The Gamekeeper at Home: Sketches of Natural History and Rural Life

Before there was Henry David Thoreau, before John Muir consecrated wilderness, Richard Jefferies was walking the hedgerows of rural England with a poet's eye and a scientist's patience. This collection of essays, his first book, introduces us to a world that has largely vanished: the gamekeeper's cottage at the edge of the wood, the dogs in their kennels, the eternal vigilance against poachers, the patient caretaking of creatures both winged and furred. Jefferies writes with extraordinary closeness about the English countryside, capturing the subtle tensions of rural life the way a painter captures light. Here is a man whose life depends on understanding the fox, the hare, the pheasant and the poacher, yet whose observations transcend mere vocation to become something like reverence. The essays move between the gamekeeper's daily rhythms and the larger rhythms of the field and forest, the changing seasons measured not by calendars but by the comings and goings of birds, the breeding of foxes, the frost on the pond. This is nature writing in its infancy, yet it already possesses the qualities that would make Jefferies one of the most influential observers of the natural world in the English language. For anyone who loves the English countryside, who seeks to understand how we once lived alongside wild things, these sketches offer an intimate and unforgettable portrait.