It may seem a bit corny, but The Everlasting Stream is the story of a man's quest for kinship, for explanation of the modern human as predator, for friendship, for a firmer relationship with his teenage son, for Hoover hogs and for what's important.

Reluctantly and somewhat accidentally (by way of marriage) introduced to hunting for cottontail rabbits in pastures and woodlots of Barren County, Kentucky, author and professional journalist Walt Harrington comes face to face with a surreal world of hounds, shotshells, gut buckets and the liturgical adhesiveness of new-old hunting tales. It also is an unpretentious, culturally pristine world of tradition and camaraderie, all of which prove to be wholly unfamiliar, organic and meaningful.

Central to Harrington's exposure to hunting in rural Kentucky are four rough-hewn, good old boys?Alex, Bobby, Lewis and Carl, Walt's father-in-law?for whom the bonds of venery, the places of the hunt and the chase are encoded in their social genetics. They are a bantering bunch of "cussing, whiskey-drinking [posthunt], country men" of country wisdom, humor and connection. They are genuine. They are not drugstore Rambos or sick and violent anthropological throwbacks that are the nimrod persona dismissively assumed by the suits and climbers in Harrington's other, prim and pseudo-omniscient vocational world. Not at all. They are men who hunt in large and tacit measure for, in Carl's words, "just being out there with one another."

This book is not just about a man's conversion to the skills, excitement and sensory anticipation of hunting. It very much also is about a compelling, albeit fleeting, absorption and memorable immersion into the real outdoors?its beauty and harsh realities. It is about intellectual and emotional grappling with the meaning of hunting and the meaning of satisfaction, and of death and living.

"Killing an animal doesn't deaden the human conscience," Harrington discovers, "it enlivens it. It jars it into being?.Not the small conscience of venial sins, but the big conscience of the original sin?the sin of existence." He experienced and came to understand, as most true hunters do, the paradox of taking animal life?that it summons from buried humanity an indelible appreciation for the quarry and the landscape that harbors it.

This small, 244-page work of nonfiction is about introspection on numerous levels. It is about perspective. Like hunting itself, there is much more to its content than one might imagine, much more than I have revealed here. The book is an easy, entertaining, poignant and, in some regards, provocative read. It isn't corny in the least. I enjoyed it a great deal and am certain that hunters and most nonhunters would as well. I propose that it be required reading for suits and climbers.

The Everlasting Steam was published in 2002 by Atlantic Monthly Press. It has a price tag of $23.00. To order, try sales@groveatlantic.com, but I found it easier to Google the title or to ask your local bookstore to order it.