Bird dogs, hunting and life from Jim Harrison’s perspective

A young Jim Harrison in the doorway of his cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

The Search for the Genuine is a newly published collection of essays and magazine columns by Jim Harrison. Subtitled Nonfiction, 1970 – 2015, these pieces are reprinted from various sporting magazines—Field & Stream, Sports Illustrated, Outside—and prestigious publications such as Esquire and The New York Times.

Jim Harrison (1937 – 2016) was a best-selling New York Times author of 39 books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and one children’s book. He is perhaps best known as a poet and for his Legends of the Fall and Dalva novels.

Harrison’s big draw for me is simply his writing. I can read anything he wrote. Beginning with his first paragraph and then his lyrical, eloquent, clear style, I became enthralled. Subject matter included dogs, hunting and fishing but also his big view of life and his big appetites. Along with his cool friends Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane and Guy de la Valdene, he shared a zest for life, food (much of which they had shot or caught) and drink.

A few favorite passages.

“Our greatest politician, Thomas Jefferson, said that ‘good wine is a necessity of life for me.’ I agree but he should have said, ‘Good wine and good dogs are necessities of life for me.’”

“Utterly docile and sweet in the cabin or house these are big-running setters suitable for the Southwest and Montana though they shorten up in the denser cover of northern Michigan. When cynics say that our dogs are ‘too far out’ we’ve learned to give a pat answer: ‘That must be where the birds are.’”

“One August morning in the Upper Peninsula Rose had twenty-nine woodcock points in less than two hours. I was slow to admit that I enjoyed this training run as much as hunting.”

This is a long passage with long sentences but, yikes, can he write.
“I’ve begun to believe that some of us are not as evolved as we may think. Up in the country, in my prolonged childhood, I liked best to walk, fish, and hunt where there were few, if any, people. After a ten-year hiatus for college and trying to be Rimbaud, Dostoyevsky, and James Joyce, not to speak of William Faulkner, in New York, Boston, and San Francisco, I found myself back in northern Michigan walking, fishing, and hunting. There are a lot more people now, but there are still plenty of places where they aren’t. Tennis, golf, and drugs didn’t work for me, so for the past thirty years my abiding passions are still centered on upland game birds, fish, and idling around fields, mountains, and the woods on foot, studying habitat but mostly wandering and looking things over.”

“The death of hunting will come not from the largely imagined forces of anti-hunting but from the death of habitat, the continuing disregard for the land in the manner of a psychopath burning down a house and then wondering why he can’t still live there. The illusion of separateness is maddening. We are nature, too, surely as a chimp or trout.”

“Strangely, as you grow older, if you can’t hunt with any of two or three friends, you’d rather hunt alone. Newcomers make the grievous error of talking to your dogs—which are confused by such breaches in taste—or they whine about the weather.”

“I’m very poor at dates and numbers and what happened at what time in our life. But if my wife mentions the name of a dog we’ve owned and loved, I can re-create the dog’s life with us, and consequently my own.”