The Simple Hunting Guide: Beginners Quick Start Into The Sport With Ease - Tracking, Scouting, And Survival Skills

Everything a first-time hunter needs, taught the way it has been taught in the bush for generations.

You have thought about hunting for years. You do not have a mentor, you are not sure where the licence office is, and every book you pick up seems to assume you already know what a scrape line looks like.

The Simple Hunting Guide starts before all of that.

Pat Gatz is First Nation Nishnabi. Canada's records say Algonquin. He is from Eagle Village First Nation - Kipawa, in northern Quebec. He took his first small game at six years old and has hunted the bush of Northern Ontario and Quebec for more than thirty years. This is the guide he wishes somebody had handed him.

What is inside

• Getting legal - hunter safety courses, licences, tags and permits, step by step
• Your first kit - what you actually need, what can wait, and what the shop will try to sell you
• Rifles, shotguns and ammunition - matched to the animal you are after, in plain language
• Reading the ground - tracks, scat, rubs, beds and travel corridors
• Scouting and stand placement - wind, cover, and where animals really move
• Small game first - rabbit, squirrel, grouse and wild turkey, the honest way to learn
• Staying alive out there - shelter, fire, water, and getting yourself un-lost
• The ethics - clean shots, using the whole animal, and respect for the land that feeds you

Who this is for

The adult who never had anyone to take them out. The father or mother getting a son or daughter ready for a first season. The city transplant with woods behind the house and no idea where to start. The experienced hunter who wants the Indigenous side of the practice, not just the mechanics.

Written plainly enough that a young teenager can follow it, and thorough enough that hunters with ten seasons behind them have written in to say they found things they did not know.

Hunt to live. Live to hunt.