Ron Ellis - Cogans Woods: A Celebration of Hunting, Family, and Kentucky

Copyright 2001, 2011 by Ron Ellis
Foreword copyright 2011 by Rick Bass
Preface copyright 2011 by Nick Lyons

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on fle.

ISBN: 978-1-61608-403-5

Printed in the United States of America

... if youre lucky, a place will shape and cut and bend you, will strengthen you and weaken you. You trade your life for the privilege of this experiencethe joy of a place, the joy of blood family; the joy of knowledge gotten by listening and observing.

Rick Bass, The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness

Later I began to understand that when you have lived with the land as long as they had, if youre lucky, there comes a point when the land is part of you and you are part of it. The union, if not perfect, is inexorable. Its in you, all its rich bounty, its pain and loss, like blood and tissue.

Harry Middleton, The Earth Is Enough

THE AUTHOR AND HIS FATHER, KENTUCKY, 1951

CONTENTS

For my father, George Elbert Ellis (19281998),
my mother, Mary Cecilia Brell Ellis,
and for Debbie, who always knew I could.

Its been over a dozen years since I first read Cogans Woods in manuscript form. I remember well the electric feeling of hope I got, reading the first paragraphfollowing it like a hunter whos been fortunate enough to cut fresh tracks, and who is hoping his or her luck will hold.

Please dont blow it, the hunter thinks in such situations, just keep your luck together, your quarry is right in front of you, almost within handjust dont spook it. Keep the sentences going, I found myself thinking, even before I was to the end of that first paragraph, this is great, dont blow it. And Ron Ellis got to the end of that first paragraph, and the writing stayed great all the way through, and I thought, again with the selfishness of hope known only to a reader, this is mine, okay, lets see if the second paragraph keeps the magic going; and it did.

Take a look at the classic iambic pentameter in the first part of the third sentence, straight out of the blocks: It was always in August at the edge of dawn... There is no record of Shakespeare having been a hunter of any kind, but theres just something about that form that whips a hunters head around, and youll cast ahead into that scent, that rhythm, for as far as daylight will take you, and then farther.

This is, as I mentioned in my first foreword, a book about the stories that serve as the stitching, the point of attachment, between people and place. It occurs to me in this, my third or fourth re-reading, that my earlier readings were different from this most recent one. In this latest reacquaintance, I was pleased to realize that two things I recalled most vividlythis stitch of storytelling, or remembering, as conduit between man-and-woods, and father-and-childand, of course, the second thing, an outrageous banquet of the senseswere indeed enduring; that I had not over-imagined them.

But what I picked up also this time was something that had somehow eluded me earlier, had slipped by as if through a sieve. Or, to return to the metaphor of the hunter, was as if I had been so concentrated on one set of tracks that I had walked right past another animal that had been standing just off to the side, watching me.

Rons father, George, is farther gone, nowobviouslybut something I didnt realize, in my first few reads of this leisurely book, is how, even with the pace so lovely and driftingwhat we might mistakenly call timelessthe current was indeed moving, slowly and powerfully. Its carried Ron some distance further on, andI find this most amazingit has carried me some distance, too. Its a clich to say that you can never step in, much less cross, the same river twice, but neither can you ever read a favorite book exactly the same way. There is a sweet and human tendency to believe that just because a sentence stops your heart, all time must stop, too. This is perhaps one of the greatest attractions of readingthat inner stillness within a swelling spiritbut there is a bittersweetness in re-reading a book and realizing that was a myththat even as your heart was stilled, and joyously so, the world was still moving.

Already, Im envious of those readers whose first reading of Cogans Woods yet awaits them. For those readers, the beauty of Elliss prose does appear to stop timeBelden County, Kentuckyin its tracks. And then for those same readers, decades in the future, who re-read itwell, youll see what I mean. Part of the books secret power is the quiet drift beneath the still waters at the surface.

And yet: we know intellectually if not emotionally that it is necessary that all time moves. This is the magic, the narrative of life that gives the nouns their beauty, and breathes animate life into the verbs of our living. If there was not a current moving steadily and slowly beneath this prose, carrying us all away from some of the things we love or loved most, there would not be as full a beauty.

Its a hell of a trade. It was for George, it is for Ron and me, it is for all who find themselves enthralled with this book. Cogans Woods honors this equationthe gap or thin seam between stillness and movement. In each reading, it never fails to illuminate the path of a marvelous journey, gorgeously observed and told.

RICK BASS

In the ten years since Cogans Woods was first published it has quietly won an enviable reputation for its warm and memorable rendering of a place, its stories, and a relationship. The place is a 207 acre tract of forest in Belden County, Kentucky; the authors memories of many days hunting with his father are vivid and heartfelt.

Cogans Woods is a wonderfully textured portrait of yearly excursions to a well loved and remembered forest of wild cherry, ash, poplar, the occasional giant beech, and chiefly the hickory groves. Here, in the shared pleasure of being together in the woods, father and son always learn more about each other and the world they hunt. As they drive in the old white Mercury, a fathers deep wisdom and affection passes seamlessly from one generation to the next, and they share recollections of past days afield and expectations of the day aheadwhether the squirrels will be cutting the nuts in the crooked limbed hickory that hung over the fence line where the trail came down off the ridge below the barn, whether there would be nuts in the slender pignut hickories, or any squirrels at all. And then the day, many days over many years, plays out, with its unique meetings with Stony or Sherman Morgan who own the land, with a rare sight of the great owl they have named Merlin, with the hunt itself in all of its special and always somewhat familiar but always different details. Sometimes they meet a local character like old Granger Nelson, who seems to live to dig ginseng roots, or hear of folk from an earlier day, remembered in legends, like Clement Ash, who once burned 200 acres of prime squirrel woods. And always Ellis records with a deft hand the details of the forest, the tools the hunters take and use, the tales of the hunts.