If The Bad Folks came tomorrow and demanded I give up my sporting books, there are several I’d go to great lengths to hide some way, some how. Without question, the first one of them would be Gun Dogs and Bird Guns: A Charley Waterman Reader. Waterman’s was perhaps the most original, authentic voice on the subject of…well…uh…fly fishing, big game hunting, competitive pistol shooting, and hunting over pointing dogs over the last quarter of the 20th century. This collection is just what it says it is, and so much more.
Kansan by birth, combat photographer by WWII, he married Debie (“deebee”) when he got out of the service and spent the next 60 years basically living happily ever after, camping, hunting, fishing, adventuring with Debie at his side.
While figuring out how to make a living writing about fishing and hunting, he worked as a newspaper photographer, sold books door to door, and did time teaching in a college, finally making Florida the base camp for the Watermans’ travels up and down the Western Hemisphere in search of sport.
Charley was the master of the wry understatement, never took himself too seriously, and loved writing. In Chapter One of Gun Dogs and Bird Guns, he typed, “With some embarrassment I confess that I would just as soon write as fish or hunt and I am perpetually amazed that anyone pays me for the stuff.”
Part of that “stuff” was Charley and Debie’s hegira from Mexico to Alaska, hunting behind a Brittany named Kelly. The goal was for Kelly to point all 18 major species of North American game birds. “Kelly, He Got Them All” is the quirky Cliff’s Notes version of that quest.
However, it’s the last chapter of Gun Dogs and Bird Guns, Waterman’s elegy to that “fuzzy little dog” (as one pointer chauvinist once described Kelly) that offers the best insight into Charley Waterman the man. You and I might agree that the maudlin “dead dog” story is the hoariest cliché in outdoor writing. But Charley never wrote a clichéd or maudlin piece in his professional life. You will have a hard time finding a better tribute to a gun dog than “Going Up Under The Mountain,” a spare, powerful piece of writing that I think first appeared in Gray’s Sporting Journal.
At age 85, Charley was pursuing another of his outdoor interests, cycling, when a hit-and-run driver almost ended his life. The brain trauma incurred in the accident meant Waterman would have to learn to talk, walk, and yes, type again. Within months, he was back writing his monthly column for Florida Sportsman.
Charley would live and write and enjoy the outdoors for six years after the accident. An obituary published in January, 2005, in the Orlando Sentinel quoted Debie Waterman: “He wrote all his life. In fact, he never retired.”
Enjoy Gun Dogs and Bird Guns for the first time, or the umpteenth time you’ve cherry picked these 25 essays. In his introduction to the book, Ed Gray writes, “I sometimes think that it would be possible to live a full and rich life in the outdoors without every lacing up a boot, uncasing a shotgun, heeling a bird dog or trying to shoot a bobwhite quail…All you’ve have to do is read Charley Waterman.”