In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Introduction Hampton hunts and wildwood walks are experiences I have shared vicariously with Archibald Rutledge from the days of starry-eyed youth to the present. As a youngster his stories in Field & Stream and Outdoor Life so entranced me that I carefully timed my visits to the barbershop in order to be sure to face a lengthy wait for a barber’s chair. That wait ensured ample opportunity to read and savor his latest contributions to the magazines. Many of the finest of those pieces dealt with the Christmas season, and the passage of two generations and appreciably greater familiarity with his work has merely served to reinforce my enchantment with the writings of this squire of the Santee. That enchantment, along with realization of just how deeply the celebration of Christmas figured in his love of Hampton Plantation, underlies this work. Only after one reads and ponders the dozens of Yuletide stories he wrote does full realization come of his passion for the season’s traditions and the way they had long been celebrated at his cherished home by the river. Hunting was an integral and important part of the season, a welcome escape and chance to reconnect with the good earth of the Low Country after months of exile in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, where Rutledge taught for thirtythree years as he endeavored to raise a family and somehow resurrect the faded glory of the familial home. One senses that when the long train ride south ended, a burden lifted from Rutledge’s mind, and for three weeks or so, year after year, his spirits soared, and he gained new inspiration for the poetry and prose that flowed from his pen in impressively prolific fashion. To be sure, Old Flintlock, as he was known to family and friends, hunted in Pennsylvania. It wasn’t the same, though, for in his hunter’s heart nothing quite matched the hallelujah chorus of a pack of hounds triumphantly coursing a whitetail, an approach to outdoor life that ran like a sparkling thread through the entire fabric of Southern sport. He would enjoy the thrills of the chase virtually every day of the Christmas break, and when he wasn’t hunting deer there were always wild turkeys (then hunted in fall and winter rather than spring), quail, waterfowl, rabbits, squirrels, woodcock, snipe, and more. Joyful as the experience was, Rutledge savored it even more thanks to sharing the Hampton hunt with his sons, extended family, and neighbors. In fact once Arch Jr. was gone, dying while still a young man, things were never quite the same. Introduction  xvi For decades, though, December provided an annual opportunity to call back distant yesteryears when George Washington had visited Hampton, when a signer of the Declaration of Independence had hunted the same ground, and when what Rutledge described in the title of one of his books as “Santee paradise ” was indeed a sportsman’s Eden. Most of what is finest and most enduring in the vast corpus of his writing revolves around life at Hampton, and nowhere did he shine more consistently than in his treatment of the Christmas season as it figured in his life and the shared lives of others, black and white, who called the plantation home. The breadth of Rutledge’s knowledge is impressive. He was a gifted teacher, talented gardener, seasoned woodsman, craftsman (today turkey calls he made fetch anywhere from $1,500 to $4,000 in collector circles), devoted friend, raconteur par excellence, outspoken conservationist, staunch patriot, and a writer for the ages. When he deals with the subjects he knew best—whether it is the history of the Low Country; folkways of his beloved black companions whom he called, in the title of another book, “God’s children”; deer and turkey hunting ; or something else—he has to be reckoned as one of the giants of American literature. Selections from his body of writings have appeared in scores if not hundreds of anthologies (I have identified just shy of one hundred such volumes and suspect my bibliographical meanderings have done little more than scratch the surface). Today, two full generations after his passing, he remains an iconic figure, at least on a regional basis, and some index to this fact is provided by the great interest among bibliophiles in his books. Many of them fetch hundreds of dollars on the out-of-print market; some bring thousands. Yet these and other hallmarks of Old Flintlock’s appeal, while worthy of...

Share