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This fascinating book takes the reader back in time to the days of tsarist Russia and a style of hunting that will never be seen again—days when hunters ran down lynx on skis, golden eagles were deployed to kill wolves, and Russian royalty gathered on massive estates for wolf and bear hunts with Russian wolfhounds. In a style both riveting and entertaining, Friedrich Remmler takes the reader along on hunts at a time and place now lost to history.
Son of a German father and a Swedish mother, Remmler grew up in Finland and developed a passion for hunting at an early age. As a teenager, he acquired and trained a golden eagle for hunting, becoming the first hunter in Finland to do so. This led to the opportunity to hunt on the Kirgiz steppe with the Kazakhs, expert falconers whose eagles took down full-size wolves. Remmler then goes on to have a wide range of hunting adventures; through his father’s business contacts, he is invited to a wolf hunt on a Russian estate where the vodka-drenched all-night carousing is more dangerous than the animals. In other chapters he skis after lynx in the bitter cold of a Finnish winter, spends a terrifying night adrift on an ice floe while hunting seals, is nearly washed out to sea on an island duck hunt, and meets a mysterious hunter who calls in wolves by howling. Later, running a business that supplies live animals to zoos, Remmler takes on the challenge of trapping live moose in nets.
Remmler’s manuscript was found some years after his death and was only recently published. His adventures are so unique and his writing so mesmerizing and descriptive, you will wish he had written much more. The book is illustrated with drawings by the Russian artist Vadim Gorbatov, whose action-packed drawings of wolves, capercallie, bears, and hunting hounds perfectly capture the spirit of the story.
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