I am, I fear, the kind of guy that David Adams Richards would hate: an urban-dwelling university professor, a self-proclaimed “progressive” (“such a damnable word,” laments Richards, in the opening salvo of his new work of nonfiction), whose greener-than-thou conscience starts at the Greenpeace pledge and stops at the recycling bin, whose outdoor know-how rests on the clay foundation of field guides, nature documentaries, and the occasional wilderness jaunt in the Gore-Texed guise of an “eco-tourist”—a word that likely infuriates Richards even more. My only consolation? At least I’m not the Chardonnay-sipping “neophyte poet” whose pontifications, at a party in Edmonton, about “how deplorable it was for men to work in the oil patch, to hunt with weapons, to kill the ecology we all must share” ignite, on page two, the fire that burns throughout Richards’ Facing the Hunter: Reflections on a Misunderstood Way of Life. The result is a sometimes angry, often nostalgic, and mostly engrossing defense of the working-class men (for they are almost all men) with whom the author once hunted and the wisdom they shared walking the forests of the Canadian Maritimes.
