Chicago Bow Hunters NEWS & EVENTS

THINGS PERMANENT AND PRICELESS

We cannot live in close touch with beautiful scenes and stimulating environments without being enriched by them. It is unlikely that we will forget the way the wilderness appeared on a certain autumn morning when every brilliantly hued leaf was encased in glittering snow-crystals and kindled into prismatic fires by the beams of the rising sun> do we cease to remember the advent of the Hunter’s Moon - a blood-red and fabulous lantern - as it peered at us across the lonely mazes of a black spruce swamp?

Do we fail to recollect the spellbound mystery of a secluded lake, girdled by virgin timber, and sleeping like a liquid tourmaline in the shadowland of twilight? These are things permanent and priceless - poems of loveliness and beauty impressed upon the mind by nature in her wild state. These are things that time cannot take from us as long as memory lasts. The deerskin on our study floor, the buck’s head over the fireplace, what are these after all but the keys which have unlocked enchanted doors, and granted us not only health and vigor, but a fresh and fairer vision of existence?

-Paul Brandreth
Trails of Enchantment, 1930

For hunters who love the north woods, the past glory of the wilderness is recorded here. Paulina Brandreth, who wrote under the pseudonym Paul Brandreth, was a woman who hunted and photographed deer in the Adirondacks with noted deer hunters Roy Chapman Andrews, General "Black Jack" Pershing, and Reuben Cary. She began writing for the acclaimed sportsmen's journal Forest and Stream in 1894 at the age of nine. Her material in the magazine was credited to Camp Good Enough, Brandreth Lake, a major deer camp on land purchased by her grandfather specifically for hunting and fishing. One of only a few women writing about hunting at that time, Brandreth chose to continue to write under a pseudonym, publishing Trails of Enchantment in 1930. She was passionate about still-hunting whitetail bucks, evident in a hunt with her guide and friend Reuben Cary: "Side by side, we knelt in the snow, waiting for the buck to appear from behind the intervening trunk of a big birch. The suspense was harrowing. And then at last he loomed suddenly before us...."