The Sporting Road
Travels Across America in an Airstream Trailer--with Fly Rod, Shotgun, and a Yellow Lab Named Sweetzer
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4.7 • 3 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
More than just a "man and his dog" hunting adventure, The Sporting Road is a book about the land and man's place in it.
It is also, in many ways, a book about relationships; with nature, animals, and the people with who live around us. As Rick Bass says in his introduction, Jim Fergus is a man for whom "The common denominator is not geographical, but internal; here is a man who belongs intensely to the living. And slowly, gradually --essay by essay--you become aware of the unsaid: the fact that he fits a diminishing time, a diminishing space, and a diminishing code of manners. That he always puts others before him; that he considers and respects his friends, his prey, his dogs, and the landscapes that engage these things."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Whether scrambling up the desiccated slopes of Utah's Desolation Canyon in pursuit of birds known as chukars or whipping a tenuous fly line into the Florida surf, Fergus (A Hunter's Road) relates simple and vivid details in this pleasing account of six years of travel and sport. Perhaps befitting a sportsman, Fergus has a spare writing style and uses only what he needs. The result is a light and enjoyable collection of tales featuring Fergus, his dog Sweetzer and a random cast ranging from a Georgia native known as Fishboy to a modern-day Davy Crockett, whom Fergus dubs the Mountain Man in deference to his flintlock rifle and steady hand with a double-bladed tomahawk. Fergus and the people with whom he hunts are not the beer-guzzling, reckless pillagers of nature who often live in the popular imagination. Even those who don't condone the sport should heed Fergus's points that hunters such as Theodore Roosevelt began the conservation movement, and that development, overgrazing and chemical farming cause incalculably greater harm to animal populations than does hunting--harm that is "rarely perceived by anyone other than the knowledgeable wildlife biologist." Because the book is composed primarily of previously published, though reworked, articles, readers are sometimes reintroduced to people and species that have already appeared. Even so, these overlapping tales have the honest allure of a good campfire yarn. Illus.
