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

About the Author

Rick Bass is the author of twenty-seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including The Wild Marsh, Why I Came West, and The Lives of Rocks. Several of his books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award, as well as the New York Times and Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year. He's been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, and his short stories and essays have received O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, and have been anthologized in Best American Short Stories, Best American Travel Writing, and Best Spiritual Writing.

From Booklist

Acclaimed fiction writer Bass goes a little rogue here, collecting essays on the joys of hunting. It’s really a sort of paean to Bass’ family, its shared heritage, and the changes wrought by the passing years. Those thousand deer are dead deer, deer his family and others like them have killed: “Earlier this fall, up in Montana, where I live now” he writes with deliberate emphasis, “I shot a deer. Killed a deer, hunted a deer, got a deer, took a deer off the planet.” He hunts because he likes it, simple as that. Bass is an elegant and passionate writer: “When we run out of country, we will run out of stories. When we run out of stories, we will run out of sanity.” He writes about hunting not merely as the taking of life (which it is, and he makes no apologies for that), but also as a shared experience, part of the history of his family, and a central part of his own love of nature. Committed opponents of hunting will probably reject the book on general principle, but Bass’ passion and narrative skills are undeniable. --David Pitt

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0292737955
• ISBN 13: 9780292737952
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 198