ONE LAST CAST

Reflections of an Outdoor Life

Bruce Masterman, Rocky Mountain Books Softcover $20 (240pp), 978-1-77160-214-3

In One Last Cast, award-winning Canadian journalist and nonfiction writer Bruce Masterman brings together thirty-six stories, intimate reflections on nature and its critters, written over his career of forty-plus years. A passionate outdoorsman for whom fishing, hunting, camping, hiking, snowshoeing, and quietly observing the cycle of the seasons is a way of life, Masterman is also a convivial storyteller who brings the wonders of nature both to those already primed for adventure and to those who prefer to view it from the comfort of an armchair.

Masterman first brings the eye of a naturalist, the heart of a poet, and a journalist’s curiosity to his descriptions of the rhythm of the seasons in a marsh: spring, when everything bursts into life as its colorful cast arrives to stake out space for nesting sites; summer, with its work of preparing the young for survival and the coming migration; autumn’s glowing colors and hunting shrouded in fog and mist; and winter, when waves have been stilled and dusted in white and his dog dashes about on the frozen water where she once swam. Together, his stories weave a rich and warmly colored tapestry of memories of landscape, place, people, and creatures both domestic and wild.

Masterman’s stories are personal but reach into the universal in their treatment of life’s joys, sorrows, wins, and losses, from the reminder to really live and confront challenges that was brought to him by death of two friends, to the especially tender story of how times spent fly fishing with his daughter grew into warm memories that bless them both now that she is grown.

Like naturalist John Muir before him, Masterman has found that a good life demands beauty as well as bread, and he has found in nature the source of both.