Long Walk into a Brisk Wind

This book follows the arc of an upland hunter's life from childhood into old age. Each chapter emphasizes the larger life lessons that hunting teaches a person as they learn and then practice the sport. A large portion of the book centers on the way upland hunting integrates wing shooting and dog work into a coherent whole that, when it works well, can approach art. The book consists a Preface, 34 stories organized into seven sections (Growing Up, Shotguns, Reloading and the Range, Dogs, Birds, The Hunt, and Dotage), and a Postface. From William Souder, author of Under a Wild Sky:Mike Lannoo's wise and utterly delightful A Long Walk into a Brisk Wind carves out a genre of its own against the wider canvas of hunting literature. Informed by a lifetime of pheasant hunting--and inspired by the previous hunting lifetimes of his mentors--the book is mediation on the nexus of dogs, guns, birds, and the humans who put them together in a sport that might better be thought of as a continuing experiment or, if you listen carefully to Lannoo, an art. Lannoo's mission is not advice, though his pages brim with lessons every hunter ought to bear in mind. Rather, the book is grounded in the axiom that if you want to learn anything in life, make friends with somebody who knows what he's doing. Take this wonderful book to heart and there's an outside chance that someday you'll BE that somebody.