Few experiences can compare to a shark attack while casting to world record bonefish to help put a diagnosis of cancer in perspective. Fly-fishing winds like an interactive time machine through the pages of Dances With Sharks, taking you on a 340 million year journey from Carboniferous mayflies the size of canaries to contemporary Mexico where the direct descendents of Mayan Jaguar Priests learn to be flats fishing guides. These short stories in the classic tradition are funny, informative, poignant, and filled with enough action to keep you up reading late into the night. The three novellas in Dances with Sharks take you on three very different adventures, and your first stop is... Armageddon. Experience first hand the end of over 300 million years of world history along with Duke and the Mayor on a five day river trip through a wilderness canyon. They wake up covered with radioactive ash, in the yellow twilight of nuclear winter the hatches have never been better. On the off chance they’re headed for heaven, the boys figure it’s best if they don’t show up with any gin, so they’re a week late for work by the time they discover their mistake. Xian Kaan. That the sun would rise each morning was not a given for the Mayan Indians, so their Jaguar Priests helped it along with blood sacrifice. For five-hundred years while Europe was mired in the Dark Ages the Mayans ruled over one of history’s most dominant and innovative civilizations, now they work for $5 a day. Explore the dual nature of the Mexican character as the heirs to those Jaguar Priests study to become fishing guides in the “Land Where the Sky is Born.” Red Coat Key. This desert island is where the British loyalists hid out after the American Revolution. It’s still full of pirates; it’s also where Ames, a man now trapped in a woman’s body following initial hormone therapy, flees to ponder the next step in his battle against cancer. “Of all the glands,” he says, “Why did it have to be my prostate?” With cancer, you pick your own treatment. Doctors recommend but don’t decide, and this practical journey down the path to an informed decision trails from dorado on the high seas and turbot on the grass flats to the effect of testosterone deprivation in the face of Asp and Viper, the dancing snake women.

Dances with Sharks

Literature & Fiction

Dave Ames

United States

Lodgepole Press

<p>Told through the eyes of a longtime Montana fishing guide and itinerant fishing bum, A Good Life Wasted offers a unique perspective on an implausible period in the recent history of human civilization. When Dave Ames started guiding, Rocky Mountain locals rode horses and dug camas roots; now they're trading stock options on cell phones. The collision of stone and computer ages was short-lived, but the deep-rooted themes of this book remain. A Good Life Wasted--a chronicle and celebration of the fishing-guide life--is poignant and spiritual; it's Blackfoot Indians and copper miners' daughters; it's fiddles and guitars and the fabric of space; it's about what happens to wild people when the wilderness is gone. From the first chapter--in which Dave Ames recalls bluffing his way into a job as a fishing guide to the rich and famous (after barely managing to suppress the overwhelming urge to go postal at the federal agency where he suffered his first, and only, "real" job in a cubicle farm)--we're hooked. We gladly follow Ames as he describes the rite of tasting clouds of mating midges to better match the hatch, tells the story of a fabled Blackfoot fishing guide, and shares his further adventures as a guy with no job, no office, and no stress. A Good Life Wasted spins a fascinating, compelling web--a web that entices the deskbound salary slave to make a break for it, and head west to big sky and fast, cold water, ASAP.</p>

A Good Life Wasted

Greycliff Publishing Company

True Love & the Wooly Bugger

GREYCLIFFE PUBLISHING CO

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Books by Dave Ames