"Dick Yatzeck, along with the late George Vukelich and Mel Ellis, stands out among the best Wisconsin outdoor writers."-Chuck Petrie, Ducks Unlimited Magazine
"The Wolf River in May or a blue October day still regularly pull me awash or afield, with a Springer spaniel for choice. I tend to seek the edges, the meeting place of plowed land and woods, in crisp weather. I learned my hunting from good men, farmers who did their own butchering and saw hunting as an extension of it. Few of us have such roots now, and hunting will perhaps eventually disappear. When it does, I hope to have disappeared too, but not before having done a bit to preserve its memory."-Richard Yatzeck
Hunting the Edges offers both fine and funny examples of the classic hunting story, and something more: an acknowledgment of that edge between the cycles of modern life and the age-old seasonal call of the hunt. Dick Yatzeck's tales of hunting and fishing through his youth and adulthood will resonate with many readers who also leave behind a job and house in town for boots and camouflage and the wild cries of geese.
This is a beautiful book about hunting--an activity society increasingly considers a beastly, barbaric pursuit, unworthy of man. Hunting will die out; it will go the way of the woods. But before it disappears completely, read this. So you will know what it was.
"I am writing in a a slanting attic above a farm kitchen to the sound of wild geese. The geese are so low that with the north window open, you can hear their heavy wingbeats. On that north windowledge is a hand-made Chinese checkers board, drilled, nailed and painted with a flat, kitchen green by Art Bloom, a Norwegian farmer who lived in Genesee fifty years ago. It was on his farm that I took the hunting fever, and his acres were the first "edge" I hunted. I miss him.
"Edge is a central notion here. It is, for wild fauna, the open space next to deep woods cover where clover, berries, grassy browse grow. Hunters seek edge to find game. In another sense, edge is where the demands of white paint, civilization, may at times be evaded. Here hunting and gathering is still minimally possible. The deer return to the glades to sleep, the hunter to white clapboard."
