A Thousand Deer: Four Generations of Hunting and the Hill Country

by Rick Bass

In November, countless families across Texas head out for the annual deer hunt, a ritual that spans generations, ethnicities, socioeconomics, and gender as perhaps no other cultural experience in the state. Rick Bass's family has returned to the same hardscrabble piece of land in the Hill Country—"the Deer Pasture"—for more than seventy-five years. In A Thousand Deer, Bass walks the Deer Pasture again in memory and stories, tallying up what hunting there has taught him about our need for wildness and wilderness, about cycles in nature and in the life of a family, and particularly about how important it is for children to live in the natural world. The arc of A Thousand Deer spans from Bass's boyhood in the suburbs of Houston, where he searched for anything rank or fecund in the little oxbow swamps and pockets of woods along Buffalo Bayou, to his commitment to providing his children in Montana the same opportunity—a life afield—that his parents gave him in Texas. Inevitably this brings him back to the Deer Pasture and the passing of seasons and generations he has experienced there. Bass lyrically describes his own passage from young manhood, when the urge to hunt was something primal, to mature adulthood and the waning of the urge to take an animal, his commitment to the hunt evolving into a commitment to family and to the last wild places.

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature

198 pages, Hardcover

First published September 15, 2012

About the author

Rick Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and grew up in Houston, the son of a geologist. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University and while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi, began writing short stories on his lunch breaks. In 1987, he moved with his wife, the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, to Montana’s remote Yaak Valley and became an active environmentalist, working to protect his adopted home from the destructive encroachment of roads and logging. He serves on the board of both the Yaak Valley Forest Council and Round River Conservation Studies and continues to live with his family on a ranch in Montana, actively engaged in saving the American wilderness.

Bass received the PEN/Nelson Algren Award in 1988 for his first short story, “The Watch,” and won the James Jones Fellowship Award for his novel Where the Sea Used To Be. His novel The Hermit’s Story was a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2000. The Lives of Rocks was a finalist for the Story Prize and was chosen as a Best Book of the Year in 2006 by the Rocky Mountain News. Bass’s stories have also been awarded the Pushcart Prize and the O. Henry Award and have been collected in The Best American Short Stories.

Reviews

[Jamie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We would do well to remember, I think, that all the world was once wilderness—the world that shaped and sculpted our brains as well as our bodies, and our systems of logic. It was and remains the baseline, the foundation of whatever we choose to call “nature”—the place where all the rest of nature first came from.”

[Rosemary · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, just as you would expect if you're a Rick Bass fan. This one is very personal and reflective. Very touching, even though I don't like hunting, and even though I dreaded reading about deer hunts, but mostly it is about a place and a family and how they are knitted together over several generations. I loved it!

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good stories well told. Lots of hunting, mostly in Texas, and familial time spent at one particular hunting camp. The last essay made me cry in a good way.

[Mark Hainds · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's worth noting that I obtained my copy of 1000 Deer from Casey Kittrell, Sponsoring Editor for the University of Texas Press. Thanks Casey!

Although I have read articles by Rick Bass, this is my first time reading a book written by the Texas-born author. I am sure there will be several more of his books in my future reading. He appears to be quite prolific.

I enjoyed Mr. Bass's writing style very much and it is obvious that our philosophies on hunting, life, and the environment match up quite well. I wish I were in his shoes, in that appears that much of his life consists of hunting and writing. My time for hunting and writing have been crushed by an increasingly hectic work life and debts that I could have avoided - if my family didn't mind living in a tiny, uninsulated house and driving junk cars.

I have read one other author with an equal skill for describing the hunt - Ernest Hemingway. While Hemingway achieved vastly greater recognition, his writing is increasingly taken to task by critics with a certain malicious glee.

Rick Bass, while lacking the public profile, has a beautiful writing style that the critics seem to adore.

So far, I am able to read and enjoy both of these authors and their dissimilar writing styles.

I recommend 1000 deer to those of my hunting companions with a penchant for reflection and the ability to slow time down, and study the moment intensely. Reading Mr. Bass will surely cause me to look and listen closer and harder, for hidden details and meaning in the stories I hear or tell, and the hunts in which I engage.

I enjoyed this whole book, but I particularly admired how Mr. Bass ended this series of stories.

[Marianne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Through his beautiful ability to describe natural occurrences, Rick Bass, grieving the loss of his mother and paying homage to her gift to him of the love of nature, sets about describing family tradition on their deer lease in the Hill Country of Central Texas. Emphasizing the roll of storytelling, tradition and rituals, he writes of their secure, predictable, and repeating nature that shape our lives like rocks upstream shape the current in a river. Waxing philosophical about hunting, he praises the elements of luck, an "invisible and inaudible contract of spirit" almost akin to prayer, and a "braided spirit...[that]sometimes a hunter finds him- or herself inside [or] outside of". At one point, he describes his daughter tracking an animal, traveling in slowly widening circles, and I realized that was how he was writing this book: repeating and almost circling back to the starting point through ever widening circles as the generations in his family at the deer lease progress through time. A very enjoyable book to live with, turning over the musings in your head in a leisurely fashion.

[Michal Strutin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Prolific writer Bass makes clear that no one in his extended family suffers from nature-deficit disorder. These 12 essays, previously published elsewhere, form a seamless celebration of family, tradition, and nature as seen through the scope of deer-hunting. Bass focuses his nonfiction on the wild and is at his best when telling stories: helping his cousin dig a truck out of a gumbo sidetrack in the driving rain or taking his teenage daughter on her first hunt, where he observed the snow-quiet world and "tracks that reminded me of the trident calligraphy of shorebirds on the beach."

Bass draws his portraits of family and the cedar-studded hill country of Texas with care and grace. His descriptions are matched by insights: at his family's annual hunt they spend time shaping stories, "even as we knew also it was more the tellers than the stories themselves who were being shaped." A Thousand Deer: for anyone who appreciates evocative prose and close observation of nature.

Review originally published in Library Journal, likely read only by librarians.

[Annette Lucksinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like Rick Bass. And I wanted to like this book since I grew up in Texas and as a non-hunter in a culture of hunting, I was curious to learn more about the tradition and the comraderie that seems to come with it. I have also been to the same areas that he describes in the book and thought that would draw me in, but it took me awhile to get into it. Because it's a series of reprinted articles (for the most part) about hunting, it lacked the cohesion of his other books. Midway through, I found it more philosophical and moving. I gave the book as a gift to my father, who has deer hunted since his teenage years, and he enjoyed it so much it inspired him to reunite his old hunting buddies.

[CW · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read several of Rick Bass's article in Texas Monthly, but I have never read a book of his. A Thousand Deer is a really good book about nature, hunting, and the bonds that he has shared with his family while hunting. I really liked his stories and he certainly has a way with words. Fantastic read about the relationship with man and nature.

[Glen · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read over half of the book looking for I to improve and become interesting. It never did. It is quite the shame as I had high hopes.

What I cannot take away from this is this is the authors family stories. For him, and probably others, it is wonderful. Unfortunately, it never connected with me.

[David Kessler · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is Rick Bass' stories about hunting deer in Texas and his family and all. We all have a stories of camping and traveling. Rick's stories would only be interesting to a hunter of deer.

[Keith Eldridge · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rick Bass writes about nature and life with great beauty and eloquence.