As you may know, from my earlier posts, I’m a sucker for Outside magazine-type stories about people getting lost in (and perhaps rescued from) the wilderness.

I think Tom Brown wrote or was a contributing editor for a publication called Foxfire, which was a series of books (or book-length magazines) that talked about how to build a shelter, forage, and survive in the woods. Several years ago, I was working on a story about a boy who ran away into the woods and, knowing practically nothing about that myself and not wanting to sit through hours of Naked and Alone, I went in search of Tom Brown’s books.

And this was the only one I could find in-store.

It didn’t exactly give me a Cliff’s Notes¹ version of survival in the woods, but I enjoyed the stories anyway.

I didn’t know much about Tom Brown, aside from this vague memory of his maybe work on Foxfire, but I assumed he was a trusted source. And then I read this book and I have to say that I became a little skeptical reading it. The stories, which focus on his work as a tracker, seemed a little… stretched… perhaps? And there was one where he tracked a fugitive (a spy perhaps?) across an area he was unfamiliar with (a hostile foreign nation, perhaps?) just seemed… a little too good to be true… like, I don’t know, out of an X-Files episode or something…

But, in preparation for this post, I read Brown’s Wikipedia page and, while it’s not heavily footnoted, it leads me to believe that I was maybe wrong about him.² He just died a couple of weeks ago, so I’m going to leave it at that. I’m not in this community; I haven’t read any of his other work; so I’ll leave his veracity to those who knew him, employed him, studied with him.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there may be certain professions³ where the norm is so unusual to those outside the business, that even the daily complaints about “my day at the office” over drinks after work will sound specious, just because this is not the water in which most of us swim.

But, if you, like me, are an armchair wilderness tracker, placing your finger in a footprint, sniffing a broken branch, and stating confidently, “He passed this way not more than 4 hours ago” this is a book for you.

1. Mommy, what’s Cliff’s Notes? ↩︎
2. Subtitle: True Stories from America’s Greatest Outdoorsman. Call me Gen X but I immediately distrust anyone who proclaim they are telling the truth without being asked. ↩︎
3. CIA Agent, Wilderness Tracker, Special Ops Agent, Bigfoot Hunter. ↩︎