right,
So thank you, Tony, good luck down in Florida, have
a blast, and to everyone listening. I will get a

(01:19:13):
list of these books in the description for this podcast
so that you can find it if for some reason
you forgot one of them, and I will post about
this on social media too, and i'd encourage you to
pick up one or two or three of these, give
them a read, do some thinking, going on an adventure
through the page. Man. I know it's easy to pull
up YouTube these days, or watch something on TV, or

(01:19:34):
flip through TikTok or Instagram or whatever. But engaging with
a written work, something deeper, something more substantial, It's got
a special power to it. There's something different about it.
If you historically have not been a reader, I would
I would ask you to give it a chance, because
books do something to you and provide an experience that

(01:19:56):
no other form of media does, and man, I think
it's powerful. So thank you for listening, thanks for being here,
and stay wired to hunt M M M

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Mark Kenyon

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ep. 777: 12 Books Every Hunter and Angler Should Read