There is a wonderful little book of essays, put together from the published and unpublished work of Maurice Thompson, by a fellow named Cliff Huntington. I was lucky enough to get a copy and have finished reading it just now.

It is chuck full of wonderful stories of good wondering, good hunting, and good times. There was, however, one gawd-awful paragraph in the book. I feel compelled to share it:

“It was late in the afternoon when I again reached the shell beach. Gulls were swarming all along the shore, their white wings brilliant in the sunlight. I soon discovered their eggs, hundreds of them, and bethought me of trying an old trick of the hungry sportsman. No sooner did I reach camp than I sent my man and one of the Dagos to break every egg they could find. They did their work of destruction with dispatch and thoroughness, so that next morning all the eggs they gathered were fresh laid, we knew, and certainly when duly scrambled they had a delicious gamy flavor.”

Thompson considered himself an ornithologist and a nature lover. Whew! with lovers like that, who needs haters?

And now some redemption with the opening paragraph of another essay:

“The first opossum hunter on the Kankakee of whom we have a written account was La Salle, but his bag of game, if we may dare call a brace of ‘possums by a name so honorable, was killed in a wood beside the St. Joseph River just before the Kankakee Portage was reached. It was December; the year 1679, with a snowstorm slanting down from the Canadian wilderness, and La Salle had been lost for a day from his band”

The story only got better from there.

I think I will read this book again, right now. What better way to spend a dog day of summer?