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An Outdoor Sporting Life: A Celebration of Heartland Hunting, Fishing, Friendship, and Landscape
Scott Irwin grew up in a time when children did chores that instilled a hands-on work ethic, but there was still time to explore the wild things.
Armed first with a slingshot carefully crafted from a forked box elder limb and powered by pre-WWII red rubber inner tube strips, he was soon using a Daisy BB gun to hunt backyard critters. He also enjoyed small-water fishing.
By age twelve, he was stalking squirrels and cottontails, and it wasn’t long before he’d mastered a tack-driving Remington 511 .22 with five-shot clip that thinned out the jackrabbits that swarmed southwest Kansas in the 1950s.
Later, he’d buy a Winchester Model 12 that opened up a whole new realm of wing shooting. It was a love affair that would continue through marriage, graduate school, and a distinguished career as a public school and university teacher—all the way until “retirement.”
He’d also write a popular column about his outdoor adventures for The Emporia Gazette, and he shares his greatest, wildest adventures across the Kansas Flint Hills, Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, South Dakota, and West Texas in “An Outdoor Sporting Life.”
Armed first with a slingshot carefully crafted from a forked box elder limb and powered by pre-WWII red rubber inner tube strips, he was soon using a Daisy BB gun to hunt backyard critters. He also enjoyed small-water fishing.
By age twelve, he was stalking squirrels and cottontails, and it wasn’t long before he’d mastered a tack-driving Remington 511 .22 with five-shot clip that thinned out the jackrabbits that swarmed southwest Kansas in the 1950s.
Later, he’d buy a Winchester Model 12 that opened up a whole new realm of wing shooting. It was a love affair that would continue through marriage, graduate school, and a distinguished career as a public school and university teacher—all the way until “retirement.”
He’d also write a popular column about his outdoor adventures for The Emporia Gazette, and he shares his greatest, wildest adventures across the Kansas Flint Hills, Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, South Dakota, and West Texas in “An Outdoor Sporting Life.”
174 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 27, 2015
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July 18, 2016
A collection of essays united by the author's abiding joy of hunting and fishing the Great Plains. He delights in wild fowl and fish, smart gun dogs, reliable shotguns and rods, friends who laugh easily, and oatmeal cookies with coffee on early-morning dove openers. Spanning the 40 years these essays were published in a Kansas newspaper, we get to see the ebb and flow of game species and fish, droughts and abundant years, and changing landscape through the author's careful eyes. Interwoven in all of these essays are explanations of the ecology and conservation of species and their habitats, with hunters, fishers, and farmers playing an active role. Anyone who values natural spaces and their roles in those places will enjoy this book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review