More Archery Book Reviews

For anyone who loves old-school hunting yarns, Howard Hill’s memoir Wild Adventure delivers epic animal battles, descriptions of rugged horizons, and bow-and-arrow glories galore. 

 

While Hill’s reminisces flow from another time (one with less sensitivity toward certain elements), they should quicken the heartbeat of readers who have thrilled at Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon or yearned for the woods in his Nick Adams stories. Hill and his cohorts (including his wife Elizabeth [Libba], who was some nine years his senior and an expert behind the bow in her own right) qualify as top-drawer, bad-@$$, old-school swashbucklers. Hill rode to the hounds in Florida, lassoed cougar and bear out West, bow-fished grouper and shark underwater, and bowhunted boar on Catalina Island. (As a modern foil for Hill, I’d recommend a gander at When the Killing’s Done, T.C. Boyle’s wonderfully critical and complicated exploration of environmentalism and ecology set against the backdrop of the Channel Islands, off California’s southern coast. That book, and the short TV series West of the West: Tales from California’s Channel Islands, explore the history and ecology of Catalina and her sister islands and provide deeper insight into the setting of some of Hill’s adventures.) 

 

For anyone who likes to fling arrows by day and get flung into book pages by night, Hill’s compendium seems to qualify as a classic, as this observation from Hill proves:

 

“Any sensible person, I know, would have been satisfied after three weeks of thrills and spills, but a dyed-in-the-wool hunting archer is almost never really sensible ….”