The Long Sit
Someone always asks it at dinner. Why do you do it? Twenty years in, I still have not answered it well.
This is not a book about how to hunt. There are no tactics in it, no gear lists, no photographs of dead animals. It is a collection of essays about what actually happens to a person who spends thirty autumns sitting alone in a tree in the cold, waiting.
It is about stillness, and boredom, and the particular attention that only arrives after the sixth hour. About a first deer at fourteen and the grief afterward that nobody warned him about. About the animal he hit badly and never found, and what he changed because of it. About a father who taught him lovingly and badly, and a daughter he took out and got wrong in a different way.
WHAT'S INSIDE
- Twelve essays on hunting, patience, failure and inheritance
- The long sit - a meditation on doing nothing well
- What the arrow costs: an honest reckoning with a practice that includes loss
- The kitchen, the folding table in December, and vegetarian friends at dinner
- Public land, crowded parking lots, and whose ground it was first
- The season he could not hunt, and what the absence revealed
- The old men in the truck at five in the morning, and a rural world going quiet
- A closing piece written for readers who do not hunt and are trying to understand someone who does
PERFECT FOR
Hunters who have started to wonder why. Readers of quiet nature writing and memoir. And the wife, husband, parent or friend who has never understood what a person is doing out there in the dark - this book was written with them in the room.
Written under a pen name. The people, places and events in these pages are composites and inventions, not reportage.
If you have ever climbed down at dark having seen nothing and still counted the day well spent, this book is for you.
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