Table of contents for Vol. 126, No. 2 - 2021 in Field & Stream

IT CAME DOWN TO THIS: Just how far would I go for a damn steelhead? My fly fishing guide had spent the better part of the last hour plowing past the other drift boats on the Deschutes to ensure we’d be the first ones to reach the Power Line Hole—a known steelhead hotspot on the river. “We could pull 10 fish out of there if no one has messed with it,” he told me. I’d netted two steelhead on the trip so far and had learned two things: 1. The steelhead cliché is true: The tug is the drug—and I wanted more. 2. The murderously slick rocks of the Deschutes live up to their rep. In fact, wading that river was one of the more dangerous things I’d ever done…

THERE’S SOMETHING in the human psyche that requires us to slay monsters. Werewolves must be shot with silver bullets. Vampires must have wooden stakes driven through their hearts. Witches must be burned at the stake.  All of these beings are imaginary, but in the animal kingdom, there’s a monster that is not. He goes by the names of nyati and m’bogo and Syncerus caffer. We know him as the Cape buffalo. Probably no one has done so much to cloak the buffalo in monsterhood as the writer Robert Ruark. In the early 1950s, Ruark made an extended safari to Kenya and Tanganyika, hunted Cape buffalo with PH Harry Selby, and discovered that he was petrified of the beasts. As Selby’s trackers put it, Bwana Ruark had “bad legs and much…

“DON’T SAY IT,” I warn. My buddy Mike Neiduski has me by a solid 8 inches and close to 20 years. He boxed in college—in Wisconsin, no less—and graduated with the sobriquet “the Polish Hammer.” But I’m a fighter on this one. “Don’t do it.” “I won’t, I won’t,” he says. “I know how you get. But you know I’m thinking it.” We’d just pulled an eight-hour stint chasing false albacore—or the idea of false albacore—up and down a dozen miles of the North Carolina coast. Jiminy Christmas, we must have burned 50 gallons of gas—gunning from Beaufort Inlet to the shoals of Cape Lookout, inside the hook of the cape, along the Shackleford Banks beaches, all this punctuated with long, looping forays a few miles off the beaches. Back…

AT A CERTAIN POINT IN LIFE, you have to give up dreaming about your potential and come to grips with what you can actually do. I, for example, will likely never be anybody’s model of shooting, fly casting, or, for that matter, fatherhood. If I hit a pie plate offhand at 100 yards, I was probably aiming at something else. The fly line on my reel measures 100 feet, of which I’ve never cast more than 50. Lately I’ve noticed that I can make my daughter’s eyes roll just using verbal sounds from my mouth. What does a man like me do when faced with such limits? He adapts and overcomes. He finds a rest for his rifle. He moves closer to the fish. He explains to his child that an…

THE SOUND OF THE DROPS hitting my rain jacket seemed to echo in my ears as I sat against the soggy oak tree, the lightweight sycamore-and-marblewood recurve resting in my lap, my arrow fletchings laden with water. The weather matched my mood. My first year as a traditional bowhunter had fallen far short of my expectations. I had never really been a fan of deer hunting in the rain, and after an hour in the misty downfall, I considered calling it quits and heading back to my truck. But this late in the season, that would feel too much like giving up on the whole thing rather than on just one hunt. So I resolved to stick it out a little longer, absorbed in my thoughts and feeling as gray…

ANNE GORDEN-VEGA notices a yellowish glint in the brush and slams on the brakes. She’s out of her Chevy Colorado pickup before I can even process what’s happening. The 62-year-old art teacher is basically operating on muscle memory as she dives into the brush with a flashlight, searching for the Burmese python she knows is there. Gorden-Vega certainly understands more about Florida’s ecology than I do, even though I’m from here and she’s originally from Missouri. In fact, she knows more than most “herpers,” people who head out nightly into the Everglades to scan the coco plums and pond apple trees in search of invasive reptiles. She’s also aware that she has to be careful. Pythons are constrictors that kill by biting and then wrapping tighter and tighter until their prey…

YOU CAN’T HAVE TRUE ROMANCE without a little danger, and no objects embody this truth better than British dangerous-game guns. They are both beautiful and horrible, brutal and graceful, refined and tough as nails. Why do English guns capture the very idea of hunting scary animals in exotic places? Because the Brits practically invented dangerous-game gunning. At the height of the British Empire, their influence stretched to almost every inch of the globe, including places like Bombay (now Mumbai) and Nairobi, which were jumping-off points for safaris in those days. As a result, the era’s top U.K. gunmakers raced to create guns that fired big, powerful cartridges in ever more efficient ways. Makers like Rigby, Westley Richards, Holland & Holland, W.J. Jeffery & Co., and Purdey may not be on…

“HEN MALLARD” is a funny way to spell “magnum teal,” but in September, when all the ducks are brown, suzy decoys are the right color and they’re twice the size of teal decoys. I’ve brought nine, plus a spinner, because that’s enough, and it’s all I wanted to pack a mile back into the bay on the reservoir. Currently, five of my hen decoys have run aground. That’s OK. It means I’m in a good spot. Teal love mudflats. This shallow bay ringed by muddy shoreline is the perfect place for them to skim for invertebrates. Most teal hunts are morning shoots, but in September, new teal can show up anytime. There’s a cool breeze that might be enough to push some birds south this afternoon, but mostly I’m here because…

DAVE STREB’S TRISTAR 12-GAUGE wasn’t really one of those ultraspecial, fancy shotguns that you take out only once a year. Hell, it didn’t even have a scope or red-dot sight on it. It was just an everyday, everyman’s turkey gun. But it was Strebbie’s. “It’s a shooter,” is all he ever really said about the gun. “Dead on out to 50.” THE MAN “Gerald?” Only my Mom and Streb ever got away with calling me by my given name. “Happy New Year, buddy.” This phone call went exactly the same way every year. “Only 108 days left till turkey season. Get a shopping list together, brother. Oh yeah, it’s almost time.” For more than 20 springs in a row, Streb, who was the business manager at Quaker Boy game calls, made…

MY FATHER WASN’T TRYING to ensure hunting's future or even create a new hunter when he slid that Savage 24S-E in .22/.410 beneath our Christmas tree in 1971. Dad had quit hunting by the time I was 14, and honestly, he probably wasn’t the best teacher or role model to take me and my three brothers out for rabbits or squirrels. Dad was a crack shot, but he was impatient with hunting and its painstaking tactics. Still, he had been a boy of the Great Depression, and Dad’s early years had instilled the necessities of marksmanship, fencerow rabbits, and freshly caught bullheads. He enlisted in the Army at age 17, as World War II ended. So on that Christmas Day, Dad drove me outside town, handed me a cardboard box with a…

I WAS AT THE BASE OF THE TREE, adjusting my climbing stand’s platform to the perfect upward angle so that it’d level out 20 feet off the ground. The stand’s scraping against white-oak bark sounded remarkably like bucks sparring. That was just what I was thinking to myself when I looked up and saw a flash of movement 70 yards up the ridge. I dropped to my knees and glassed, straining to confirm what I thought I was seeing: a deer, slinking silently through wet leaves. I focused on a back leg, the hock stained black. A thick neck and an antler frame twisted toward me, and then a buck lurched into full view. I had two choices: I could try to guess the buck’s age and do a quick,…

Any good sermon about quail hunting in the South starts in the Red Hills surrounding Thomasville, Georgia, and includes three legendary dogmen: Neal Carter Sr., Curtis Brooks Sr., and Joe Fryson. Those three men are the lifeblood of the Ga-Fla Shooting Dog Handlers Club (commonly called the Black Handlers Club), which runs its big field trial annually on the first Monday of March. This field trial has run for 40 years and includes some 30 pointing-dog handlers from all over the country. While you’ll see some truly incredible dog work (and some fine horse work too) at this field trial, it’s much more than a competition. It’s among these longleaf pines that we find a particular kind of sanctuary that nurtures the spirit of great bird dogs and the…

CENTURIES BEFORE Theodore Roosevelt and the birth of America’s conservation movement at the turn of the 20th century, beaver populations were nearly trapped into oblivion thanks to Europe’s need for a quality hat. With high demand and a seemingly endless supply of beavers in the wilds of North America, trappers plied the lowlands, trading companies manned outposts, and commerce boomed. For hundreds of years, enterprising traders built their empires and set the groundwork for a colonized continent. Then, in the mid-1800s, fashionable society decided that men should wear silk hats instead of beaver ones, and the beaver fur trade and trapping came crashing down. Up until now, the popularity of trapping in America has always been tied to fur prices and the simple rules of supply and demand. When there’s more…

MY EYES SNAP OPEN when the toms gobble, my head swiveling like an owl’s. They’re close. “Hear something?” My dad is looking at me, eyebrows raised. “Two,” I whisper, surprised. The gobbles were loud, carrying down the ridge. I hold up two fingers to be sure he copies. It’s already sunrise on opening day and we’re still listening for gobbles like a pair of desperate coyotes. Or at least, I’m listening. At 64, Dad can’t hear like he used to. I hadn’t realized how bad it had gotten in the years since we’d hunted together. “Where are they?” He hitches a bulky pack higher on his shoulder, the only turkey hunter for a hundred miles without a vest. “Up the hill, on the quarry road,” I say, checking my watch, then…