Tales Of Hunting, Fishing, Trapping, And Life In The Woods
By Will Brantley
Hard Cover, 214 Pages
Available from Simon And Schuster
1-800-223-2336
$29.95 + $5.05 Shipping
Will Brantley is Field and Stream magazines answer to Mark Twain.
A gifted storyteller he recounts a lifetime spent hunting, fishing, and writing about it for the magazines. Stories are arranged in the order that they happened forming a sort of autobiography as they progress through the years of his life. Hunting begins with small game and goes through the big game available in this country and abroad.
Due to his position as a writer he was allowed to even take Nash Buckingham’s famous shotgun Bo Whoop on a duck hunt in Buckingham’s old duck hunting spot in Tunica County, Mississippi. For the younger generation, Buckingham was one of the most famous outdoor writers of his day and Bo Whoop was the famous HE-grade Super Fox specially bored by the great Burt Becker. It got its name because its report at a distance sounded like Bo Whoop and it delivered a 90 percent pattern at 40 yards with Western Super-X 3-inch loads of number 4 lead shot. On the hunt Will and his companions found Bo Whoop was a gun that they couldn’t seem to miss ducks with and came away feeling the gun seemed somehow magical. As one of the men who shot it that day said “No misses in that gun!”
From traditional bream, bass, and trout fishing to rasslin’ big river catfish out of the river by hand he covers all types of fishing this country has to offer. Personally, I don’t recommend hand catching big blue and flathead catfish or snapping turtles for that matter. Just another good way to get hurt real bad. Will got off lucky. He had the skin on his knuckles peeled , blistered, and oozing pus from the jaws of a flathead catfish.
His wife exclaimed “Heaven help! That’s from a fish bite?” His hands were hurting so bad that he couldn’t put them in his pocket. I have known of men dragged under and drowned by oversize catfish and men having their hands maimed or amputated by alligator snapping turtles.
His moose had to be shot off hand at 180 yards because there was no time for a rest. Glad to hear someone besides me unable to take a rest when an important shot had to be made.
Will also trapped beaver and appreciates what a gourmet food beaver is. The fanciest recipes I have ever seen were some of the Cree Indian’s recipes for beaver. The Cree put the vaunted French chefs to shame when it comes to gourmet cooking and they do some of their best work on beaver.
Every type of hunting North America has to offer features in these stories as well. Moose, elk, deer, and bear stories are there, all told by a celebrated storyteller who developed a following during his years writing about it.—Jim Dickson
