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Heart Shots Women Write about Hunting

Here’s a great Christmas present idea for all the women who hunt, want to hunt, will soon hunt, or you wish would hunt with you.: a book of all women writers writing passionately about what they do: hunt.

It’s the best collection of women’s hunting stories ever.   From Annie Oakley to Osa Johnson, Frances Hamerstrom, and even me, the collection covers more than a century of writing that rarely gets any attention from the powers that be.   Have you ever heard of Vivienne de Watteville?  She was her Dad’s right hand ‘man’ on an elephant collecting safari in Africa.  He did the hunting and shooting, she did the taxidermy.   Then one day, he was mauled by a lion and died.   Guess who finished collecting the animals?  All elephants, with her Dad’s .416 Rigby.  And did the taxidermy, and the meat hunting for the porters while other women were being told they were too ‘fragile’ to be outdoors.  (John’s grandmother heard that one, just before she left her home in Minnesota and homesteaded, by herself, in Montana just about the same time Vivienne was writing  Out in the Blue, published in 1927; it’s excerpted here along with a bunch of other great writing, by women, that you’ll never find elsewhere.

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Description

The publisher is not planning to re-print the hard cover, but they did print a soft cover. But now both are in short supply. I occasionally find new/very good condition copies, so if you want one please email me at riflesandrecipes@gmail.com or call 406-521-0273.

This is a great book for women hunters–and girls you’d like to inspire to become hunters.  People buy Heart Shots for their daughters, girlfriends, granddaughters and themselves, and don’t ever want to resell it. That’s why copies are scarce.

Edited by Mary Zeiss Stange  (Autographed by both Mary and me.)
2003, hardcover, 360 pages

Covering several continents, plus a century of writing.

Don’t miss this great collection

Table Of Contents

Part One: Initiation

Terry Tempest Williams:   “Deerskin” (1984)
Dorothy Doolittle:   A Girl’s Version of a Turkey Hunt  (1905)
Helen Fischer:  Introduction from Peril is my Companion  (1957)
Geneen Haugen:  “Stalking Fear”  (2000)
Florence Krall Shepard: “The Shape of Things from Ecotone” (1984)
Gretchen Yost: “Autumn in Love”  (2000)

 

Part Two: First Kill

Diana Rupp:  “Realization” (1997)
Grace Seton-Thompson: “The Imps and My Elk,” from A Woman Tenderfoot  (1900)
Susan Ewing:  “To Each Her Own”  (1983)
Jennifer Bové:  “A Place Among Elk”  (2002)

Part Three:  Adventure

Marjorie [Kinnan Rawlings]:  “A Breach of Convention,” from Outdoor Life (1900)
Agnes Herbert:  “We Set Out or Alaska,” from Two Dianas in Alaska  (1909)
Courtney Borden: “Wrangel Island and Polar Bears,” from The Cruise of the Northern Light (1928)
Isabel Savory:  “Tiger Shooting”, from A Sportswoman in India  (1900)
Frances Hamerstrom:  “And Now with the Pygmies and Indians,” from My Double Life  (1994)
Elinore Pruitt Stewart:  “The Hunt” and “The Seventh Man,” from Letters on an Elk Hunt  (1915)

Part Four: Trophies

Sheila Link:  “Daylight Stalker”  (2002)
Mary Jobe Akeley:  “Playing with Friendly Lions,” from Carl Akeley’s Africa  (1929)
Vivienne de Watteville:  “Semliki Valley and White Nile,” from Out in the Blue  (1937)
Eileen Clarke:  “Herr Guide”  (2000)

Part Five:  Predators and Prey

Agnes Herbert:  “On Killing a She-Bear” from Two Dianas in Alaska  (1909)
Durga Bernhard:  “The Gift of Artemis: A Hunting Mother’s Perspective”  (2002)
Gretchen Cron:  “King, Sultan, or President?” from The Roaring Veldt  (1930)
Mary Hastings Bradley:  “Lion Hunting at Night” from On the Gorilla Trail  (1922)
Beryl Markham:  “I May Have to Shoot Him” from West With the Night  (1942)

Part Six:  Food

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings:  “Our Daily Bread” from Cross Creek  (1942)
Osa Johnson:  “Christmas at Lake Paradise” from Four Years in Paradise  (1944)
Gretchen Legler:  “Gooseberry Marsh, Part Two” from All the Powerful Invisible Things  (1995)
Eileen Clarke:  “In the Eye of the Beholder”  (1998)

Part Seven:  Family Ties

Barney Nelson:  “My First Daughter was an Antelope” from The Wild and the Domestic  (2000)
Nellie A. O’Brien:  “The Muskat Trapper”  (1997)
Kim Barnes:   “from In the Wilderness“ (1996)
Judy Clayton Cornell:  “Earl”  (2002)
Jull Carroll: “My Mother’s Shotgun” (2002)

Part Eight:  Guides, Companions, Significant Others

Annie Oakley:  “A Brief Sketch of her Career and Notes on Shooting”  (1913)
Nellie Bennett:  “A Colorado Outing” from Outdoor Life”  (1904)
Alberta Claire:  “The Story of Two Girls: from Outdoor life”  (1916)
Erica Fresquez:  “Four Points Richer”  (2002)
Marilyn stone:  “On Men and Hunting Alone”  (2002)

Part Nine:  Death

Deb Carpenter: “They’re Easy to Kill”  (1997)
Linda Hasselstrom:  “Reckoning the Cost of a Dead Steer” from Feels Like Far ” (1999)
Jean Keezer-Clayton:  “The Last Coyote Hunt”  (1996)
Astric Bergman Sucksdorff:  “Beloved Enemy” and “The Big Drive” from Tiger in Sight” (1970)
Mary Zeiss Stange:  “In the Snow Queen’s Palace”  (1996)
Rickey Gard Diamond:  From Second Sight  (1997)

Part Ten:  Body, Soul, and the Hunt’s Afterlife

Sandra dal Poggetto:  “Duccio in the Eye of the Hunt”  (1996)
Page Lambert:  “Deerstalking: Contemplating an Old Tradition”  (1991)
Geneen Haugen:  “The Ilusory Distance Between Pacifist and Warrior”  (2000)
Paul (Paulina) Brandreth:  “The Spirit of the Primitive: from Trails of Enchantment”  (1930)

1 review for Heart Shots Women Write about Hunting

  1. Valued Reader –

    Far from a collection of gory tales about animal killing, this elegantly edited anthology is a tribute to the women who have forayed into the male-dominated world of hunting. With excerpts from novels, short stories and articles by thoughtful hunters and writers, including Beryl Markham, Annie Oakley and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, this volume celebrates nature, wildlife and visceral sensations. It also considers the subtle differences between men and women vis-à-vis their hunting styles, while acknowledging that “the essential appeal of the hunt, the drive to get back to nature and to basics… is not only ageless, it is surely also genderless.” As intriguing as this book might be for hunters, it may be even more so for women who have never experienced the sensation of traveling through a forest with a gun, since reading about hunting lions at night, for example, offers a glimpse into a state of mind that’s far from the ordinary.

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