A Thousand Deer: Four Generations of Hunting and the Hill Country (Ellen and Edward Randall Series) - Hardcover

Bass, Rick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0292737955 ISBN 13: 9780292737952

Publisher: University of Texas Press, 2012

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Product Description

A Thousand Deer A definitive and eloquent book about deer hunting in Texas and the lessons it teaches about the cycles of life in nature and in a family

Review

"Indeed, the emotional and material tangibility of Bass's prose - exhibited at its finest in these pages - both demonstrates and contemplates the relationship between language and physicality...Rick Bass guides his own readers...to celebrate the electricity of a good story, much as the hunter feels the electricity of a meaningful day in the woods. A Thousand Deer captures this energy masterfully." - Scott Slovic, Great Plains Quarterly "The essays in A Thousand Deer flow into one another beautifully, almost as chapters, though originally published in magazines over a two-decade span... While most hunting stories tread familiar paths of bragging or variations on Natty Bumppo, this book goes further. Exactingly observed and powerfully written, A Thousand Deer offers the richness of hunting to outsiders curious about such barbarian rituals and offers a voice for hunters who struggle to articulate the deep motives for walking frozen hills before dawn. This is a valuable contribution to nature writing, written with the intensity of a hunt." - Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0292737955
• ISBN 13: 9780292737952
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 198