A Hunter's Book of Days is a personal narrative set in the grouse and woodcock covers surrounding Fergus's longtime home in Pennsylvania. The author focuses his text around bird hunts behind his springer spaniels, including flashbacks to Jenny, a quintessential gun dog, and Caillie, his up-and-coming youngster. But A Hunter's Book of Days is far more than a chronicle of sporting memories: Within the book's chapters, Fergus deals with the loss of covers, land development, and life-altering events all neatly linked to thoughts on dogs, guns, bird hunting, love of home ground, and friendship.
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About the Author
Chuck Fergus is a writer who lives in Vermont.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Realistic Snapshot of Pennsylvania Grouse Hunting in 2002,
By Fred Zelt (United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Hunter's Book of Days (Hardcover)
This 174-page book published in 2005 is the well-written product of a prolific outdoor writer. The author, Charles Fergus, is a long-time hunter who spent years writing for the Pennsylvania Game News and has completed several books about hunting and nature. The dust jacket has a very nice painting by Rod Crossman of a hunter walking along a snow-covered road through woods, accompanied by a dog and carrying a grouse. Inside the book are six small, simple sketches with similar themes: grouse, hunter, dog.
This is not a "how-to" book. It is a contribution to the classic hunting literature that revolves around upland birds, dogs and double guns. I have hunted grouse on Pennsylvania lands that have incuded abandoned strip mines, abandoned nineteenth-century railroads, along an abandoned segment of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, in forested oil fields and in seemingly trackless wild areas. To me, this book is more complex and realistic than any other grouse hunting book that I have read. I recommend this book to all hunters from the central Appalachians and to experienced grouse hunters anywhere. Because of it's complex nature, I would think twice before giving it as a gift and would not recommend it as someone's first grouse-hunting book. Fergus's 1991 book "A Rough Shooting Dog" might be a better introduction to the grouse hunting literature. The focus of "A Hunter's Book of Days" is a series of grouse and woodcock hunts during Fergus's last hunting season living among the valleys and ridges of central Pennsylvania. It is also a story of Fergus's service on a zoning committee that tried to limit the impact of a new interstate highway. In his mid-40's, fed up with the loss of wild places to development and after the failure of his group's zoning proposals, Fergus and his family moved to Vermont in 2003. Fergus hunts with classic British double-barreled shotguns, and a friend uses British double-barreled shotguns with damascus barrels and external hammers. The dog Fergus hunts with in the book is a Springer Spaniel. Fergus demonstrates a deep appreciation for the natural environment. Thanks to a Botany Professor father, Fergus's descriptions of wild places are as complete with the names of the plants and trees as they are with artistic descriptions of the landscape's hues and textures. Some of the descriptions of hunting are as clear, compelling and artistic as any work by other outstanding classic or contemporary grouse hunting writers including Burton Spiller (Grouse Feathers, originally published in 1935) and Ted Nelson Lundrigan (Hunting the Sun, published 1997). Unfortunately for those who enjoy the purity and simplicity of hunting stories, in this book Fergus has commonly chosen to interrupt the flow of beautiful hunting scenes with mention of traffic noise or other irritations of modern life in a developed region. Another example of realism not often attempted by other authors is Fergus's cautionary tale of his own shooting-related hearing loss and how he has coped with it. It occurs to the reader that this book may have been written primarily as therapy for the writer: an attempt to reconcile a desire by many for commercial development and material goods, Fergus's love for natural areas, the pain of being on the losing side of small-town politics, Fergus's respect for the people and history of the area, and a scarcity of game that can be temporary or permanent. Game animals including grouse that have been hunted continuously in the northeastern United States for more than 200 years tend to be adaptable. Hunters are adaptable too. In the end, Fergus lets us know that he understands the priorities that his former neighbors have placed on conservation versus development. And grouse still fly in wild places, both in central Pennsylvania and Fergus's new home state of Vermont.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A lament that enlightens,
This review is from: A Hunter's Book of Days (Hardcover)
Fergus's book is ultimately a lament for the destruction of nature in the Bald Eagle Valley of central Pennsylvania. Yes, he does give information about grouse hunting and dogs, enough to satisfy the reader of any shooting book. It is also a song about the delights of hunting birds in the Valley and how that delight has eroded. It is both a happy and a sad song. It should enlighten each reader that every tiny scraping of our natural bounty is an eternal loss.
I recommend it to those thoughtful people who follow dogs into the field and shoot lovingly at grouse.
1 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Horrid Work,
By
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This review is from: A Hunter's Book of Days (Hardcover)
Avoid this book like the plague. It reeks of selfishness, elitism, and vanity. I tired to post a lengthier review, but Amazon did not post it. So I thought I would try to post another review. Simply stated, this book has a poor tone which leads one to conclude that hunters are simply interested in using our common resources for their enjoyment alone. This is not true. Most hunters recognize the role of progress in promoting the prosperity needed to protect hunting, but recognize the costs of this arrangement as well. Fergus does not. He takes an absolutist's view that denies individuals the right to develop their communities because this would deprive the enlightened of a favored pursuit. Additionally, he rails against a government that tries to maximize benefits for all, instead of protecting the interests of purists (i.e. his discussion of pheasant management in Pennsylvania). And he regularly divests "the average hunter," who does not have the leisure time needed to participate in the sport as he sees fit, of any dignity as a member of the hunting community. Overall, these deficiencies cause the book to become a poor rant. It simply becomes the tract of an angry whiner who could not deal with the fact that his desired lifestyle was harmed by the progress of others.
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