44 Years of a Hunter's Life/Meshach Browning

[Emily]

Forty-Four Years of the Life of a Hunter
Being Reminiscences of Meshach Browning
A Maryland Hunter Roughly Written Down by Himself
by Meshach Browning
revised and illustrated by E. Stabler
with Forewords by Robert Wegner and R. Getty Browning
a prologue by Archibald Rutledge and
an Introduction by E. Lee Le Compte

republished in 2006 as part of the Classics of American Sport series by Stackpole Books (Mechanicsburg, PA); trade paperback, 400 pp.
http://www.stackpolebooks.com/cgi-bin/s ... storefront

Originally published by Lippincott, Philadelphia in 1859


This book is an informal account of the hunting life of a pioneer and master hunter in the Alleghenies some fifty miles from Cumberland, Maryland. It relates thrilling stories of day-to-day life on the frontier. Browning thought nothing of hardships most of us soft modern folk would find unendurable—for instance, getting caught in the woods by a snowstorm for days, with no food or blanket and little warm clothing. His matter-of-fact accounts of hand-to-hand combat with bears and panthers, taking huge numbers of game animals as a matter of course, spending a week in the woods with little in the way of supplies, his courtship and romantic marriage to his first wife and their self-reliance and ingenuity while bringing up a family of eleven children in the wilderness, are almost as remote to the modern reader as fairy tales, yet they reveal the foundations of the American spirit at every turn.
The fairy tale quality is enhanced by the illustrations—nineteenth century engravings bringing to life the memorable highlights of the hunting tales. Browning wrestling a wounded deer held by the antlers in waist deep water. Browning hunting by candlelit lantern. Browning and his hound confronting a sow bear and her cubs. .
The hunts themselves involve both a degree of danger foreign to the modern hunter and a joy in the hunt and its tools that is very familiar to us. Browning hunts for a living. He hunts for fun. He hunts with friends, relatives and neighbors. He hunts alone with his bravehearted hounds, a crss between greyhounds and English bulldogs. Despite the shortcomings of his firearm, he brings home deer by the dozens and several bears at a time, often completing the kill with a knife after merely wounding his prey with his rifle. He hunts wolves and panthers for the bounty. He brings home turkeys and trout by the stringful as casually as we go to the supermarket.
All this is told in a neighborly voice that is proud but not boastful. On just about every page, he concludes a hunt with “and down he fell.” he does Browning is true to his contemporaries’ hunter ethics. He wants his quarry to have a sporting chance, and by the end of his hunting career, he hesitates before pulling the trigger more than most in his day would have. His charming voice reveals an appreciation of the beauty of his natural setting and his pleasure in the abundance of game in the wilderness he inhabits.
Oddly to us, though, he considers the panther a cowardly beast because it retreats to a tree rather than sticking around to fight. He admires bears as a worthy adversary, but the big cat is merely “dastardly,” “a sneak,” a threat to livestock, and little more than vermin to him.
The only drawback to the current edition is that it appears to be prepared from a typescript. I found the print rather small for my elderly eyes and there were odd skips where some parts of some of the letters are missing, making the words difficult to make out. There is an interesting bibliography accompanying the latest foreword, by Robert Wegner.
Highly recommended.

esp