Claws

A new illustrated edition of an outdoor adventure story by South Carolina's first poet laureate

Unseen by readers for a century, Archibald Rutledge's story "Claws" is a fast-paced adventure tale of a young boy, Paul, lost in the foreboding terrain of Spencer's Swamp, the domain of the mighty bobcat Claws, which is deftly evading hounds and hunters alike. When Paul and Claws encounter one another at a perilous creek crossing, Rutledge's mastery of outdoors storytelling shines through in every evocative word.

The short story "Claws" was written for publication in an early twentieth-century boy's magazine and was first collected in the privately printed Eddy Press edition of Old Plantation Days (c. 1913). Limited to just a few hundred copies, the Eddy Press edition is highly prized by Rutledge collectors and includes these four stories—"Claws," "The Doom of Ravenswood," "The Egret's Plumes," and "The Ocean's Menace"—not found in the more widely available 1921 Stokes edition of Old Plantation Days.

A project of South Carolina Humanities benefiting the South Carolina literary programs, this new edition of Claws is illustrated in handsome charcoal etchings by Southern artist Stephen Chesley. Award-winning outdoors writer and noted Rutledge scholar Jim Casada provides the volume's introduction and retired South Carolina conservation officer Ben McC. Moïse offers an afterword.