Table of contents for No. 2 - 2022 in Field & Stream

I WENT FISHING on Sunday for a change. I typically stick to weekday mornings or late afternoons, when I can count on having the place to myself. But it had been a couple of weeks since I’d fished, and the need to spend time on the water was gnawing at me, so I chanced a weekend outing. I left home bright and early and made great time on the road—and still arrived to a crowded river. I spent the first couple of hours in pocket water downstream of a trio of spin-fishing anglers. I landed a few trout—all the while keeping as close an eye on the other fishermen as I did on my strike indicator. When they eventually left, I moved near where they’d been fishing. I wrongly assumed…

WHEN RYAN GILL was 13, his father gave him a stave—or long stick—from a black locust tree, along with a single wood rasp. By the time his dad got home from work that evening, Gill was standing over a mound of wood shavings and holding a primitive-looking bow in his hand. After stealing a string from a Bear recurve, they strung Gill’s first bow and shot it into the night—launching a lifelong obsession, Gill says, to re-create and hunt with the tools of our Stone Age ancestors. Today, as the owner of Hunt Primitive, Gill spends most of his waking hours building self bows and atlatls and crafting wooden arrows, spears, and knives tipped with stone points he knaps by hand from flint and obsidian. When he’s not making them,…

I PICKED A BAD TIME to learn how to shoot. At least, that’s what I think as I pack my gear for a long-range shooting class in Grand Junction, Colorado. I’ve been shooting rifles since I was 13, but a lot has changed since then—mainly the long-range craze. Like countless other hunters, I became interested in learning whether the math and science behind shooting at long distances could improve my skills in the field. I got started by competing in my first PRS match about a year ago and have been practicing ever since—but one thing is clear: I need more training. My biggest problem right now, though, isn’t a lack of instruction. It’s a lack of ammo. Of all times to get serious about learning how to shoot, I do…

I WAS FINGERPRINTED, twice, provided three references, and underwent a background check. I couldn’t remember ever having been arrested, but as the process wound on, I was less and less sure. It seemed like anybody qualified to be a mentor would have to be so saintlike that he’d have nothing in common with the kids he was supposed to be helping. Then came the sniff test, an interview with the program director. I’d rehearsed phrases I thought he’d be looking for, like “giving back to the community” and “helping a young man fulfill his potential.” But when the moment actually came, I heard myself sigh and say, “Hey, man, I’m just trying to get into heaven, you know?” It surprised even me, and I wondered whether the desire to pad my…

IT’S A MUGGY February day in south Florida, and pro kayak angler Kristine Fischer is on the water, fishing during a break between tournament stops. She’s hunting big bass, casting a Texas-rigged 4-inch creature bait and working it through thick hydrilla growing up from the lake’s bottom. Her sonar shows a sizable blip. Fischer casts to it and waits. She’s anticipating the feel of weightlessness, which means only one thing—a largemouth is gulping her bait. In an instant, Fischer rears back in the seat of her kayak to set the hook with so much force that if there were no back to the chair, she would tumble out of the kayak and into the water. “Oh God, it’s a big one. That’s a giant. I can’t control it. OH MY…

“WELL, I NEVER THOUGHT I’d ride up this wash and not see a burro.” Travis Holyoak squints into the gully from beneath the shade of his straw hat. Despite the midday glare, the rancher can see plenty from horseback. The craggy mesas of Arizona’s Black Mountains stretch ahead of us, spring green-up just starting to recede from the slopes. At a distance, the land looks almost lush. Up close, there’s no mistaking it for the desert it is. Our horses pick their way past spiky yucca, catclaw, and gobs of dried burro dung. The only thing burros are good for, a fellow rancher once told Holyoak, is making trails. A trail or two is welcome in this country, where my saddle horse occasionally stumbles on loose rock before recovering his…

I SET OUT on my first sheep hunt the August after I graduated from high school. My cousin and I had a few pieces of hand-me-down gear and a kick in the right direction. We were enthusiastic. And we had no idea what we were getting into. I was wet behind the ears: I’d never backpack hunted for more than a night or covered such long distances under such rugged conditions. The mountains looked impossibly big and insurmountably steep. But with plenty of work and a dose of luck, I killed my first ram on opening day in 2004. By the time we enjoyed fresh-sliced backstrap cooked on a small frying pan, I knew for sure that sheep hunting was in my blood. I’m not exactly sure when my infatuation…

As the weapon became more and more effective, man imposed more and more limitations on himself as the animal’s rival in order to leave it free to practice its wily defenses, in order to avoid making the prey and the hunter excessively unequal, as if passing beyond a certain limit in the relationship might annihilate the essential character of the hunt. —Jorge Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting LIMITS GOT OFF TO A SLOW START. Humans (or their ancestors) began hunting 2 million years ago. But until 800 years ago, setting limits on what you could kill and giving animals a chance to survive would have been regarded as insane. For nearly all the time we’ve been clubbing and spearing and shooting, getting enough to eat was a desperately uncertain…

SOME SAY a big shellcracker is the most mysterious fish in freshwater. Properly called a redear sunfish, it’s three times the size of a keeper bluegill, on average, and just as delicious. But it’s notoriously finicky, apt to ignore a nightcrawler threaded onto an Aberdeen hook but then inhale a redworm thrown to the same spot on the same rig the very next cast. Most of the time they hug the bottom, where they probe gravel bars for snails. When you haven’t caught one in a year, their power against light spinning tackle is startling. For a few short days late in the spring, when the weather is warm and the moon is just so, and if you’ve been a good person most of the year and hold your mouth…

AMONG HUNTERS AND ANGLERS, fall gets all the love, but there sure is something about summer. Even long after your school days are over, there’s an undeniable sense of freedom in the fresh air right now. Whether we’re catching bullfrogs or bluegills, grilling game over hot coals, or trading tales around a warm fire, we can’t get enough of summer.…

I HAVE A YUPPIE FRIEND named Gary whose operating principle when it comes to buying and selling guns is Can I get out of it what I have in it? In fact, that’s his mantra for buying and selling pretty much anything, and I’m sure it’s no coincidence that Gary has done much better for himself than I have. But my operating principle is more fun. I assume I’m going to lose money on any gun I sell or trade, and I chalk it up to the rent I pay for the pleasure of owning it. This way, I can try a gun I’m curious about or get the oddball guns that no one else wants without factoring in their resale value. I suppose if I saw a lifetime accounting…

WHILE THIS ISSUE was being pulled together, I skipped out for a morning to go turkey hunting with my buddy Josh Dahlke, the most fanatical gobbler chaser I know. I wouldn’t call him the best turkey hunter in the country, and he’s not the most accomplished either. But Josh cares more about turkeys and turkey hunting than just about anything else in his life. Plenty of folks consider themselves serious turkey hunters, but after a few days of hard hunting—waking up before 3 a.m. and then staying out till dark to roost birds—those same hunters pray to punch their tag just so the hunt can be over. Josh, on the other hand, is eager to wake up well before dawn almost every day of his season, which he stretches across…

JEFF JOHNSTON ADMITS he’s a walking paradox. A lifelong whitetail hunter who manages his farm in eastern Oklahoma for record-class bucks, Johnston has written widely about his obsession with outsize deer. He’s even developed an algorithm-based antler-scoring system, called Trophy Scan, that can estimate a score based on a good-quality photograph of a deer’s rack. But for all his devotion to identifying, hunting, and killing what he calls “big-ass” bucks, Johnston has never put a tape measure to his own trophies, and he’s never entered them in the Boone and Crockett or Pope and Young record books, which catalog big-game species that achieve a minimum size, usually measured in inches of antler. “I have a deer that’s pushing 190 [inches],” says Johnston, “and I have another that’s probably over 200.…

“Big tracks don’t always mean big racks, but big racks always mean big tracks.” —Old deer hunter saying “I’VE NEVER YET shot a big buck that didn’t have a big track. So a big track is key. You find a big track, and now you’re getting someplace.” I listen closely to Michael Hirschi, even as my eyes wander incredulously across the handful of 200-plus Boone and Crockett mule deer mounted on the walls around him. We sit in his office, which doubles as the master bedroom of his Utah home. There are a half dozen monster bucks on these walls and more on almost every wall in the house. And more still in the shop outside. Most serious mule deer hunters will spend a lifetime to catch perhaps one glimpse…

BACK IN THE YEARS when I had more mouths to feed and any elk was a good elk and where it died on the mountain was of no particular concern, I drew a tag to hunt moose in the Spanish Peaks Wilderness, in Montana. I did not much think about the hardships involved in such an endeavor. To me, a moose was just an elk by another color, and I had packed elk quarters from near and far and from riverbottoms to rimrock basins, suffering no consequences beyond losing a few pounds. The destination for this hunt was a saddle on a ridge on the far side of the Gallatin River, where I was to meet up with my old friend Joe Gutkoski. Joe would hunt elk while I…

THE KLAMATH BASIN is one of the most iconic watersheds in North America. It’s also one of the most troubled. The basin, which spans 15,751 square miles along the remote California-Oregon border, was once considered the “Everglades of the West” for its network of more than 440,000 acres of wetlands. The sky blackened each fall with millions of ducks migrating down the Pacific Flyway. And the Klamath River supported some of the largest runs of salmon and steelhead in the world, which sustained Indigenous tribes for generations. With the Klamath Project, which was approved in 1905, the federal government drained much of the area’s wetlands to make way for agriculture and, soon after, began damming the river for hydroelectric purposes, blocking salmon and steelhead from hundreds of miles of spawning…

THE FLY LINE straightens out 3 feet above the water, and the popping bug hits the pond with a pleasing splat. I see the popper try to roll over, which tells me I have a bit of twist in the leader that I should probably take care of. But that little bit of movement sends a few microripples quivering on the water’s surface, so I let it ride. That just might be the ticket. It is late June, so it’s past the peak of the bluegill bedding season, when fat bream would smack every bug and fly almost as soon as it hit the water. Now the fish have scattered, with a few late bloomers on the bed, but most sulking here, there, and yonder in the pond. These days,…

BULLFROGS START CALLING once the poison ivy is about 4 inches tall and the carpenter bees are buzzing around the rafters of the barn. All of that signals the real start to summer, and it happens in early May around here. But the legal frog-hunting season doesn’t open until later in the month. I think that’s for the best because it forces country kids to have to sit and listen to the barruummphs for a couple weeks before getting after them. Delayed gratification is a good lesson to learn. That frogs live in the mud, and hunting for them takes place at night and is best when it’s hot, and the season opens just as school is closing for the summer, all seem almost too perfect. When I was…

IT WAS GETTING LATE in the season here in Minnesota, and most of the potholes and swamps I hunt were frozen over. I should have stopped earlier than I did, but I wasn’t ready to quit hunting. So I went looking for open ponds to jump shoot. When I saw one crowded with more than 60 buffleheads—my favorite duck—I couldn’t help myself. I parked and snuck around the pond, but the ducks flew off without presenting a shot. Then they circled back. I killed a mallard and a nice bufflehead. The greenhead landed with a thump on shore, but the buff had dropped in the water. I was wading in 3 feet of water when I stepped off a ledge and plunged into the lake! My flooded waders started to…

THE SURF SCOTERS come in fast, dive-bombing our decoys. Rue Mapp pops up from our boat blind and knocks one of the ducks into the water. This is Mapp’s hunt, a 50th birthday present from her mentor, Holly Heyser, but as another sea duck flies by, we get in on the action too. Then the ducks stop flying over our boat in San Francisco Bay. So we sit and talk—Mapp, Heyser, our sea captain, her boat hand, and me—all women, all hunters who started later in life. But we don’t talk much about that. Instead, we talk about rendering duck fat, about the whitetail shoulder mount Mapp plans to hang on her living room wall, and about the connection hunting gives her to the land and her heritage. Mapp is…

THE SWELTERING HUMIDITY of Thailand seeps into Rich Hart’s every pore as he contemplates what he has just accomplished. The jet lag, flesh-eating bacteria, and dehydration that Hart suffered to get here don’t matter in this moment. What matters is that he’s standing knee-deep in a river, holding a fat snakehead in full spawning colors. Purple and green shine through its dappled, striped flanks. After weighing the fish with certified grips—14 pounds 2 ounces—he holds out the snakehead again for a final photo. There’s not much danger to the air-breathing river-dweller, so one more snapshot seems appropriate before letting his world-record fish swim away. Then Hart washes the slime off his hands in the muddy river, and makes another cast. THE TRAVELER “Everything in the jungle wants to kill you,”…