"Ian Niall wrote this masterpiece of country lore to retain the thrill of crossing the hills in the moonlight and of creeping up the woodside at dusk.He said, 'This book is about poaching in the old traditional style, the craft of men who knew and loved the countryside and invoked the unorthodox skills rather than the crude use of modern science to catch their game, which they took sparingly, as they needed it.'From the Poacher's Handbook you will learn how to retrieve a ferret from a deep burrow and how to train a dog, as well as the cunning ways of gamekeepers and the meaning in the changing flight of a loan pigeon. You are advised to walk softly and to listen long, when to run and when to stand still, the thing to do in the black hat of night and the way to read a flushed magpie and the laugh of the jay.Poet, countryman and scholar, Bernard O'Donaghue, wrote a foreword to this celebrated country classic which will delight a new generation of country lovers and collectors alike.The Poacher's Handbook was first published in 1950. Hailed as 'the outstanding of nature books', it was an immediate bestseller and achieved no less than 14 editions before being republished in 1960 as The New Poacher's Handbook but without Barbara Greg's wood engravings. Since then there have been two separate paperback editions and total sales of over 100,000.This edition is a re-issue of the original format and includes Barbara Greg's highly-acclaimed wood engravings."

An Edgar Award winner, Tom Franklin’s Poachers collects ten stunning, bleak tales set in the woodlands, swamps and chemical plants along the Alabama River. Staking his claim as a fresh, original Southern voice, Tom Frankin’s lyric, deceptively simple prose conjures a world where the default setting is violence, a world of hunting and fishing, gambling and losing, drinking and poaching—a world most of us have never seen. In the chilling title novella, three wild boys confront a mythic game warden as mysterious and deadly as the river they haunt. And, as a weathered, hand-painted sign reads: “Jesus is not coming.” This terrain isn’t pretty, isn’t for the weak of heart, but in these deperate, lost people, Franklin somehow finds the moments of grace that make them what they so abundantly are: human. “While he may occasionally wax sentimental about life in the impoverished South, Franklin’s style is often as laconic and simply spoken as his characters’ dialogue, sometimes close to Hemingway, but more often akin to Denis Johnson or Raymond Carver in its resonant ordinariness.” —Publishers Weekly

A wild collection of illegal hunting and fishing stories—all of them true! Life as a game warden is more dangerous and exciting than you might think. Tom Chapin served as a Minnesota Game Warden for 29 years, and his career was both exhilarating and harrowing. He had run-ins with everyone from illegal night hunters to major fish poachers. In Poachers Caught!, Tom shares the details of 35 of his most amazing, incredible cases. Each short story allows you to experience a riveting encounter as if you were a witness and participant. Fans of the great outdoors of all ages—especially hunters and anglers—will appreciate and enjoy this look into the life of a vital yet often underappreciated enforcer of the law.

The poacher of these "Confessions" is no imaginary being. In the following pages the author has set down nothing but what has come within his own personal experience; and, although the little book is full of strange inconsistencies, he cannot, knowing the man, call them by a harder name. Nature made old "Phil" a Poacher, but she made him a Sportsman and a Naturalist at the same time. Although eighty years of age there is still some of the old erectness in his carriage; some of the old fire in his eyes. As a young man he was handsome, though now his features are battered out of all original conception. His silvery hair still covers a lion-like head, and his tanned cheeks are hard and firm. If his life has been a lawless one he has paid heavily for his wrong doings. Great as a poacher, he must have been great whatever he had been.