Cogan's Woods
A Celebration of Hunting, Family, and Kentucky
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In Cogan’s Woods Ron Ellis fondly recalls annual August hunting trips with his father: heading towards the great forests of Kentucky in the passenger seat of the family Mercury, exploring the foggy woods and hills above the Ohio River. While they searched for game, Ellis’ father imparted his wisdom to his son, passing on a legacy of appreciation for the natural world. This lyrical account of a beloved time and place celebrates a father-son relationship nurtured by a landscape that shapes the men and draws them back year after year.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In an early form, this evocative memoir of Ellis's yearly squirrel hunts with his father in 1960s Kentucky became the author's ticket into the University of Montana's Environmental Writing Institute, where he studied with nature writer Rick Bass. Ellis recreates the tastes and sounds of rural America with scenes that sometimes border on clich , but are kept fresh by his devotion to quiet, lovely detail. Avoiding overworked pastoral imagery, he recreates his memories: inhaling the smell of weeds and wood smoke as his father steered their white Mercury through wet fog; stepping into a "foyer of ancient beech trees with their silvered trunks and brushy, gray-green canopy"; watching the predawn silhouettes of squirrels in rain-soaked foliage and "the stuttering rhythm of cowbells." After the hunt, they would stop for lunch at the Persimmon Gap General Store, with its penny candy bins and blue boxes of shotgun shells. Ellis depicts his father as a sensitive squirrel hunter, who blends manly restraint and expressive engagement. This image-laden portrait of an archetypal South is more poignant since the landscape of Ellis's memories has all but disappeared.
