Every fall close to one million hunters enter Pennsylvania’s forests and mountains in quest of the white-tailed deer. Some are seeking sport and companionship; others are stocking their larders for winter; many are conservationists who regard hunting as the most humane way of reducing overpopulated deer herds. They all face the increasing activism of animal rights advocates who are opposed to hunting in principle and who frequently picket and harass hunters.
This controversial subject is explored in depth by Mike Sajna, the outdoors columnist for Pittsburgh Magazine and a twenty-year veteran of Pennsylvania’s “pumpkin army,” the orange-clad throng that invades the woods every season. To explain the ethos and traditions of hunting he takes the reader to a typical deer camp in Warren County, in the rugged terrain of the Allegheny High Plateau. Starting with the trek north from their homes around Pittsburgh, he captures the sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings of three generations of hunters. With humor, affection, and insight he recounts the hunting lore, the camaraderie, the physical testing that make deer camp a unique experience.
In November, countless families across Texas head out for the annual deer hunt, a ritual that spans generations, ethnicities, socioeconomics, and gender as perhaps no other cultural experience in the state. Rick Bass’s family has returned to the same hardscrabble piece of land in the Hill Country—“the Deer Pasture”—for more than seventy-five years. In A Thousand Deer, Bass walks the Deer Pasture again in memory and stories, tallying up what hunting there has taught him about our need for wildness and wilderness, about cycles in nature and in the life of a family, and particularly about how important it is for children to live in the natural world.
The arc of A Thousand Deer spans from Bass’s boyhood in the suburbs of Houston, where he searched for anything rank or fecund in the little oxbow swamps and pockets of woods along Buffalo Bayou, to his commitment to providing his children in Montana the same opportunity—a life afield—that his parents gave him in Texas. Inevitably this brings him back to the Deer Pasture and the passing of seasons and generations he has experienced there. Bass lyrically describes his own passage from young manhood, when the urge to hunt was something primal, to mature adulthood and the waning of the urge to take an animal, his commitment to the hunt evolving into a commitment to family and to the last wild places.
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