Dickey did bring considerable experience to this book. Like Muldrow, he was for many years an avid hunter, although, at 70, be thinks he “may have gone on the last hunt.” Speaking from his home in Columbia, S.C., he says wistfully, “I’ve got all this archery equipment around, which I love, I love the whole sport and the whole idea of archery; I love to shoot arrows. But my orientation has kind of changed a little bit, because of the plight of the animals and the environment. Sport hunting, I just feel–I just can’t bring myself to do it anymore.” Another chuckle: “Not that the deer population was ever in any real danger from my depredations.”
“I don’t like to kill anything that much. The idea of being out there in that activity is what appealed to me, to be hunting out there”–and here a note of withering scorn enters his voice–“not just taking pictures and all that, but to actually be in a life-and-death situation, I always enjoyed that sensation very much. There’s nothing like the hunt. Anyone who’s never done it could not really approximate what it feels like.”
Dickey also drew on his own experience as a fighter pilot in World War II. Did he fly over Tokyo, like Muldrow? “I sure did, many a time, all over the Japanese home islands. I was airborne the night they dropped the second atomic bomb, on Nagasalki. I was on Okinawa when the war ended. We were going to go in on the invasion. There wouldn’t have been a single person in my squadron who survived. We’d’ve gone in on the first wave. So I owe my life to the atomic bomb.”
