In his Introduction to An Outside Chance, Thomas McGuane’s classic collection of sporting essays, Geoffrey Wolf grumbles, “Sometimes it pisses me off what he knows.”
I thought of this when, a little more than halfway through On the Wing, E. Donnall Thomas Jr.’s wide-ranging new collection of essays, the author describes shooting a handsome drake bufflehead—a bird he normally lets fly—because he “hadn’t taken a duck to the taxidermist all year.” This brought me up short. Don Thomas, the ultimate outdoors DIYer, doesn’t do his own taxidermy?
This is a guy who scouts for ptarmigan from the controls of a bush plane, for crying out loud.
Subtitled “A Lifetime Afield with Shotgun and Dogs,” On the Wing is, at heart, a memoir of Thomas’s experiences as a wingshooter. Other than occasional flashbacks to his youth hunting ruffed grouse and woodcock in upstate New York and a smattering of trips to “exotic” locales, the settings are the places Thomas, for most of his life a practicing MD, has made his home: the Pacific Northwest, Alaska and, currently, Montana. The book is peppered with insightful observations; one of the best comes from “One Hundred Straight,” a chapter devoted to Thomas’s Lab, Rosy, and the season she retrieved 100 birds in a row.
“With some exceptions due to weather and terrain,” writes Thomas, “a great retrieve usually implies some degree of error on the hunter’s part.” Pretty obvious when you think about it, but it’s this ability to reveal truths hiding in plain sight that separates the writers you remember from the ones you don’t.
And while there’s a certain professorial quality to Thomas’s prose, he’s not above poking fun at himself. In a chapter on sharptails, he sizes up a big piece of Montana cover and tells his wife and favorite hunting companion, Lori, how he thinks they should approach it.
“You always come up with a plan,” she tells him as she loads her 20-gauge. “I just wish more of them worked.”
A 329-page softcover illustrated with color photographs, On the Wing sells for $26 plus shipping. To order, visit donthomasbooks.com.
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