Shoot the Pager

Doc Hall's Journal: The Rumblings of a Sportsman, by James W. Hall III '55 (Wilderness Adventures Press).

Jim Hall is an endangered species of Dartmouth alumnus, and the same may apply to undergraduates as well. The purposeful pace of business and the professional life, as well as that of the campus, allows less and less time for the sort of outdoor ad venture that makes up the colorful chapters of this book. Mere "ramblings" they are not. They are the absorbing reflections of a sensitive participant in a demanding hobby on its techniques, its opportunities for companionship, its proximity to nature, its occasional misadventures and embarrassing moments, but, most of all, its joys. Tutored in the Michigan woods and streams by a loving father, like the most ravenous of rainbows or steelheads, young Hall eagerly took the lure that the Dartmouth outdoors dangled before him. As an undergraduate he soon made the acquaintance of the late Corey Ford, with whom he shared cabins, flycasts, near-human hunting dogs, and fireside fellowship every chance he could get. The friendship continued through med school as well as Harvard and Stanford; Hall is the character "Doc Hall" in Ford's famous Hardscrabble short stories.

From Alaska to Manitoba to Mexico to New Zealand come the author's tautly written memories of small streams and big fish, marsh-bound mallards, and elusive wild turkeys—all with a woodsman's proper respect for the environment and the dimensions of each day's game bag. His "toughest but happiest decision" is in one of the book's snapshots: a beckoning meadow, in the far background a snow-clad mountain range and close-up, the retiring Dr. Hall taking dead aim at his pager.

Corey Ford protéegé Jim Hall has written a bait-and-bullet tome of his own.