First, a little personal history. My late brother hated hunting.
In the early 70s, after he returned from serving in Vietnam, he wrote an op-ed piece for the Springfield, MO newspaper criticizing hunting, specifically deer hunting. This caused some friction with my dad, who was a dedicated hunter, although of much smaller things (mostly squirrels, rabbits and geese). I’m not sure they ever worked it out, because it would’ve required honest communication, something at which my family did not excel.
I never became a real hunter. I went a few times as a boy, but much like fishing and driving, my father was terrible at teaching me things, and we usually ended up enraged at each other. For a long time I hated the sport, not from any moral perspective, but because I thought I was terrible at it.
Peter Hathaway Capstick.
The late Peter Hathaway Capstick wrote several wonderful non-fiction books about his experiences hunting all over the world. In Death in the Silent Places, he explains the rationale behind big-game hunting thus:
“The difference between shooting an elephant at one hundred yards through the chest and stalking a big tusker to within ten or so yards is the difference between simple animal assassination and real sport hunting. When you are within ten yards of a bull elephant, you, my friend, are in harm’s way. With the long shot, one kills an elephant in a sterile, riskless and, in my opinion, cowardly manner. At halitosis range, you enter into the most ancient nonbiological passion of humanity: self-testing. And on purpose, which is the most important aspect of the implied morality of the act.”
And that, really, is why I started writing about Linda Fontana and T.S. Bunch: I wanted to write about people who self-test, on purpose.
Linda is six feet tall, has the thickest Southern accent imaginable, and is known (behind her back) as “the Babe in the Woods.” Bunch is skinny, long-haired and possesses the greatest streak of luck anyone’s ever seen. They’ve been platonic friends since grade school, and travel the world hunting and guiding other hunters, in the tradition of Haggard and Hemingway, with a dollop of Capstick.
The first two stories, “Next-to-Last of the Tiger Men” and “Mack’s Last Rhino,” will be available from Amazon as part of their StoryFront imprint on December 18, and you can pre-order them here for 99 cents. I hope people like them, so I’ll be able to do more. Because I like Fontana and Bunch, and want to hang out with them for a long time.