Adam Shaw was sitting in a neonatal intensive care unit holding his prematurely born daughter when his dad called to tell him his mom had died. Six weeks later, he and his brother met up at a local arcade and played Big Buck Hunter, a childhood hobby that would reignite in the wake of their mom’s death, spiraling into cross-country road trips, competitions on international leaderboards, and a place in the Big Buck World Championship. It was a ride they never saw coming but couldn’t back down from. The essays in Sportsman's Paradise trace the eighteen months between Shaw’s mom's death and he and his brother qualifying for their first Big Buck Hunter pro tournament. With the popular arcade game as its backdrop, this collection offers a look into the complexities of sibling rivalry, the chaos of new fatherhood, and the burden of intergenerational trauma as they relate to the places in which we find comfort in the face of loss.