The collection of stories by a well-known author summarizes nearly two dozen tales from his earlier works with a hunting theme. In the stories The Easter Deer, Half a Boar, The Minister's Friend, The Great Exchange, Four Deer Without Smetana, On That Green Meadow, A Bear in a Trap, New Year's Eve with Deer, and many others, readers have the opportunity to return to the times when the author was just starting out – a time when foresters could also be hunters, hunting guests from capitalist foreign lands visited the forest districts, and annual snowfall was not yet automatically referred to as a snow calamity – and to experience the often tumultuous transition to the post-revolutionary era. All the texts share a common sense of humor and subtle irony. Aleš Dostál (*1946) was born in Ostrava, studied at the Faculty of Forestry at the Mendel University in Brno, and worked for the Czech Republic's Forests. He is the author of several books, the first of which was published in the 1980s, with the latest including Poacher's Stories (2017), a hunting-themed novel Trophies and Losses (2018), and an autobiographical novella All the Dogs of My Life (2019).
