Showing titles in Hunting & Fishing

Critically acclaimed as a master of adventure writing for Death in the Long Grass and Death in the Silent Places, former professional hunter Peter Hathaway Capstick takes us back to Africa to encounter the world’s most dangerous big-game animals. After consulting African game experts and recalling his own experiences and those of his colleagues, Capstick has written chilling, authoritative accounts of hunting the five most dangerous killers on the African continent—lion, leopard, elephant, Cape buffalo and rhinoceros.

A little over 100 years ago, East Africa was terra incognita to most whites: a land largely unmapped, sparsely settled by Europeans, and teeming with wildlife. It was the hunter-adventurer's paradise, and by the early 20th century, a small, lionhearted clan of explorers and big-game hunters began leading safaris there for money.

In 1898, the British were building a railway line between Mombasa in Kenya and Uganda. At the Tsavo River in Kenya where a bridge needed to be built, the project was suddenly interrupted by two man-eating lions that targeted the camps of the workers. Over a period of nine months, the lions killed scores of people. These lions were deliberately hunting people, preferring humans over any other prey, and they seemed to have supernatural abilities in evading all attempts to stop them. Colonel J.H. Patterson, the chief engineer in charge of the project, finally managed to eliminate them.

There is the Cornwall Lamorna Ash knew as a child – the idyllic, folklore-rich place where she spent her summer holidays. Then there is the Cornwall she discovers when, feeling increasingly dislocated in London, she moves to Newlyn, a fishing town near Land’s End. This Cornwall is messier and harder; it doesn’t seem like a place that would welcome strangers. Before long, however, Lamorna finds herself on a week-long trawler trip with a crew of local fishermen, afforded a rare glimpse into their world, their warmth and their humour.

In her early twenties, drifting and directionless, Marina Gibson fled the city for the countryside, and picked up a fishing rod for the first time in years. She was returning to a childhood pursuit and a passion passed on by her mother. Fishing overtook Marina's life as she grew enraptured by the quiet magic of angling and the silent mysteries of the river. The complexity of fly fishing, the ritual of casting and the music of the waterways provided her refuge from a failing marriage, a source of serenity, and a connection to the tradition of female anglers stretching back generations.

In Wild Men, Wild Alaska professional hunting and fishing guide and outfitter Rocky McElveen tells the stories of his own adventures as well as those of some of his well-known clients. The book takes listeners directly into the Alaskan bush, and shares the intense challenges of a majestic wilderness that pushes a man to his limits.

Peter Hathaway Capstick first earned a name as an outdoor writer in the pages of such magazines as Guns & Ammo, Petersen’s Hunting, The American Hunter, and Outdoor Life. In Last Horizons, the first of a two-volume collection of his hunting, fishing, and shooting tales, Capstick shares twenty-four stories of his keen eye and steady hand with rifle, shotgun, bow, and typewriter.

While most of us fly-fish to escape from daily life, for John Gierach and his friends fly-fishing IS a way of life. They are trout bums. But John Gierach is also an exceptional writer. The essays in Trout Bum are reflective, bitingly humorous, and enormously wise in the ways of fishing and men. In vivid, unforgettable detail they recount the emotional, spiritual, and tangible adventures and pleasures of stalking trout in and around the Rockies—day in, day out, from season to season, with friends, and alone.

In The Optimist, David Coggins tackled the techniques of fly-fishing and meditated on its virtues, recounting his triumphs and failures. Now, in The Believer, he deftly mixes travel, local cultures, further fishing challenges (some knee-buckling in their disappointment), and details his own experience as life and love crowd his time to fish.

Whether debating bamboo versus graphite rods, describing the pleasure of fishing in pocket waters or during a spring snow in the mountains, or recounting a trip in pursuit of the "fascinatingly ugly" longnose gar, Gierach understands that fly-fishing is more than a sport. It's a way of life in which patience is (mostly) rewarded, the rhythms of the natural world are appreciated, and the search for the perfect rod or ideal stream is never ending.

Paradise, Gierach shows us, is relative; it can be found in the guilty luxury of fishing private waters or when one is soaked to the skin, in a small canoe on a big lake in a storm a hundred miles from anywhere, exhilarated after a day's fishing. There are also pleasures to be found in unexpected places: solitary fishing trips, fishing for less-appreciated fish like carp, or meeting a guide who at first seems like an inarticulate ax murderer but who proves to be a "Zen master among fishing guides."

Brilliant, witty, perceptive essays about fly-fishing, the natural world, and life in general by the acknowledged master of fishing writers.

With over 30 years' experience, there is perhaps no one better qualified in the art of carp fishing than angling legend John Wilson. In this essential carp fishing guide, John covers everything you need to know, providing beginners and experts alike with invaluable hints and tips. Along the way John offers advice on the best equipment for each scenario as he passes on a wealth of knowledge that can come only from a lifetime of fishing.

In Casting Forward, naturalist, educator, and writer Steve Ramirez takes the listener on a yearlong journey fly fishing all of the major rivers of the Texas Hill Country.

Originally published in 1994, this book was a fly-fishing phenomenon in the way Howell Raines' Fly Fishing Through the Mid-Life Crisis was. Taking his fishing hobby to near metaphysical levels, Ted Leeson tells about his passions: rivers, trout, and fly fishing. With wry humor and rare insight, he explores questions that engage most fishermen: What is it about rivers that draws us so irresistibly, and why does fly fishing seem such an aptly suited response?

On the last day of June, my bush pilot left me alone and without food in a wilderness rain forest of Southeast Alaska. He would return in September. For the next 10 weeks my survival would depend on foraging, hunting, and fishing on an island I would share with 1,600 brown bears.

A chance meeting around a safari campfire on the banks of the Mupamadazi River leads to The Last Ivory Hunter: The Saga of Wally Johnson, a grand tale of African adventure by renowned hunting author Peter Hathaway Capstick. Wally Johnson spent half a century in Mozambique hunting white gold—ivory. Most men died at this hazardous trade. He’s the last one able to tell his story.

In Dumb Luck and the Kindness of Strangers, Gierach looks back to the long-ago day when he bought his first resident fishing license in Colorado, where the fishing season never ends, and just knew he was in the right place. And he succinctly sums up part of the appeal of his sport when he writes that it is "[A]n acquired taste that reintroduces the chaos of uncertainty back into our well-regulated lives".

With his inimitable combination of wit and wisdom, John Gierach once again celebrates the fly-fishing life in Standing in a River Waving a Stick and notes its benefits as a sport, philosophical pursuit, even therapy: "The solution to any problem-work, love, money, whatever-is to go fishing, and the worse the problem, the longer the trip should be." After all, fly-fishing does teach important life lessons, says Gierach-about solitude, patience, perspective, humor, and the sublime coffee break.

In 1834, Osborne Russell joined an expedition from Boston, which proceeded to the Rocky Mountains to capitalize on the lucrative salmon and fur trade. Beginning at the age of 20, he detailed the life of a trapper in his journal and recorded his adventures through treacherous terrain, encounters with dangerous wildlife, and confrontations with the Rockies natives of the Rockies. Osbourne would remain there for the next nine years. Journal of a Trapper is his remarkable account as he developed into an experienced trapper and a seasoned mountain man of the Rockies.