The Upland Shooting Life (Unabridged‪)‬

George Bird Evans is a man to whom upland shooting has been a way of life for 50 years, and his book is both a creed for shooters and a fascinating sharing of the experiences of a true specialist. It is not a book for meat hunters (although possession of the game means as much to the author as to the next man), rather it is a book, half "how-to," half anecdotal and philosophical, that reveals in rich and intimate detail the unity that makes upland shooting that triad of bird-dog-gun in which no part is complete without the others.

George Evans has gunned bobwhites, shoots that gaudy foreigner, the ringneck pheasant, tries his skill with the turkey gobbler, but mostly he and his Old Hemlock setters (he breeds a now distinguished line) haunt the old hill-farm fields grown to briars, the hemlock and rhododendron thickets, and the alder swamps in his Allegheny country for grouse and woodcock.

The coverts described in this book are the real coverts gunned in; the comments as to the effects of weather, food conditions, and flight behavior are based on a gun diary kept in scrupulous detail since 1932. And while the book is mellow with the character of men who shoot, it is also incisive with original opinions and rich advice. The chapter on wing shooting and the section on gun fit, to take but two examples, are crammed with instructive suggestions for the shooter who is taking his first gun afield, as well as for the man who has shot long enough to have encountered all the problems. The dogs, whose work is described so engagingly in this book, are actual gun dogs that were bred, trained, worried over, and gloried in by the author. And the guns, old friends of the author's, almost become characters in the story.

The Upland Shooting Life will be enjoyed by a grateful audience of listeners and shooters for many years to come-and without question read more than once, now to share vicariously the author's experiences, now to glean from this rich lore tips on why one misses a straightaway grouse in the pines or stands sometimes goggle-eyed, with mouth agape, when the timberdoodle offers him an open shot. Advice on loads, shot size, gun types-indeed on every aspect of upland shooting informs every episode and enriches every chapter. George Evans is an upland shooter's shooter and a writer for every man who goes afield with the scatter gun.