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Writer distills hands-on lore photo by Jim Craven How-to book ranges from horse-moving to staking new fence By Bill Varble If you want to know how to move range cattle into a corral, or figure what size pump you need to move water from a well, Jim Brunner is your guy. Brunner spent many years working the dry side of the country with the Bureau of Land Management, the federal Soil Conservation Service and various oil firms. Now he has distilled much of the hands-on lore he picked up over the years into a book on wildlands improvements. Brunner, 82, of Medford, plans a book signing Thursday evening at Barnes and Noble in Medford. The way Brunner sees it, new college graduates in natural resource fields have great backgrounds in ecology, plant and animal biology, the pathways of photosynthesis and so on. But ask them to stake a fence from point A to point B, or pipe a spring from here over to there, and they draw a blank. "I know of no college that instructs undergraduates to do these tasks," he says. So he�s leaping into the breach. "The Wildlands Workers� Handbook" is a how-to book that covers such matters as handling western horses, driving a four-wheel drive on steep trails, building a cattle guard or building water catchments. Brunner says everybody he ever worked with, from CEOs to cowboys, taught him something � "even if it was how not to do a job." The charts and graphs in the book speak to the skills Brunner learned during many years with the BLM and other outfits in California, Texas, Nevada, Colorado, Idaho and Arizona. He can, and will, tell you about rotary well drilling rigs or drilling with mud and water, drill rigs, pumps and windmills � the kind of stuff that�s usually passed down from old-timers to green employees on ranches or public lands. Once the book was finished, Brunner queried many publishers and found no takers. Nobody quibbled with the information, he says. They just felt it was too limited a market. Brunner acknowledges that the book is no threat to Stephen King. "I got a stack of rejections a foot high," he says. "It�s a niche book." But he believes that government agencies, rural landowners and college instructors and students are likely buyers. With little marketing other than an ad in the journal of the Society for Range Management, a professional group, he�s sold about 100 copies since he published the book himself. "I just enjoy the heck out of writing," he says. "You try to present your ideas. It�s fun." Brunner these days writes on outdoor subjects for the Oregon Wildlife Journal and has sold stories to Outdoor Life and Sports Afield. He remains active in the Upper Rogue Watershed Association and the Society for Range Management�s Pacific Northwest branch. He figures his book will have a life if he can get the word out. After all, it has little or no competition. Mother Earth magazine published some articles on the subjects many years ago, but Brunner says there�s generally a dearth of material. "I believe in the book," he says. Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2000 Mail Tribune, Inc.