Dreaming the Lion

Tom McIntyre is a writer with a distinctive voice and an exceptional talent. His style has pith and elegance -and humor and intelligence. For a couple of decades now (maybe a little more) he has written some of the best prose we have on hunting. "Dreaming The Lion" is a treasury of his finest work, and will prove a delight for every literate hunter.This is by no means a somber book, but it is a thoughtful one. Reflecting on the prospect of hunting in his native California, McIntyre writes, "The best thing would be to hunt the country you were born into, to make it even more your home. But what if your native country is not only a place, but a time, and what if that time is past?" Not exactly the kind of bang-and- brag drivel so common to lesser hunting writers, and to an unfortunately increasing number of "sporting" publications. "Dreaming The Lion" is a collection of choice pieces, (mostly about hunting, especially but not exclusively about big game,) connected by one-page, inter-chapter selections from an ongoing African diary. In this safari narrative McIntrye appears more as protagonist than hero; he screws up sometimes, misses badly on occasion, has his ups and downs just like we, the readers, probably would. The book's final section, the title essay in three parts, recounts another African adventure and by any fair standard must be judged one of the finest pieces of hunting writing in our time. Comparisons to Hemingway and Ruark and Capstick or anyone else are as unnecessary as they are trite. McIntyre is his own writer, speaking with his own voice in his own (for a hunting writer, not entirely fortunate) time. Enjoy him.

When a writer conveys an experience he conveys something of himself. Thirty years after reading him, when I think of Robert Ruark in Africa, I remember his honesty in writing about fear and booze and his struggle to live up to his own image of what he wanted to be, as much as his insightful observations of a safari. When I think of Hemingway, the exquisite craftsmanship of "The Green Hills of Africa" is overshadowed by his chest-thumping competitiveness and dishonest self-aggrandisement. In "Dreaming the Lion," Tom McIntyre brings all the unabashed, unapologetic masculinity you would expect in a book about hunting, but he tempers it with the thoughtful intelligence of someone who thinks about his actions and their consequences, who thinks about the world around him and his place in it. And more: he brings a refreshing mastery of the English language and a wit as quick and sharp as a skinning knife. This is a book about ideas as much as actions, written by a man who doesn't suffer fools gladly, and who sees the world he loves slowly and irrevocably vanishing. Read it and dream of Africa.

In a just world, Thomas McIntyre's Dreaming the Lion would be considered a classic. While it is definitely a "hunting book" it is also literature in every sense, and superior to such curiosities as Hemingway's True at First Light.McIntyre has hunted everywhere from the Rockies to the Arctic to Africa, not to mention his native California, whose degradation he describes movingly in the essay "Blade Hunter": "...no matter how Californian the armature of my soul may be, in the end it is insufficiently rigid to keep me here until it's all barricaded away and I am reduced to stalking Norway rats in the storm drains with the broken-off shaft of a nine-iron tipped witha fluted point knapped from a glass insulator, til all that's fit to live here is cockroaches and Keith Richards."McIntyre's essays range from the dark to the humorous to the moving, though always free of the easy sentimentality common to lesser "hook and bullet" writers. He has not only been just about everywhere; he has read just about everything, from novels to history to biology, and thought long and hard about it all. He would never scorn the meat or trophies produced by his hunts, but his real quest is for meaning, experience , and the wild within and without.If you are a hunter who has not read him, you will find things here that you will find nowhere else. If you are a nonhunter or even an anti-hunter who wants to understand the soul of the hunter, start here. As McIntyre says, "Welcome to the wild."

Having read all of Thomas McIntyre's books, I want to share some of the critical comments about them that I have found. About Dreaming the Lion: "...one of the best books about hunting and the nature of hunting that I have read in recent years...Dreaming the Lion has poetry and passion, real thought, even quite a bit of science and anthropology," Steven J. Bodio, Shooting Sportsman; "Well, at last. A hunter writer for our own time whom we don't need to apologize for: Zane Gray without the hyperbole; T.R. without the excesses; Papa minus the awful competitiveness. There is a certain temptation to term him our finest living hunting writer..." John Hewitt, Gray's Sporting Journal; "Put quite simply, this is one of the best-written books of the genre that I have ever had the pleasure to read. McIntyre is at once storyteller, poet, and magician in a well-crafted book that confirms him as one of the icons of field literature...McIntyre is a thinking man's outdoorsman, a true philosopher afield who can be read for pure entertainment or, like Nabokov, read for the exhilaration of seeing what a guy with a real grip on the writer's craft can do with philosophy and fun," Clive Siegle, Game Trails. And here are some additional comments about McIntyre's first book, Days Afield, to be published in a newly and completely revised edition by The Lyons Press in 2003: "McIntyre is a major talent who leaves the `saw `em, shot `em' outdoor writers back at the camp," American Library Association Booklist; "...Thomas McIntyre is the naturalist hunter's new poet laureate," Stephen J. Bodio, Gray's Sporting Journal; "An interesting mix of good writing, good adventure, good sport and a wide range of outdoorsmanship-I thoroughly enjoyed it," Ed Zern, Department Editor, Field & Stream; "Sensitively written essays on hunting and fishing that mix brawny experience with enviable literary talent," Kenneth Turan, California Magazine; "Tom McIntyre [has wondered] if outdoor writing can ever reach the levels of art. He answers the question with two dozen stories that add up to a wild, elegant, evocative, sad yet resounding `Yes!'. Perhaps the finest is the Cape buffalo piece; Hemingway without the hubris," Robert F. Jones, author of Bloodsport; "Thomas McIntyre's Days Afield is unquestionably the best book I have read in thirty years," Peter Hathaway Capstick, author of Death in the Long Grass; "Sheer, unapologetic masculinity is perfectly balanced by magnificently crafted writing," David Graber, Los Angeles Times.