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

Book excerpt: 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.