Hunting from Home: A Year Afield in the Blue Ridge Mountains

by Christopher Camuto

Overview

Hunting from Home is the culmination of a long and thoughtful journey through the rich natural landscape of the southern Appalachians.

A vivid rendering of the four seasons on a Shenandoah Valley farm and in the Virginia mountains. Christopher Camuto has been praised for writing "with the clear-sightedness and imaginative reachboth inward and outwardof a poet" (Verlyn Klinkenborg). In Hunting from Home, Camuto takes the reader through a year of intense experiences: hunting grouse with his setter through snowbound forests in winter; wading trout streams in spring; closely observing birds and wildlife through summer; exploring the backcountry, cutting wood, and hunting deer in autumn. He takes seriouslyand joyously Thoreau's injunction to practice "the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen." Camuto writes incisively about the hunter's paradoxical love of the game he pursues; but he also hunts in the broadest sense possible, searching out and witnessing the life of the things he lovesbrook trout and black bear, hawks and warblerswith the hope of sharing the pleasures and preoccupations of a "border life" lived, with deep satisfaction, in the shadow of the Blue Ridge. 4 b/w illustrations.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393084382
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/24/2011
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
Sales rank:	755,110
File size:	786 KB

About the Author

Christopher Camuto is the author of A Fly Fisherman’s Blue Ridge, Another Country: Journeying Toward the Cherokee Mountains, Hunting from Home and Time and Tide in Acadia. He teaches creative writing at Bucknell University and lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

	Prologue	13
	Solitary in Winter	27
	Second Growth	52
	Caught by the Way	82
	Early Wood	105
	Bend of a River	133
	Karst	164
	Late Wood	193
	Expecting to Be Surprised	218
	Archer's Paradox	242
	Blood Trail	274
	Working Past Dark	306

Editorial Reviews

In this celebration of a year in the country, Camuto (A Fly Fisherman's Blue Ridge), who lives in a four-room log cabin near the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, meditates on the pleasures of nature and his place in it. Eloquently conveying the joy he takes in finding "the miraculous in the common," he writes of the passing seasons, the ever-changing landscape, and the animals and birds that inhabit the mountains and the 200-acre farm he calls home. He also spends much of his time hunting and fishing-grouse in winter, trout in early spring, deer in fall and early winter-and the hunting theme permeates the book. As he admits, it may seem incongruous that someone who loves nature so much is an avid hunter. But, he says, "Hunting has weighted my time outdoors and clarified a great deal for me, taught me innumerable practical lessons and taken me in certain dreamlike moments through the transcendental concentration of the hunt to contact with what I assume is the sacred pulse of being, my own and that of the game I pursue." Nicely covering the same poetic ground as Ted Kerasote and Rick Bass, Camuto describes days spent in the woods tracking grouse, the details of teaching himself bow hunting, or cleaning deer. Camuto's book holds many attractions: his observations about his world and its delights-the trees, the flowers, the stars, the unexpected sight of deer running through the snow on a moonlit night, the presence of Carolina wrens nesting on his front porch, the smell of newly split wood-are memorable and can hold their own with the best nature writing. (Mar.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

A heavily mulled account of a country year, an ordinary place in rural Virginia where nature writer Camuto (Another Country, 1997, etc.) takes his joy, celebrates, studies. Camuto is agog at the pure happiness he feels when abroad in the Blue Ridge countryside he calls home, in awe of its venerability. He endeavors to join the landscape, and hunting is one of his vehicles as he pokes about with his dog through "a funky patch of mulish mountain farmland wildly reasserting itself," or goes bow hunting, which "requires slipping into the not-there, getting so close to deer that you are where they are, within the space of their awareness without them being aware of you." Camuto is at his best when he is simply out there reveling, which is where we find him most of the time. But he can also be a bore, endeavoring to justify hunting by trotting out 10th-century Chinese sage Fan K'uan or 20th-century Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset (when will this poor man be given a rest by conscience-stricken hunters?). It would be so much easier, not to mention more honorable and believable, for the author to say that hunting makes him feel good and natural, that he does it with respect, that his take is modest. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine anyone who walks on the land with greater circumspection and appreciation than Camuto. His fondness for thinking aloud on the page sometimes results in such best-kept-to-himself reveries as "the musty wing revives the memory of an odor ancient as pine sap," or "I watch day and night exchange gifts." But then he will win you back by revealing the times he thought he was onto something deep and mystical, only to discover it was a robin or a dogwood without leaves.Which just serves to underscore the heart of the matter: it's all in the seeing. Slightly self-conscious, but often inviting.

Kirkus Reviews

Camuto is, pound for pound, word for word, the heavyweight champion of southern nature writing.

Bloomsbury Review

The mystery of connection lies at the heart of Hunting from Home. . . . The stealthy cadence of Camuto's prose reveals glimpses of his effort to do justice to a place and way of life that often seem just beyond his reach; hunting becomes a metaphor of how to capture the natural within the self and on the page.

New York Times Book Review