Bird Dog Days, Wingshooting Ways by Archibald Rutledge

Bird Dog Days, Wingshooting Ways by Archibald Rutledge

An expanded edition of Rutledge's stories on game-bird hunting and devoted canine companions

Archibald Rutledge has long been recognized as one of the finest sporting scribes this country has ever produced. A prolific writer who specialized in stories on nature and hunting, over the course of a long and prolific career Rutledge produced more than fifty books of poetry and prose, held the position of South Carolina's poet laureate for thirty-three years, and garnered numerous honorary degrees and prizes for his writings. In this revised and expanded edition of Bird Dog Days, Wingshooting Ways, noted outdoor writer Jim Casada draws together Rutledge's stories on the southern heartland, deer hunting, turkey hunting, and Carolina Christmas hunts and traditions.

This collection, first published in 1998, turns to Rutledge's writings on two subjects near and dear to his heart that he understood with an intimacy growing out of a lifetime of experience—upland bird hunting and hunting dogs. Its contents range from delightful tales of quail and grouse hunts to pieces on special dogs and some of their traits. Bird Dog Days, Wingshooting Ways also includes a long fictional piece, "The Odyssey of Bolio," which shows that Rutledge's literary mastery extended beyond simple tales for outdoorsmen.

"Jim Casada has compiled and edited a wonderful collection of writing from Archibald Rutledge [that] captures.. his years pursuing grouse in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Mountains... and his quail hunting in and around his beloved Hampton Plantation." —Gray's Sporting Journal

Jim Casada is a retired Winthrop University history professor who has written on outdoor-related subjects for some four decades. Over the course of his career, he has won more than 170 excellence-in-craft awards from regional and national organizations. The editor at large for Sporting Classics magazine, he writes columns for two newspapers and contributes regularly to outdoor magazines. Casada is the editor and compiler of eighteen anthologies, including four that feature Archibald Rutledge. He is the author of nineteen original books and more than five thousand magazine and newspaper articles. Casada is currently working on a biography of Rutledge and writing a trilogy of books, Portals of Paradise, covering the people, places, and perspectives on his boyhood homeland in western North Carolina.