A Hunter's Book of Days

"Back home, in the gloaming," writes author Charles Fergus, "I look for a chunk of pinkish sandstone lying in the tree strip between our house and the horse pasture. Left over after the building of our house, the stone marks my old spaniel Jenny’s grave. It’s covered with snow, but I find it and brush the snow from its top.... It has been a year now since Jenny died. But she’s present in my mind, tied to the many memories she helped me gather in the uplands. One of those memories shines brightly for me now. It happened on a day much like this one, at a place less than a mile from Henderson Cemetery in a covert we call Christmas Tree."

A Hunter’s Book of Days is a personal narrative set in the grouse and woodcock covers surrounding Fergus’s longtime home in Pennsylvania. The author focuses his text around bird hunts behind his springer spaniels, including flashbacks to Jenny, a quintessential gun dog, and Caillie, his up-and-coming youngster. But A Hunter’s Book of Days is far more than a chronicle of sporting memories: Within the book’s chapters, Fergus deals with the loss of covers, land development, and life-altering events all neatly linked to thoughts on dogs, guns, bird hunting, love of home ground, and friendship.