Out Home

Introduction

Introduction This book began, as many good things do, in the spring. And it began out home-deep in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, in a turkey camp on a pine ridge just shouting distance from Muddy Creek. It was the introspective hour. The sun was disappearing out over Oklahoma and the last roosting turkey had gobbled somewhere off to the east. There wasn't much talk in camp; most of us were making a slow transition from the silence of a day's turkey hunting to the time, later, when the hissing Colemans would light up our ridgetop with their thin, greenish glare, when we would ease back into the chatter of tired hunters glad to be together again. John and I were sitting by the fire, indulging our mutual fondness for thick Louisiana coffee and talking haphazardly about two other loves we share-the outdoors and its literature. Somewhere along the way, a familiar thought occurred to meit 's impossible to talk about the best outdoor literature of the mid-twentieth century without talking about John Madson. ix Introduction This book began, as many good things do, in the spring. And it began out home-deep in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, in a turkey camp on a pine ridge just shouting distance from Muddy Creek. It was the introspective hour. The sun was disappearing out over Oklahoma and the last roosting turkey had gobbled somewhere off to the east. There wasn't much talk in camp; most of us were making a slow transition from the silence of a day's turkey hunting to the time, later, when the hissing Colemans would light up our ridgetop with their thin, greenish glare, when we would ease back into the chatter of tired hunters glad to be together again. John and I were sitting by the fire, indulging our mutual fondness for thick Louisiana coffee and talking haphazardly about two other loves we share-the outdoors and its literature. Somewhere along the way, a familiar thought occurred to meit 's impossible to talk about the best outdoor literature of the mid-twentieth century without talking about John Madson. ix Introduction This book began, as many good things do, in the spring. And it began out home-deep in the Ouachita Mountains of Arkansas, in a turkey camp on a pine ridge just shouting distance from Muddy Creek. It was the introspective hour. The sun was disappearing out over Oklahoma and the last roosting turkey had gobbled somewhere off to the east. There wasn't much talk in camp; most of us were making a slow transition from the silence of a day's turkey hunting to the time, later, when the hissing Colemans would light up our ridgetop with their thin, greenish glare, when we would ease back into the chatter of tired hunters glad to be together again. John and I were sitting by the fire, indulging our mutual fondness for thick Louisiana coffee and talking haphazardly about two other loves we share-the outdoors and its literature. Somewhere along the way, a familiar thought occurred to meit 's impossible to talk about the best outdoor literature of the mid-twentieth century without talking about John Madson. ix x INTRODUCTION So I did. I talked about his story on the Delta Marsh that had come out the month before in Audubon, and he went on to tell me about a bee-tree piece that was in the mill for fall. My memory began sifting back through the magazine pieces John has written over the past few years, and I thought once again that they were just too good to be left lying piecemeal in the gloom of the bound periodicals section. I'm afraid I lost the thread of the beetree story about then, because a book was beginning to take shape in my mind-a book of wonderful stories about the earth and its creatures, a book by the man who, better than any writer today, captures the fine, bright love of the outdoors in prose as good as prose can be. It would be nice if books could be completed- as simply and effortlessly as they are sometimes conceived. But, of course, it cannot be so. Since that spring night in the Ouachitas when I sat musing between the wild turkeys and the sunset, there have been months of work, months of reading and re-reading, questioning , probing. The result, I believe, has more than justified...