Honest hunting, fishing, field skills, gear, wild food, conservation, and outdoor stories, narrated for the road, the workshop, and the quiet hours after dark.
Reading the feed…
I hung my stand in July. That should have told me everything, and it told me nothing. The first weekend of July I walked out to a white oak flat I had never hunted, a spot I picked off an aerial map because it sat inside a big timber bend and looked like the kind […]
The buck was maybe ninety pounds, and he was running away from me, and I shot him anyway. That is the sentence I have been trying to make peace with for six years, and I will tell you the rest of it straight, because dressing it up would be a different kind of lie. It […]
The buck was on the ground before eight in the morning, a clean little eight point that had walked out of a cedar thicket like he owned the place. I shot him, watched him fold, and stood there with my heart slamming around in my chest the way it does the first time you do […]
I had been throwing that Whopper Plopper for an hour and four minutes. I know because I kept checking my phone between casts, which is its own problem, but we’ll get to that. The sun was gone behind the tree line and the water had gone that flat gunmetal color it gets about ten minutes […]
I put a hundred arrows into a foam target last summer and called it practice. I shot every evening after work, same three yardages, same flat yard, same steady heart. I could put five arrows in a coffee cup lid at forty yards when the wind was down and the mosquitoes weren’t biting. I thought […]
You know the axle is breaking before it breaks, because the wagon starts to sing. It is late May, 1849, on the south side of the Sweetwater, and the whole day has been one long pull through sand that grabs the wheels and will not let go. Then, as you crest a low rise with […]
I did not catch a fish for eleven weekends straight. Not one. I borrowed rods, I studied maps, I watched every video I could find, and I still came home empty handed every single Sunday with a cooler full of ice that never touched a fish. Somewhere around week nine my wife stopped asking how […]
The first fish I ever lost out of my own pride was a smallmouth I am still mad about, and it had nothing to do with the fish. It had to do with a baitcaster I bought because the guy on the YouTube channel made it look easy, a Palomar knot I tied in the […]
Your license is valid. The season is open. You are standing on public land with a tag in your pocket, and you can still be hunting illegally. That is not a scare line. That is how layered regulations actually work. Here is the model case. A hunter sits over a corn pile forty yards inside […]
My first opening day on public land, I did what every guy with a four-wheel drive and a false sense of confidence does. I got to the parking lot at four in the morning, which made me feel like I was ahead of somebody, and I found the nearest likely looking ridge, which was about […]
The call came at six in the morning from a man named Darrell who owns the bottom field on the other side of the creek. He didn’t say hello. He said, “There’s thirty of ’em out here and they already tore up an acre of my beans. Bring something.” I have never dressed faster in […]
The first deer I ever shot, I shot in the guts. I was twenty-two, shaking so hard the crosshair wouldn’t sit still, and the doe was forty yards out in the last legal light. She was broadside, perfectly still, eating. I told myself I had a clean lung shot. I rushed it. I watched her […]
I dialed that buck at 45 yards and watched my arrow sail clean under his chest. Clean under, the way a ball rolls off a pool table you didn’t mean to shoot. Four inches low. He didn’t even bolt hard, just tipped his head down at where the arrow stuck in the dirt, looked back […]
You wake before light because the chestnut mare is down. It is early June, 1848, on the north bank of the North Platte, and the sound that pulled you out of sleep is not a voice but the absence of one, the mare breathing hard and low through her nose and not getting up. The […]
The last page of the folder is the plainest one in the whole stack. No stain where a pot sat, no torn corner, no drawing of a wing or a fin pressed into the paper with hard ink. Just one word dead center, written small and careful the way a man writes when he’s taken […]
The page after the duck is clean paper for the first two inches, and then it’s ruined, a wide brown stain the exact shape of a shallow pot that somebody set down still warm and left there overnight. Over the stain, in the same hard ink Amos used on the duck, I can make out […]
The catfish hole had been mine for years. A bend in the river just past the second bridge on County Road 9, where the current slowed and the water went deep and green. Pull up on the gravel, walk fifty yards downstream past the cottonwoods, and there’s a log that juts out over the dropoff. […]
I walked into the mountains out west thinking I was ready because I could bench two plates and run a seven minute mile on a treadmill. I came home knowing I wasn’t. The mountain didn’t care what I could lift. It only cared how long I could keep putting one boot in front of the […]
My Uncle Ray used to tell me that a man’s first buck is a coin flip between the best day he ever had and the worst walk of shame back to the truck. He never said which side I’d land on. I found out at twenty yards, which is close enough that you can count […]
The screen lit up with 3% and then went black, and I stood there in the dark trying to wake it back up like some fool shaking a dead man. The phone was my map, my compass, my way in and my way out, all wrapped up in one little rectangle I had never once […]
The page after the softshell is chipped on one edge, and the corner itself is gone, torn away years back like somebody needed a clean place to wipe a knife. What’s left of the word at the top is drawn in heavy ink, pressed deep enough that it near cut the paper, and all I […]
The page after the gar is the last one I pulled out before I set the folder down for the night, and it nearly stopped the whole thing. The edges are darkened like the sheet laid a long time against something wet, and at the top, raised and set off by itself, is one word […]
The first deer I ever killed was shot by mistake. I don’t mean I pulled the trigger on accident and hit him. I mean I was twelve years old, sitting in a box blind my dad had built out of scrap plywood and a tarp, freezing my ass off and thinking about a video game, […]
You wake because your tongue has gone thick and your head is splitting behind the eyes. It is late July, 1849, somewhere on the alkali flats west of the Sweetwater, and the water barrel under the wagon has been empty since yesterday noon. The sun is a white hammer. Your wife Hannah is already out […]
For the first ten years I killed deer, I threw the heart in the gut pile. Not out of disrespect. Out of habit, and out of a lazy little voice that said the heart was organ meat, and organ meat was for people who couldn’t afford steaks. I was wrong on every count, and I […]
