One of America’s most famous hunting writers of the late 20th century, Thomas Francis McGuane III, was born in Michigan in 1939 and is still alive yet today. He was educated in the Midwest, then spent much of his adult life in Montana. In addition to becoming a successful writer (novels, short stories, essays, Hollywood screenplays, etc.) he was also an accomplished cowboy, sailor, fly fisherman, and hunter. What’s intriguing about McGuane’s writing as a hunter is that he writes as much about his failures afield as his successes, making his stories very relatable.
For instance, once while learning to hunt ducks as a kid with his father, he inadvertently set the stock of his father’s prized Winchester Model 12 pump-action shotgun (today a highly collectible firearm) on top of a small briquette fire in the duck blind. Not realizing what he had done, young Tom then left the blind to help his dad with the decoys. When his father returned to the blind, he quickly stepped back out, McGuane writing:
“In his hands was the Winchester. Much smoke poured from the wrong end. The buttstock extended about 2½ inches behind the trigger guard.
“‘I would have thought,’ said my father without rancor, ‘that you could have smelled the recoil pad burning. It’s rubber.’
“I don’t suppose either of us knew on that day, there in the sleet of the American frontier, that in some way the most resonant chord of my life as a hunter had been struck.”
It’s been said that McGuane chooses to write of the hunt rather than the trophy. In what is likely his best-known essay on sport hunting, titled “The Heart of the Game,” he writes the following of a white-tailed deer hunt.
“Hunting in your own back yard becomes with time, if you love hunting, less and less expeditionary. This year, when Montana’s eager frosts knocked my garden on its butt, the hoe seemed more like the rifle than it ever had before, the vegetables more like game.
“I found an active game trail…sat in a good vantage place under a cottonwood with the aught-six across my knees. I thought, running my hands up into my sleeves, this is lovely but I’d rather be up in the hills; and I fell asleep.
“I woke up a couple of hours later, the coffee and early-morning drill having done not one thing for my alertness. I had drooled on my rifle and it was time for my chores back at the ranch.”
Though, at times, self-deprecating concerning his hunting skills, McGuane was far from incompetent in the woods. About an antelope hunt he said, “I could see antelope on the skyline…there was a good buck angling across from me, looking at everything. I got into a sitting position and into the sling. I had made my moves quietly, but when I looked through the scope the antelope was two hundred yards out, using up the country in bounds. I tracked with him, let him bounce up into the reticle, and touched off a shot. He was down and still, but I sat watching until I was sure.
“Nobody who loves to hunt feels absolutely hunky-dory when the quarry goes down. The remorse spins out almost before anything and the balancing act ends on one declination or another. I decided that unless I become a vegetarian, I’ll get my meat by hunting for it. I feel absolutely unabashed by the arguments of other carnivores who get their meat in plastic with blue numbers on it. I’ve seen slaughterhouses, and anyway, as Sitting Bull said, when the buffalo are gone, we will hunt mice, for we are hunters and we want our freedom.
“You could tell how cold the morning was, despite the exertion, just by watching the steam roar from the abdominal cavity. I stuck the knife in the ground and sat back against the slope, looking clear across to Convict Glade and the Crazy Mountains. I was blood from the elbows down and the antelope’s eyes had skinned over. I thought, This is goddamned serious and you had better always remember that.”
But McGuane’s writing is not always so sobering. He can also tell a good humor story, especially about his less-than-perfect birddog, Molly.
“I have a seven-year-old pointer. When she was a puppy she was wild, flushing birds far from the gun. She ran deer and often didn’t come home at night at all. My dog has six hunting seasons under her belt now and, if anything, she is worse than ever. Her remote barking in the deep forest is the sound of bird hunting to me. But this would be the year when my Molly and I would get it all together.
“‘Find some birds,’ I tell her. She gives me one last look, as though from the cockpit of a fighter plane, and pours it on. I don’t believe this. My heart begins to sink as she ticks off the first 880 and I realize nothing has changed.
“I walk gloomily along a shelterbelt of Lombardy poplars with only the vaguest reference to the shrinking liver-and-white form in the distance. At the far end of the field I see her stop, lock up on point, then selfishly pounce into the middle of the birds. Pheasants scatter. But wait—they’re flying this way!
Like the lowest kind of dry-gulch artist, I crouch in the hedgerow. The pheasants keep coming, Molly yelping along behind. At fifty yards I rise to the balls of my feet. At twenty I stand up out of the brambles and…shoot a double! Two cock pheasants tumble. I scramble around to gather them up before my dog can rend and eat them. At last that perfect symbiosis between a man and his dog! I finally feel that Molly is as good a hunter as I am.”
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