Dogs That Point, Fish That Bite: Outdoor Essays

by Jim Dean

Overview

Jim Dean, longtime editor of Wildlife in North Carolina, offers his personal observations on the pleasures and frustrations of hunting, fishing, camping, and other outdoor pursuits. Dogs That Point, Fish That Bite draws together fifty of the best columns that Dean has written for the magazine over the last seventeen years. The witty, sometimes poignant pieces are arranged into a loose chronicle of the sporting year, with a generous allowance for digression: the first is set in April, on the opening day of trout season, and the last tells of a New Year's Day spent alone in a mountain cabin.

At first glance, hunting and fishing are the focus of most of the columns. Often, however, Dean is after bigger game. A crab that escapes the pot leads him to reflect on the capricious nature of life. The restoration of a cabin at the old family farm evokes memories of family and simpler times. And a May panfishing trip takes on the quality of ritual, performed by two old friends. The consistent theme uniting all the essays is the celebration of wild places and rural traditions that have become endangered in our modern world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807848647
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	02/28/2000
Series:	Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History
Edition description:	1
Pages:	168
Sales rank:	1,020,992
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.39(d)

About the Author

An outdoor writer and photographer, Jim Dean served as editor of Wildlife in North Carolina for eighteen years and continues to write his monthly "Our Natural Heritage" column for the magazine. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Read an Excerpt

From A Kinship in Stone

The August sun was falling into the tops of the distant trees, and the last light bathed the fields in a warm glow. At the crest of the hill, I pulled off the dirt path, opened the car door, and stepped out of the artificial cool into ninety-degree heat. These rolling fields have not changed in the more than forty years I have known them. I have hunted quail here with a grandfather and father and, more recently, a son and daughter.

With no particular goal, I walked between the tall tobacco plants, kicking up grasshoppers that soared ahead toward a large field of corn that seemed to fold along the contours like some giant yellow quilt. Off to my right, a quarter of a mile beyond the path, I could see an abandoned house shrouded in vines, its dark windows overlooking a good stand of soybeans that rimmed a small pond. In every direction, the view was familiar. My grandfather, dead since 1968, could walk the same row today and see nothing different. I think that would please him.

As I turned back toward the car and paused for a last look, I noticed a triangular shape next to my foot. I reached down, half expecting it to be a clod of dry dirt. But no, it was a bit more substantial, an ancient spear point of carefully crafted stone, with delicate side notches and serrated edges that came to a sharp point. I thought I recognized its type as a Palmer or Kirk, but it was so nearly dark by then that in order to see the shape better, I held it between my thumb and forefinger and raised it to the dying light. It was an act I recognized immediately as being symbolic--as symbolic as it was accidental.

No doubt, I was the first human being to pick up this bit of stone in at least seven thousand years. For me, it was a moment of almost overpowering kinship between all humans who have visited, used, profited from, and perhaps loved this particular small plot of land. There seemed little difference between a grandfather dead nearly twenty years and an Indian dead thousands of years. Or me, or those who would follow. I also realized why it was important for me to walk into the familiarity of that field and take pleasure in such continuity wherever I might find it.

That short incident came to mind again over a month later in what at first seemed an unlikely place. I had traveled east to the town of Columbia, capitol of Tyrrell County. With a population of something like one thousand, it is the largest town in the county. (I think the second largest is Gum Neck.) I first saw Columbia when it had no paved streets, when the hotel there (now gone) got two dollars per night, and when to get there you passed a succession of junked cars marked "Eat at Carley's Cafe" for twenty miles in either direction on US 64.

Columbia was my kind of town, and Tyrrell County was a sportsman's dream all the way from Fort Landing, the Frying Pan, and Gum Neck on the Alligator River west through the pocosin and swamps to the eastern shore of Phelps Lake. Even with the passage of years and the threats of superfarms, peat mining, and massive logging, the area still retains a lot of its wild appeal.

So as we sailed out of Columbia down the Scuppernong River into Albemarle Sound, I was pleased to see that the shoreline of this handsome blackwater river still looked like the kind of place where you'd want to watch your step. In the middle of the sound, the wind fell out completely, as it invariably does when I go sailing. Indeed, the entire sound as far as you could see in any direction was calm ("slick ca'm," as they still say in certain areas along the coast).

We turned loose the sheets, let the boat drift, and jumped over the side. Around us in the water were the tiny stingless jellyfish some people call phosphors. They brushed lightly against our legs as we drifted on boat cushions. What reminded me of the s pear point as I floated there was the sudden realization that I could not see exactly where sky met water in the distance. Indeed, unless I turned to look at the boat or my companions, I could not see anything man-made whatsoever. Here was one of the few places left in North Carolina where an Indian who had lived thousands of years ago might look around and see nothing unfamiliar.

For more than a month, I had thought of that spear point as a gift from the past, and a reminder that we are only temporary keepers of the land and water. Now, all at once, it also seemed like a warning.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Just Once a Year
2. Children of the Moon
3. One Berry Picker Moves On
4. Fishing with Grandfathers
5. Fishing for Ice Age Trout
6. Calendar Art and the Sacrificial Bass
7. Somewhere behind the Post Office
8. Let the Good Earth Roll
9. Getting Lost and Loving It
10. Death of a Turtle
11. A Brief History of Hats
12. Ship of Frogs
13. Brothers of the Lodge
14. Fly Fishing for Grouse
15. Too Lazy to Fish
16. A Few Kind Words about Guns
17. Camp Cooking Catastrophes
18. Blindfolded, with Scissors
19. Breaking In a New Guide
20. Life on the End
21. Homegrown Interludes
22. Out on the Big Blue
23. A Train up Every Creek
24. The Laws of Discontinued Perfection
25. Fishing and Supply-Side Economics
26. Fishing and the Theory of Relativity
27. The Summers before Air
28. Live Entertainment
29. The Last Elk's Legacy
30. A Kinship in Stone
31. Down and Dirty
32. Bird Thou Never Wert
33. The Last, Best Day
34. Shooting with Bone-Narrows
35. The Art of Anticipation
36. Calling All Dogs
37. The Thanksgiving Hunt
38. Dogs Are a Better Class of People
39. Birds out of Hand
40. Deerly Beloved, We Are Gathered
41. Real Ducks, Fake Ducks
42. Greasy Burgers and Curb Service
43. A Goose for Lemmie
44. A Jetty Too Far
45. File under Diversions
46. Enough Is Not Enough
47. The Best We Can Hope For
48. Where the Wind Comes From
49. Cutting the Tree
50. A Different Kind of New Year's

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Dean is a master of both observation and inference. He often moves from specific moments to larger musings, and can construct a compelling meditation out of a single crab's release from an overcrowded pot.—Fly Rod & Reel



The consistent theme uniting all of these witty and poignant essays is the celebration of wild places and rural traditions.—Fly Rod & Reel



Dogs That Point, Fish That Bite . . . is a real hoot—the poignant, witty, bittersweet, sometimes outrageous observations of a 17-year editor of Wildlife in North Carolina magazine. . . . Wonderful, wonderful reading.—Richmond Times-Dispatch



What a delightful book! . . . Anyone interested in fishing or hunting will enjoy the wit and humor that Jim Dean weaves into each of his stories.—The Pulse



Jim Dean brings you his outdoors with long experience, pleasant sentiment and unforgettable wry humor. His hunting, fishing and camping life may have centered in his beloved North Carolina but his pilgrimages to other fields and waters have spiced his stories with memorable comparisons. His book will last.—Charles F. Waterman, author of Black Bass and the Fly Rod



Earthy, intimate, brilliant, and always wise, these outdoor essays spring from the heart and mind of a replete hunter and fisherman. Jim Dean is among the top few writer-sportsmen in America — I love this book.—Nick Lyons, author of Confessions of a Fly-Fishing Addict



They say comparisons are odious, but Jim Dean's gemlike stories remind me of another North Carolina writer, the one who gave us The Old Man and the Boy. Like Mr. Ruark, Jim Dean is a master of the short personal essay that you can read again and again and each time find something new, something true.—Michael McIntosh



To refer to Jim Dean as an 'outdoor writer' is to qualify or in some way diminish his writing skills. Dean is quite simply a writer with few equals. His works are filled with wisdom and subtle humor, and his style is both elegant and unpretentious. . . . This wonderful book deserves a place on the shelf of anyone who appreciates great writing.—Tom Earnhardt, author of Fly Fishing the Tidewaters

Editorial Reviews

What a delightful book!

"The Pulse"

Dean is quite simply a writer with few equals.

Tom Earnhardt, author of "Fly Fishing the Tidewaters"

Jim Dean brings you his outdoors with long experience, pleasant sentiment and unforgettable wry humor.

Charles F. Waterman, author of "Black Bass and the Fly Rod#"

Jim Dean is among the top few writer-sportsmen in America--and I "love" this book.

Nick Lyons, author of "Confessions of a Fly-Fishing Addict"

"Dean is quite simply a writer with few equals.

Tom Earnhardt, author of "Fly Fishing the Tidewaters""

"Jim Dean brings you his outdoors with long experience, pleasant sentiment and unforgettable wry humor.

Charles F. Waterman, author of "Black Bass and the Fly Rod#""

"Jim Dean is among the top few writer-sportsmen in America--and I "love" this book.

Nick Lyons, author of "Confessions of a Fly-Fishing Addict""

The consistent theme uniting all of these witty and poignant essays is the celebration of wild places and rural traditions.

"Fly Rod & Reel"

From the Publisher

Dean is a master of both observation and inference. He often moves from specific moments to larger musings, and can construct a compelling meditation out of a single crab's release from an overcrowded pot.

Fly Rod & Reel