by Bill Heavey
The phone rings, and I jog down to catch it. It’s a neighbor inviting us over for cocktails. “I can’t get over how much you sound like your father,” she says. “I feel like I’m talking to him.”
“I know,” I say. “Maybe you are.”
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to many people who helped move this book from the theoretical plane to the actual one. I would like first to thank my parents. Without them, there’s no telling where I might be right now.
I’d like to thank everyone at Field & Stream: Sid Evans, the magazine’s editor, urged me to do this book. A wise reader and editor with great instincts for the story, he often believes in me when others do not, including me. Jean McKenna, who edits the monthly column I currently write, keeps me on schedule, and listens to me whine when I can’t think up anything to say. David E. Petzal, beneath whose gruff exterior lies an even more blunt and bearish second layer. Whether there’s anything beyond that is known but to God. Mike Toth and Anthony Licata, both of whom continue to give me work in spite of the jokes I subject them to over the telephone. Slaton White, who first let me into the pages of the magazine.
Finally, I’d like to thank my former wife, Jane Ashley. Maybe we aren’t meant to be married to one another, but nobody can say we didn’t try, and I still love you.
*A note on the title: I made it up. It’s just one of several titles I came up with one night. Among others that were rejected: 1) Don’t Shoot Until That Deer Finishes Mowing My Lawn; 2) Giant Bucks I Have Missed; and 3) Fifty Ways to Leave Your Tree Stand. In the end, we went with the one in big letters on the opposite page. —B.H.
*Note that this piece was written before 9/11, when you could carry anything short of a rocket launcher aboard a plane.