front cover of Out Home
Out Home
John Madson
University of Iowa Press, 1979
Long out of print, Out Home is the first published collection of naturalist and conservationist John Madson’s essays. Written between 1961 and 1977 for such venues as Outdoor Life, Sports Afield, Audubon, and Guns and Ammo, the twenty-one essays and one poem in this classic volume focus on game and nongame animals and the people who love them and their outdoor world. Madson writes of hunting and wildlife management, the tricks of whitetail and cottontail, the bewildering interactions of pheasants with their harsh winter world, the cliff-nesting geese of the Missouri River, biscuits and gravy and stories shared around campfires with friends and family, and the great seasonal migrations of geese and cranes.
     Writing always with the knowledge that he was witnessing the end of the wilderness, of the outdoor home that nourished him, Madson brings a brilliant energy to these tough, unsentimental tales. “A strong place puts a mark on all that lives there, and the mark may outlast the place itself. Prairie people are like their western meadowlarks, seeming to be the same as their eastern relatives, but with a different song.” In his song about the “play of wind on tallgrasses, with the land running beneath a towering sky,” we hear the voice that went on to give us the magic of Where the Sky Began.
     Editor Michael McIntosh, one of the nation’s foremost experts on shotguns, has written a short introduction to this first paperback edition of these ageless wilderness tales.
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front cover of Up on the River
Up on the River
People and Wildlife of the Upper Mississippi
Madson, John
University of Iowa Press, 1985
Up on the River is John Madson’s loving and often hilarious tribute to the people, animal life, and places of the Upper Mississippi. Madson’s Upper Mississippi is the part “between the saints,” from St. Louis to St. Paul, and where for thirty years he explored the bright waters of the upper reaches of the mighty river itself as well as the tangled multitude of sloughs, cuts, and side channels that wander through its wooded islands and floodplain forests.
 “Some of my best time on the River has been in the company of game wardens, biologists, commercial fishermen, clammers, trappers, hunters, and a smelly, mud-smeared coterie of river rats in general, and my views of the River are far more likely to reflect theirs than those of the transportation industry,” Madson writes of his thirty-year acquaintance with the Mississippi. Traveling mainly by canoe and johnboat, he tells of encounters between archetypal commercial fishermen and archetypal game wardens over hot fish chowder, fishing for crappies in the tops of submerged trees and for walleyes amid gale force winds, nesting and migrating herons and ducks and eagles, the histories of river logging and pearling and button making, and towboats and barges and the lives of the “ramstugenous” people who move freight on the river.
 
Learning about the Upper Mississippi via the wry tutelage of John Madson, who discovered that “whenever I am out on a river some of its freeness rubs off on me,” readers of this classic book will also come under the spell of this freeness.
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