Edward Hoagland, one of America's most distinguished writers, is the author of seventeen books, including Walking the Dead Diamond River, The Courage of Turtles, Red Wolves and Black Bears, African Calliope, Tugman's Passage, Balancing Acts, and Tigers & Ice. He lives in Vermont and teaches in the English Department at Bennington College.

Excerpt from pg. 21:
On the first hunt, we went to the Duck Pond Road in the township of Glover. It's a defunct jigsaw road, scarcely navigable, that twists past abandoned farmsteads and log houses for a dozen miles, with the acres of overgrown red clover and alfalfa fields and orchards everywhere that attract bears, mile after mile of new-fledged wilderness that has not been bulldozed because a strip through the middle of it is slated to become a superhighway. Tuffy, Doyle's strike dog, trotted ahead, urinating repeatedly as he warmed to the occasion. He was butter-footed in the beginning, as stiff as if he were walking on ice, having hunted in Holland, Vt., the day before and treed a yearling, which the hosts and landowners there shot. He has grasshopper legs, a long gazelle waist and a broad face for a dog, providing plenty of space for his teeth and for his smelling-chambers. He's even blacker than a bear, and doesn't lope or pace the way a wolf does, for instance; his gait is gimpier, pointier, pumpier, dancier; his legs seem to dangle--long girlish legs--and there's a trotting-horse quality to him--he has a thin tail and shaky, mile-jigging legs. His ears flop incongruously, like a cartoon puppy's, and yet he sniffed like a jackhammer as he started hunting more smoothy, after relieving his bowels and getting the excess of high spirits out of his system. The start, gaunt persona of a working dog, whether a sled, hound or attack dog, emerged--the scarred face flattening likea janissary's, the eyes going gaily daft. His tail swung with the degree of interest the smells he encountered aroused.