Stories from Afield Adventures with Wild Things in Wild Places

About this book

Over the past four decades, Bruce L. Smith has worked with most big-game species in some of the American West's most breathtaking and challenging landscapes. In Stories from Afield, readers join Smith on his adventures as a naturalist, sportsman, and wildlife biologist, as he pulls us into the field of learning and discovery across wilderness areas of western Montana, the National Elk Refuge in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and a South African temperate forest.

Ranging from humorous to harrowing, Smith's essays recount capturing newborn elk calves, stalking mountain goats on icy cliffs, being stranded on a mountain after riding out a helicopter crash, confrontations with bears during his research, plus quirky and edifying hunting tales. Throughout his adventures, the magnetism and danger of wild nature are ever present, reminding us that our fascination with wildness often stems from its unpredictability.

Contents

Introduction

1. Snowbound
2. Big Turtle
3. The Way West
4. The Deer Hunt
5. The Elk Hunt
6. Woodpeckers to Goats
7. The Bear and the Tree
8. Gravity
9. Lightning
10. Collecting
11. Old Garbage Gut
12. In the Timber
13. Baby Elk
14. The Circle
15. Empty Forests
16. Four Decades Later

Afterword
Acknowledgments

Customer Reviews

Biography

Bruce L. Smith retired from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2004 after a thirty-year career as a wildlife manager and scientist. He was named Wyoming's Conservationist of the Year in 1997 and received the John and Frank Craighead Wildlife Conservation Award in 2005. His latest book, Life on the Rocks: A Portrait of the American Mountain Goat, won two National Outdoor Book Awards.