Pages 3 - 19 Summary and Analysis

In "Once a Salmon Sang to Me," Hill assumes the voice of a salmon heading upstream to spawn. The salmon, in rhyming couplets, gives the would-be salmon fisherman advice on the best equipment to use and the best strategies for catching salmon. At the end of the poem, the salmon thanks the fisherman for preserving his habitat and keeping his rivers clean, and he slyly urges the fisherman not to spend too much time fishing, because like the salmon, the fisherman has to spend some time "spawning" too.

In "No, I Have Not Thanked a Green Plant Today—I've Been Busy," Hill laments the emotional, anti-sportsman attitude of so-called environmentalists and others who object to guns and hunting, when it is in fact the sportsman who is conserving and caring for the wildlife the environmentalists claim to want...