"A style that brings to mind Mark Twain, Art Buchwald, and Garrison Keiller."
--PEOPLE
"Everybody should read Patrick F. McManus
--IAN FRIZIER
Table of Contents
Muldoon in Love
Cry Wolf
Pigs
The MFFFF
Summer Reading
Angler's Dictionary
The Mountain
Not Long for This Whirl
Claw of the Sea-Puss
A Really Nice Blizzard
Rubber Legs and White Tail-Hairs
Nude, with Other Wildlife
The Belcher
Shooter
The Last Flight of Homer Pidgin
A Boy and His (Ugh!) Dog
To Filet or Not to Filet
What's in a Name, Moonbeam?
Loud Screeching and Other Tips on Getting Lost
The Big Fix
The Fine Art of Delay
Gun-Trading
Throwing Stuff
Letter to Santa
The Cabin at Spooky Lake
Outdoor Burnout
Advanced Duck-Hunting Techniques
Caught up in the media craze of placing one-hundred-dollar bills end-to-end to see if they reach to the moon and back, as a way of making the national debt more understandable and poignant to the tax-payer, I recently laid all my fly-tying books end-to-end to see how far they reached. They reached from my writing desk to the cat box in the utility room. How far is that? Not nearly far enough, believe me. "Look," I said to my wife, Bun. "I laid all my fly-tying books end-to-end to see how far they would reach. What do you think? " So who cares what she thinks? The point I wished to illuminate with this comparison is simply that an unfathomable copiosity of fly-tying books exists, and I possess most of the copiosity. I have been studying fly-tying books for forty years and have yet to succeed in tying a single fly that resembles anything more than a hair ball. The fault lies with the books and not with me, despite my childhood nickname of "Thumbs." Here is the problem. Fly-tying books all contain a powerful spring in the binding. Whenever I reach Step 15 in the tying of a fly, with both hands fully engaged in maintaining a cat's cradle of thread in the vicinity of a wad of feathers and fur clinging precariously to a hook, the powerful spring is activated and snaps shut like a bear trap. I lean over and open the book with my ear. Using my tongue, I flip pages back to the instructions for the fly. Holding the book open with my chin, I read Step 15 with my nose while telescoping my eyes around to watch what my hands are doing. When the fly is finally finished, I remove it from the vise and place it in my fly box. You never can tell when the fish might go for a hair ball.
Caught up in the media craze of placing one-hundred-dollar bills end-to-end to see if they reach to the moon and back, as a way of making the national debt more understandable and poignant to the tax-payer, I recently laid all my fly-tying books end-to-end to see how far they reached. They reached from my writing desk to the cat box in the utility room. How far is that? Not nearly far enough, believe me.