Peacock, Doug.Grizzly Years: In Search of The American Wilderness. Zebra Books, New York, 1992, 375 pages. Mass Market Paperback. Inscribed by the author on the back of the first page “To Bruce & Jamie, From their pal Doug in Aspen Co 3/93 For The Wild Ones”.
In Good condition, with some general cover wear and some cocking to spine. Signed copies are not commonly offered.
$21.95 Postpaid in U.S. (Subject to Prior Sale). To order please contact us at huntbook1@gmail.com
From the back cover:
“Beyond its riveting adventure and solid natural history, Grizzly Years is a powerful argument for the preservation of all things wild. It is also the extraordinary personal chronicle of a man redeemed by the American wilderness”.
Chapter titles include Indian Country, Year of the Grizzlies, The Bitter Creek Griz, Demise of the Grizzly, The Sacred Bear of the Blackfeet, and more.
Peacock was the inspiration for the George Hayduke character in Edward Abbey’s infamous environmental novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang” (a must read in itself, by the way). A more irascible, confounding character there has never been. Hayduke lives!
“The stirring outdoor story about a young boy, Ted; his collie, Tammie; and a pair of tremendous bucks in the wild country of the Black Hills grew out of Jim Kjelgaard’s lifelong interest in deer.
It began during his boyhood in Pennsylvania, at a time when the state’s great herds were at their peak. The two bucks of the story, Damon and Pythias, are based on a pair that the author actually observed. Young Ted, who wants so badly to own and run a hunting camp, is a boy he really knew, while loyal Tammie, who acts as a secret carrier of supplies and messages to Ted’s father, hiding out in the woods because the sheriff wants him on a serious charge, manipulated by his ruthless enemy, is a composite of several dogs Jim Kjelgaard has owned.
So Double Challenge is very real, besides being very exciting and moving. But then, all of Jim Kjelgaard’s books are that way…Written For Older Boys”.
Chapter headings include “The Threat, Coon Valley, A Flight of Woodcock, A Black Bear Charges, and more…”
This copy is in Very Good+ condition with a Very Good Dustjacket, which has some small chips missing at the edges. It is price clipped. Published by Dodd, Mead & Company, 1957. This is the true First Printing of The First Edition. It is not an X-library copy. A very scarce Kjelgaard tile, rarely offered in this condition. $250.
* “Big Red” is the author’s most famous novel. It is the story of a famed Irish Setter, and was made into a Walt Disney movie of the same name.
Like many of you, I am often captivated by the words of others. I try and save them when I find something particularly interesting or appropriate to whatever subject I have been working on.
We have listed many of these in our “Quote Section” on the left hand margin. I am sure you will find them as fascinating as I, so scroll down and read away. They offer great insights into the problems of our complex and troubled world. They also offer some marvelous solutions, if we listen.
Almost everyone has a favorite quote or two. We would love to hear some of yours.
Below are just a few of ours:
Random Hunting & Fishing Quotes
What Boy’s Do
“The woods are made for the hunters of dreams, the brooks for the fishers of song”.
–Sam Foss
“Rich, ‘the Old Man said dreamily, ‘is not baying after what you can’t have. Rich is having the time to do what you want to do. Rich is a little whiskey to drink and some food to eat and a roof over your head and a fish pole and a boat and a gun and a dollar for a box of shells. Rich is not owing any money to anybody, and not spending what you haven’t got.”
–Robert Ruark, “The Old Man’s Boy Grows Older”
“When a hunter is in a tree stand with high moral values and with the proper hunting ethics and richer for the experience, that hunter is 20 feet closer to God”.
–Fred Bear
“In this quiet, peaceful time of twilight there is, in this great circle of life, an awful lot of hunting and fishing and catching and killing and dying and eating going on all around me. As the old fisherman said, ‘That’s the way with life. Sometimes you eat well; sometimes you are well-eaten.’”
–Paul Quinnett, Darwin’s Bass
“Come warm weather, I’m going to take a kid fishing; I hope you do to. But nothing would make me happier than to look across the cove or down the stream and see a young one help an old one remember what it is like to be young in Springtime.”
–Gene Hill
“How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook.”
–Aldo Leopold
“No human being, however great, or powerful, was ever so free as a fish.”
–John Ruskin, The Two Paths
When some of my friends have asked me anxiously about their boys, whether they should let them hunt, I have answered yes – remembering that it was one of the best parts of my education – make them hunters.
“Once they are gone, the trees and the grasslands, the screaming waterfowl, the beavers, and the antelope, we can only remember them with longing. We are not god. We cannot make America over again as it was in the beginning, but we can come to what is left of our heritage with a patriot’s reverence”.
——-Anonymous
From Things Precious & Wild: A Book of Nature Quotations by John K. Terres
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared we would become a captive audience. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared that we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
—Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985)
A Journal of Honest Food, Freedom, and The Natural World
