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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.

Stories of fishing with family and friends by beloved author Jerry Apps 

From his first experiences going fishing with his pa as a boy, Jerry Apps was hooked. Eighty-some years later, Apps reflects on a lifetime of fishing and the memories and lessons hauled in along the way. As he recounts the simple pleasures of casting a line from shore on a warm summer evening or reeling in a lunker on opening day of trout season, he reminds us of the values fishing can teach people of all ages: persistence, resourcefulness, and the importance of caring for our natural world. 
 
Along with his best-loved fish tales, Apps includes fishing photos from the family album and favorite angling locales, lingo, bait, and gear. He draws on interviews with fellow fishermen and -women, his own journal entries recorded over decades, and his popular newspaper column Outdoor Notebook. And, since it’s a tradition among fishing folks to pass along tales told by others, he shares stories that have come his way from extended family and friends—some of them funny, some poignant, many embellished, and all of them keepers. Humorous pen-and-ink illustrations made by artist Sid Boyum to commemorate the annual fishing season opener add charm to this delightful volume.  

In Lunkers, Keepers, and Ones that Got Away, Apps captures the exciting, heartwarming, and nostalgia-inducing experiences that fishing brings to avid and casual anglers alike.