All works deserve an introduction, if nothing else to give the writer a focus and to provide the reader with insight into her or his mind and presumably the theses trying to be communicated. In the middle of the first decade of this millennia (historians love using long descriptions to carefully identify vague dates), I began a website named HuntingAcademics.com. The purpose of the site was to chronicle the hunting adventures of a few fellow academics and myself and to assert that critical and analytical approaches to hunting as well as the pursuit of knowledge (if not also wisdom) were meritorious. Essentially it was a way to advertise a middle way between the Ivory Tower and the Field, or at least argue that one could spend time in both and still be successful in both. The two characters with whom I hunted and whose adventures I chronicled have since moved on from graduate studies in the humanities and now hold faculty posts, like myself, in academia. We all still try to maintain both the love of the chase and our professional responsibilities at universities. It is a difficult balance, particularly as members of both the Tower and members of the Field generally cannot see a way that one can be a full member of one as well as the other.

The struggle is a bit like those Christians of the Late Medieval world who lived in the secular world but who, although they did not take orders or vows, turned to a mixed life fueled by the availability of vernacular devotional literature. These seekers identified with both the secular and the religious, and thus struggled (for truly it required additional energy and time) to participate in both which at times could be divided by actual walls. Of course, like any interdisciplinary scholar, those of the mixed life were accused of not being full members of either group and inadequately pursuing both worlds and their objectives. The struggle for both identity and fulfillment was ever present for those of the mixed life.

Evidence from the last decade, however, has convinced me that the walls between the Field and Tower are eroding, for if nothing else, hunting in America is being gentrified as the number of practitioners falls and the price to play increases. (More on that shift later.) This collection of essays are the ruminations of someone who tries to live in the middle, embracing a reflective and active life—a life between in the Field and in the Tower. Yet, these occasional essays will always reflect the tension between the life in the middle and the life on the edge that is required of the hunter as he moves between civilization and domestication and what is left of the wild.