![]() ![]() Keith wrote stories as if he was telling them to a friend and in fact in his later years his stories were dictated. Keith is the only one in the story, turning the bowl of his pipe down so the rain won’t put it out, and tracking elk, killing elk, and dressing them out in the dark, providing winter meat for his family and the families of those other hunters back in camp. The gun writer Elmer Keith wrote one of the best hunting stories I ever read, and it was just his account of one soggy, rainy day’s hunt up on the Lochsa River in Idaho. Nobody wants to read a story about fishing for hire, a man casting his line where a finger points, or a man pressing the trigger after the guide has done all the real hunting. ![]() There is no moral to his story except the unwritten one, that the best fishing, and hunting, too, has a sense of discovery at its core. ” –he then proceeds to talk about trolling in a rowboat for king salmon in a place where nobody had caught salmon before. One of the greatest fishing stories I ever read was written by Roderick Haig Brown and began something like this: “I’ve told this story before in different ways but as it is the best story I know. Its primary purpose is simply to tell a story. It does not need to illuminate larger issues or reveal fundamental human truths, though the best of it can do that too. Narrative writing does not have to instruct, though it can instruct. As we developed written language, our hunting and fishing stories became narratives on pages made of papyrus, wasp nests, and finally wood paper. It began with cave art and the oral tradition. The need to tell our stories, to record them so that others might read them and learn from them and draw inspiration from them, is one of the oldest human impulses. Our Paleolithic ancestors were the first storytellers. Paleolithic scholars believe that some of these drawings of bison, cats, bear and rhinoceros are accounts of past hunting successes and are a mystic ritual to improve the chances for success in future hunts.Īs outdoor writers, this is the tradition we come from. They do not tell stories of love or war, or of politics or philosophy. The first stories that humans ever told, that we are aware of, are recorded in the pictographs painted on the cave walls of Lascaux in southwestern France. It has always been so, since the beginning of recorded time. As hunters and fishermen, we have a need to tell stories. ![]()
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