Paper-covered boards, Faber, first trade edition, 64 pp, July 1931.
Book condition: lacking the dust wrapper; externally the spine is worn and cracked, but internally the hinges are intact and the pages tight.

The publisher's blurb on the (missing) dust wrapper reads: 'The ethics of stag-hunting, as conducted on the moors of North Devon, form a subject of endless and bitter controversy, but the average man has had so far no reliable statement of the humanitarian and economic points at issue. Mr. Henry Williamson's "digression", while not polemic by intention, sets forth all these points in a peculiarly interesting and unusual way. By means of a commentary on the verbatim report of a protest meeting held at Minehead, and then by a glowing description of his own experiences, he submits to our judgment every aspect of the case.

'Mr. Williamson's authority to speak on the subject is, of course, of the highest. He has lived for years in the heart of the stag-hunting country and in his lovely studies of animal life, on the one hand, and in his novels, in the other, he has demonstrated an exquisite sympathy with both man and beast – a sympathy that is finely balanced in this study of a contemporary problem.'

(For a further consideration of the book and the background to the writing of it, see Anne Williamson's The Wild Red Deer of Exmoor.)