Following his English setters into thickets in search of grouse and woodcock, Mark Parman feels the pull of older ways and lost wisdom. How rare it is, in our high-tech world, to find oneself completely off the track, bewildered in the wild, and then find the path home by sight and scent and memory. Among the Aspen interweaves tales of companionable dogs, lucky hunts, and favorite coverts where quarry lurks with ruminations on the demise of hunting traditions, the sale of public lands and the privatization of places to hunt, the growing indifference to science, and the loss of wilderness on a planet increasingly transformed by the sprawl of humanity.

Aldo Leopold wrote, ""There are two kinds of hunting: ordinary hunting, and ruffed-grouse hunting."" Like Leopold, Mark Parman takes to the woods when the aspens are smoky gold. He distills twenty seasons of grouse hunting in an evocative almanac that chronicles the early season of the grouse hunt through its end in the snows of January. He writes of old dogs and gun lust, cover and clear cutting, climate change, companions male and female, wildlife art, and stumps.