I would shoot my own mother if she went in coveys and had a good strong flight.

-Ernest Hemingway, Letter to Robert M. Coates, 5 November, 1932, in Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame, Matthew J. Bruccoli (ed.) 2006.

Frank W. Benson (1862-1951), Salmon Fishing
oil on canvas – 32 by 40 inches

This impressionist oil painting by renowned sporting artist Frank Benson is the highlight of today’s Sporting Sale, today and tomorrow at Boston’s Park Plaza Hotel by Copley Fine Art Auctions. The Benson is expected to sell between $600,000 and $900,000.

RESULTS

Sales price was $650,000 + 15% buyer premium = $747,500.00

Guns and Hooks

The Museum of Idaho (in Idaho Falls) will feature an exhibition titled Guns of the West & Rocky Mountain Fly Fishing running from July 14, 2006 to January 27th, 2007.

Over a dozen major collections are represented, illustrating 500 years of firearms history, and the considerably shorter, but still fascinating, history of Western fly fishing.

I’m told there are more than 20 linear feet of antique fly rods on display. Not to be missed.

The Telegraph supplies a story indicating just how marginalized firearms and hunting have become in Britain.

A deer hunter who took his photographs to a supermarket for processing was shocked to find himself reported to police.

Although the sport is legal, Tesco gave his details to officers who questioned him for several hours.

Last night the store was accused of “demonising” people who participate in field sports.

“Peter Williams”, who asked for his real name not to be published, said he was “made to feel like a terrorist”. Tesco has no ban on photographs of shooting and its privacy policy says: “We will never pass your personal data to anyone else”, but it contacted the police without telling Mr Williams.

Mr Williams, who is in his early thirties, from north Devon, took his film to Tesco in Barnstaple. Staff deemed photographs of him with his gun and a deer he had shot “inappropriate”, although he had broken no animal cruelty or firearms laws.

Mr Williams said that he was “utterly shocked and stunned” when two policemen arrived at his house on a Sunday morning with a set of prints given to them by Tesco.

After questioning him, the police accepted that he had a firearms certificate and had not broken any laws. Simon Hart, the chief executive of the Countryside Alliance, which campaigns on rural issues, said: “This is one of the most disturbing and ridiculous examples of ignorance and demonisation, of which Tesco should be ashamed.”

Mr Williams asked the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), of which he is a member, to demand an explanation from Tesco. Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, replied that staff had acted appropriately: “On being asked to view the prints, our store’s management team decided that there was cause for concern and as such contacted the police.”

A second letter on behalf of Sir Terry said: “Tesco does not discriminate against any lawful section of the community… We are confident that the actions of our staff were… within the law.”

Last night a spokesman for Tesco said: “We are sorry for any upset or distress caused to the gentleman. However, if our staff are concerned about the content of photographic material it is right that they should seek advice from the appropriate authorities, in this instance, the police.”

A spokesman for Devon and Cornwall Police said: “With any allegation of a possible criminal offence which is referred to the police, we have a duty to the community to make inquiries, particularly with any issues involving firearms.”

Loni Hancock thinks coursing is “barbaric,” and the practioners of such a practice are insensitive. Here’s a passage by the author of the earliest surviving account of the sport, written in an era when crucifixion of human beings was a routine punishment.

The true sportsman does not take out his dogs to destroy the hares, but for the sake of the race, and the contest between the dogs and the hare, and is glad if the hare escapes. And if she flies to some brake that is too thin to hide her, and seems to decline the contest, he will call off his dogs, especially if she has run well. I myself often, when I have followed the course on horseback, and have come up in time enough to save the hare alive, have taken her from the dogs, and tied them up, and let her go. And sometimes, when I have come up too late to save her, I have not been able to avoid striking myself on the head in chagrin at so good an antagonist being killed by the dogs.

—Arrian (c.87 – After 145 A.D.), Cynegetica, 16:4-5.

Dean Wolstenhome, Greyhounds Coursing a Hare

The self-styled I-Team (“I” for investigation, get it?) of KGO-TV in San Francisco hit pay dirt Superbowl weekend. While couch-potatoes all over America swilled beer, munched pretzels, and watched steroid-enhanced gladiatorial combat over the pigskin spheroid, Ted Baxter discovered that a tiny minority of Americans were still afield in California pursuing the ancient sport of coursing.

Coursing is a very old and traditional form of hunting, whose literature goes back to the 2nd century A.D., cultivated both in Christian Europe and in the Islamic Middle East, consisting of the reduction to possession of game (typically, the hare) by the pursuit of gazehounds, i.e., dogs which hunt by sight. Some breeds typically used in coursing are greyhounds and saluqi.

Ted, of course, was engaged in a more modern, and far less sporting, type of hunting: the pursuit and elimination of the unpopular minority by a pack of fools and bigots down a trail of prejudice, guided by curs like Ted himself. Ted Baxter in this case being an orthodontically-gleaming opportunist named Dan Noyes, who preens and congratulates himself publicly for his reporter’s instinct (I’d call it something else), and for telling a compelling story.

The compelling story consists of the survival of a “blood sport” within the Bay Area, an esoteric and little-known activity, incomprehensible to the urban masses, with the controversial feature common to all blood sports, including fishing, of the death of the quarry, at least on those occasions –often in the minority– when the pursuit is successful. To city boys like Ted, meat is produced in government-supervised nutrition factories, where it is processed, packaged, and then shipped to convenient supermarkets. The death of an animal is unthinkable. As one city-dweller once said to me: how could you be so heartless as to kill an animal, when you can eat a hamburger at McDonald’s?

Ted Baxter’s indignant news story, which opines: “That’s got to be a tough way to die for a rabbit.” implicitly imagines that aging jack rabbits retire to nursing homes, collect old age pensions, and die in bed.

Ted has no idea that, in California, jack rabbits breed year round, producing a litter of up to 8 leverets every six weeks or so. Females nurse the young for only two or three days, and then go back to making more jack rabbits. Crash production is essential, because the life of the jack rabbit is characterically short. Few jack rabbits live to the ripe old age of one year. The jack rabbit is a principal staple of the diet of coyotes, bobcats, foxes (red, grey, and kit), minks, martens, fishers, ferrets, mountain lions, bears, weasels, and numerous species hawks and owls and snakes; and are commonly killed by motor vehicles and by domestic dogs and cats.

It sounds terrible and barbarous to some busy-body old lady, left-wing state legislator from Berkeley, like Loni Hancock to whom Ted went running to tattle, that jack rabbits do sometimes suffer the unenviable fate (as Ted notes) of being slain by the jaws of the greyhounds. But, once Comrade Hancock introduces (see her blog), and in theory passes, her bill banning coursing in California, the jack rabbit saved by her efforts and those of noble Ted Baxter (and Channel’s 7’s crack I-Team) gets to run only a short distance further down the sunny California meadow, and, whoops! down come a great big red-tailed hawk which slays him with his talons, and tears him to pieces with his beak. Or up comes the hungry coyote, whose jaws are not readily distinguishable from those of greyhound.

The elimination of this ancient, complex and honorable tradition will, in reality, spare few pangs to jack rabbits.

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Steve Bodio also comments on this classic manifestation of the well-known tolerance of California’s Bay Area.

Faced with a tyrannical ban on Hunting, the British countryside responded this year with an increased turnout for Boxing Day hunt meetings.

The infamous February 2005 Hunt Ban, enacted by Britain’s Labour Party as a gesture of class animosity and urban spite, banned hunting par force du chien (i.e., the traditional pursuit and reduction to possession of the quarry by a pack of hounds), but included certain loopholes: drag hunts (i.e., hunts in which the pack hunts an artificially created line of scent), are lawful; and hounds can be used to follow a scent and to flush out a fox, which may then be pursued by no more than two dogs, and ultimately shot or taken by means of falconry. Consequently, the Telegraph reports:

In Buckinghamshire, for instance, a good time was had chasing a scent line across country, while the Cheshire rode out with two hounds and an eagle owl, as solemnly permitted by Act of Parliament.

These new, officially sanctioned forms of hunting might seem daft but, objectively considered, they are no more so than the traditional version.

The point of the [fox] hunt, after all, was always highly necessary pest control, and that in itself is a pretty joyless business. But an accumulation of seasonal rituals, special drinks and menus, private language and silly clothes turned an onerous obligation into a community festival, and the native absurdity of it was always part of the enjoyment.

So if the opponents of hunting thought that the spirit of traditional countrymen would be broken by making them ride with an owl, or chase a false scent before accidentally encountering a fox (as though that had never happened before), they were rather pitifully missing the point. Hunting was always absurd, because fun usually is.

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Earlier reports.

Web sources are reported the death of angling writer Ernest G. Schwiebert. More to follow.

Seasonal unmelted humor posted by Seneca the Younger (who typo’d reindeer) on YARGB.

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Yet Another Really Great — Flares Into Darkness is a very new group blog, only slightly older than ourselves (YARGB: 17 Sep 2005 vs. NYM: 29 Oct 2005). We think YARGB is most interesting new blog we’ve come upon in a long time, and we intend to look in regularly.

The equipment of the celebrated Ithaca Gun Company was sold at auction in a going-of-business auction sale last Tuesday.

The Ithaca Gun Company was founded in Fall Creek, NY in 1883 by the renowned American arms designer William Henry Baker, in partnership with Leroy & Lou Smith, George Livermore, J.E. VanNatta, and Dwight McIntire. Originally called “W.H. Baker and Company, Gun Works,” the name was changed, and the first Ithaca Gun catalogue appeared in 1885, advertising “the celebrated Ithaca gun, the strongest, simplest, and best American gun manufactured.” Famous models included the Flues, Knickerbocker, and N.I.D. (“New Ithaca Double”), and the heavy-duty Magnum 10 double-barreled models; the Ithaca single-barreled trap guns, and the popular Model 37 pump-action Featherlight. Ithaca made the least expensive of America’s classic double-barreled shotguns. Field grade Ithacas were inexpensive, but they were rugged and simple, and were famous for their fast lock-time.

Ithaca guns were used by Annie Oakley, John Phillip Souza (Ithaca’s most opulent productions were once called their “Souza-grade”), George Marshall, and Dwight Eisenhower, and admired by such well-known sporting writers as Charles Askins, Elmer Keith, and Michael McIntosh. I shot a goodly number of ruffed grouse and ducks, when I was young, with a slick-handling Model 37 12 gauge.

The Ithaca Company has died twice previously, and the famous Ithaca name has been revived each time. We are living in a period when appreciation for, and collector interest in, classic American firearms is at an all time height. So, who knows? Springsteen could be right:

Maybe ev’rything dies, baby, that’s a fact
But maybe ev’rything that dies someday comes back.

Here’s a great on-line rifle and pistol shooting simulator. (I should have kept this one to myself a lot longer. )