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HOME RANGE: Notes on Literature, Nature, Working Dogs, History, Martial Arts, Other Obsessions and Sundry Annoyances by Henry Chappell

Covey Rise Article

I'm pleased that Covey Rise has published my Texas bobwhite hunting piece in its latest issue.
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A Shot of Testosterone

I liked the Turnpike Troubadours before anyone had heard of them. I still like them. This song makes this old man want to go out and get in a fight. At a gun show. I highly recommend it. (Not the fight. The song. And ... hell ... the gun show.)




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Words I Wish I'd Written

You stick with a Cormac McCarthy novel for passages like this one from All the Pretty Horses:


"In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he’d always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and the children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses’ hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and foot-slaves following half naked and sorely burdened and above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across the mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives. "

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Not an Exact Fit, but Fitting Nonetheless

Your outpost for half-baked ideas. Courtesy of Patrick Burns aka Terrierman.
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Come See Us in Dallas on November 10!


This promises to be a fun event - our first signing of Horses to Ride Cattle to Cut: The San Antonio Viejo Ranch of Texas in the Dallas area, November 10, 6 - 8 p.m., at the Bush Library.
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