Archibald Rutledge

As a plantation boy, I kept many wild creatures as pets. One of these was the fawn of a whitetail deer. One day, while it was still but a baby, it ran against a barbed wire fence, tearing an ugly gash in its side. I cleansed the wound with carbolic w [...]

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It is doubtful if Longfellow ever saw an alligator; certainly he never saw save in imagination the mournful beauty of the Louisiana swamps that he describes so vividly in "Evangeline." Yet there could be no happier epithet for the Western H [...]

Certain wild creatures appear to me to belong in a class by themselves—there are distinguished beasts. Even as a boy, brought up in an immense and lonely wilderness, I began to name them—those remarkable characters of the woods and waters—creat [...]

I Let's go home," said my friend. "I don't like the woods at night." What he was really voicing was not reasonable apprehension but ancestral dread, harking back to that far time when man's constant combat was with the wild beasts w [...]

The afterglow had been so brilliant that its suffused radiance of color did not seem to die, but softly to merge with the mellow light of the moon, streaming goldenly through the lonely stretches of pine forest. After a long delightful day in the woo [...]

That sink of iniquitous mud known as the Causeway—a perfect trap one mile long spanning the Delta of the Santee, was my waiting-place on that rainy Sunday. Expecting hunting guests, I had written them that I should meet them on the Causeway. My sel [...]

The Santee, throughout the length of its antediluvian Delta, is a tidal river; and when a freshet comes down from the Up Country, the whole Delta and the mainland stretches bordering both rivers are deeply submerged. A drowned Delta is a fascinating [...]

I The thing happened at a place called Fox Bay, deep in the wild and fragrant heart of the romantic San-tee Country; and though at the time I was only about ten years old, the impression left with me was so vivid —probably because of the patheti [...]

Now he shall never be a child again! This ruddy blue-eyed lad with tawny hair, Too young to know how perilously fair The world can be—this stranger unto pain, Suddenly finds his boyish pastimes vain. . . . Behold his glamo [...]