An excerpt…Walking a freshly turned firebreak, I was dripping a diesel-and-gasoline cocktail along the edge of planted pines when an Eastern hognose snake bumped the tip of my torch with an inquisitive glance, its body extending from the brush like a gleaming staff of carbon fiber. Snake is not a second language for me, but he seemed to be asking why I was setting fire to his woods on such a crisp winter’s day and would I mind moving along so that he could scare up a little lunch. Happy to oblige, I cast my fire to the end of the lane, set down my torch and, in a strange, existential twist, considered these questions: Why do we set the woods on fire and why does it ignite in us a fascination as primitive as the snake itself?

Simply put, prescribed burning replicates one of nature’s most essential grooming tools, spreading fire across a forest floor, eliminating the competition for target species, and renewing soil with essential nutrients to encourage native growth. Humans have replaced nature’s random lightning strike with the more predictable drip torch, but the awe and ferocity of fire is the same. We manage the enterprise as best we can, cutting in firebreaks and choosing days or nights when the wind, relative humidity, and dispersion indexes are most favorable. We burn in rotations that allow fuel to reach a combustible but manageable level, sufficient to knock back the undergrowth without damaging the desired trees such as pines, which have evolved with thick, protective bark and thrive in fiery conditions.

Trees, however, aren’t the only beneficiaries. Scratchers like quail and wild turkeys will often begin the quest for bugs even before the smoke clears, while predatory hawks and coyotes quickly follow a fire to enjoy a brief window of better hunting as the food chain resets and balances. Within days, new native growth emerges, resulting in fresh greenery for the deer and other grazers. Also bouncing back quickly are the hedgerows and broom straw that shelter quail and other species as the forest floor shifts from the grays and blacks of smoke and ash to the brilliant greens and golds that draw us afield with dogs and friends and stories new and old.

An excerpt…Cotton, an eight-year-old English setter, jumped out of the truck, hit the ground, and ran in a circle. A bit short for a setter, she was taller than a beagle, but not by much. She slid to a stop to look at her master.

“Wait,” Mike Crawford told her. She waited. My dog, Liesl, blasted off through the sage and came back when I called . . . and kept on running. Liesl last hunted with another dog when she was only three months old. Maybe now the old dog would teach the young one some new tricks?

We heard chukar when we started away from the truck. Liesl cocked her head. Those sounded like birds, all right, but she was a quail and pheasant hunter and wasn’t quite sure. Stephen Wymer pushed shells into the magazine of his Weatherby, and I dropped two loads into the tubes of my side-by-side CZ Ringneck. Liesl quartered back and forth, while the older dog checked for scent and cast a look over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t too far ahead. Twice I called Liesl back. Then the white dog’s tail began to flag.

Eight years ago, when he was looking for a female English setter, Mike Crawford heard about a breeder in Tennessee who had a dog out of the five-time champion Pennstar. There had been a litter, but only one pup was left. Crawford acted fast and a little white female was on her way to Oregon.

“She was kind of the runt of the litter,” Crawford said. “But the breeder didn’t tell us that.”

At six months, the puppy was a white, energetic but unruly bit of fluff and looked like a tuft of cotton. Crawford admitted he was disappointed when he saw her.

“She was so small,” he said. “But it has proved to be an advantage.” Crawford enlisted the help of trainer Gene Adams. They found the little setter had heart.

An excerpt…To test the Ferrari FF’s versatility, last fall we drove one across rural northern New England, from the Maine coast over New Hampshire’s White Mountains and Vermont’s Green Mountains into the foothills of New York’s Adirondacks. Terry Allen, photographer extraordinaire, had arrived at my house in Maine with a couple of carry-on bags, a two-gun alloy case, and one of those oversize double-decker duffle bags that was—as they say in the hills of Vermont—“heavier’n a dead minister.” Yet, along with my own (much more modest) kit, everything fit under the FF’s liftgate, with some spillover onto the back seats. Our destination was Pheasant Ridge, a small private estate in Greenwich, New York, near Saratoga Springs, where proprietor Virginia Mallon has hosted a jewel of a continental pheasant shoot for more than 20 years.