A friend of mine recently wrote a book titled "Skinning Catfish in Mary's Kitchen: Tales of Hunting, Fishing, Trapping, and Life in the Woods."
Will Brantley writes from the perspective of his own adventures, and having grown up and flourished in western Kentucky, his tales remind me of how many of us grew up in rural West Virginia.
The times I've hunted with Will, we fell in together like childhood buddies who had been hunting and fishing together their entire lives. With parallel upbringings and experiences, mostly the freedom to roam the hills and hollers and creeks and streams for various critters to pursue, there was always something in season in the days of our youth.
His chapter about the opening day of squirrel season and hunting the shagbark hickories for squirrels for the first time, when he was old enough to carry a .22 rifle while his father carried his beloved 16-gauge shotgun, hit home. I recall that after many years of being a tag-along spectator, watching my elders hunt while I was the vine-shaker and retriever of the downed game, I finally had the opportunity to become a hands-on participant in the hunt.
Last year, and we planned on repeating it this year, I joined Will at his home for the opener of squirrel season to hunt the hickories. It was one of my favorite hunts of the year. Why? Because it simply felt natural and opened the floodgates of memories of an outdoor childhood I wouldn't trade or change for anything.
The professionals at Simon & Schuster responsible for distributing his book wrote a description worth sharing:
"'Skinning Catfish in Mary's Kitchen' is a compilation of modern hunting and fishing tales told in the classic, no-apologies style of Will Brantley, long-time columnist for Field & Stream and one of the nation's best-known outdoor writers. The book chronicles Brantley's earliest days in the woods, hunting squirrels with his dad, to working as a greenskeeper on a golf course (where he snuck in a few casts in the water hazards), to experiencing big-game adventures abroad, to teaching his young son the ways of the woods and water.
"Brantley has written all about outdoor skills, like noodling for catfish and calling turkeys, but his favorite assignments are about characters, such as the little old lady who helped him haul a Canadian moose out of the North Woods and the Argentine guide who took him hunting for capybara with hand-rolled buckshot. Some of Brantley's favorite characters aren't people; Lil, a Lewellyn setter, was his beloved bird dog of early adulthood, and a giant largemouth bass named Lockjaw haunted Brantley for two summers in the late ’90s, when he was a teenager.
"All of these stories and many more can be found in this collection, which will leave you laughing, on the edge of your seat and perhaps shedding a tear, too."
If you need a good read to get you excited about the upcoming hunting season, or you simply need a book to read that feels like the author grew up down the road and hunted and fished with you as a kid, it's worth your time.
And to be honest, there aren't that many of us left telling hunting and fishing stories that old-fashioned way – by retelling stories of a well-spent youth in the woods and on the water, when we could walk out our back doors to an awaiting world of adventures with only one rule – be home by dark.
