Table of contents for No. 4 - 2022 in Field & Stream

I KNOW I’M NOT supposed to play favorites, but I can’t help but be especially fond of one story in this issue: “To Build a Campfire,” by David E. Petzal. I’ve read the piece nearly a dozen times now, and what I continue to enjoy most—aside from the enviable prose—is the warmth and chill I feel from one line to the next. When Petzal describes the fire he and a hunting buddy sparked on a Montana mountainside—not so much for heated comfort as for survival in the murderously cold air—I was reminded of the harshest winter conditions I’ve ever experienced. This took place the week after Thanksgiving, years ago, when I traveled to Saskatchewan for a whitetail hunt. Heeding the warnings of the extreme lows in the forecast, I…

FROM 1938 TO 1989, Bo Randall’s shop made some of the finest hunting, survival, and fighting knives in the world—and since then, his family has continued the tradition. Guy Clark wrote a song about one. Bush pilots, hunters, and survivalists have relied on them. And NASA even sent Randall knives into space. In the early days, if you wanted a Randall, you got in line with GIs and sailors ordering blades before heading overseas. Today, demand is so high you have to wait six years to get a new one. This, in part, is why collectors dedicate their lives to searching for vintage Randall knives. “It becomes a sickness,” says Randall dealer Duke McCaa. “I just facilitate the madness.” Together with collector Mitchell Harrison, McCaa runs the website randallmadeknife.com—an…

WHEN YOU HUNT from the leaning-tree stand, you never know where the deer might come from. It’s an inexpensive two-person ladder stand, old as dirt, not quite rickety, but you can see rickety from there. It’s up against an oak that leans forward just a bit—which means you lean forward just a bit with it. It’s not dangerous, but it is uncomfortable, and with your thigh muscles taut and a bend in your back, it’s not an easy stand to shoot from. A couple of hours into a sit, it’s cramp city. The only direction you don’t have to worry about is the quadrant behind your left shoulder, where a wide-open pasture the size of a football field edges a farm pond by the house. No one in my…

I DON’T MIND putting time and effort into ice fishing when the payout is big. I’m not talking coolers brimming with crappies and yellow perch, either. I’m talking about fish that make you question how the hell you’re going to get them through the hole, assuming you survive the fight. I experienced this a year ago on Colorado’s Lake Granby. There I was, kneeling with my nerves shot, watching my little reel’s spool spin at such high RPMs that I was expecting it to fly off. For two days I worked for that bite, jigging soft plastics big enough to catch tuna in 50 holes a day. Somehow, I didn’t screw up and put a 43-inch lake trout on the ice. It was the coolest experience I’ve ever had…

HE WAS THE MOST IMPRESSIVE BUCK we had on the farm that year, maybe any year, and I knew just where he lived. Or, at least, I thought I did. There’s a marshy creek that runs down the west side of the property, and that creekbottom transitions to a 100-yard-wide stretch of hardwoods that border a hayfield. The buck lived in the creekbottom and patrolled the hardwoods for does as they made their way up into the field. I knew this because my hunting buddy Josh Dahlke and I had the whole area rigged with cellular trail cameras and we’d been monitoring the buck since August. Most of the photos we had of him came from a camera we’d set over a scrape in the timber, within 20 yards…

LOOKING OUT over the rolling steppe surrounding the Khentii Mountains of northeast Mongolia, it’s easy to understand how its people once conquered the world. This is ideal horse country. Unspoiled land, covered with grass and forage, rolls smoothly from one horizon to the next. There’s nothing to cause a rider to check the headlong charge of his steed. In the mountains above the steppe, which are not very tall or severe, lives one of the three subspecies of the argali sheep. The Hangay argali is the middle child: smaller than the Altai argali of westernmost Mongolia, larger than the Gobi argali that lives in the Gobi Desert that defines much of the country’s southern border with China. All are easy to recognize with their distinctive double-curling horns. My hunting…

UNLESS YOU CONSIDER the impenetrable 30 acres of head-high cattails in the old oxbow slough, the wildest part of this working alfalfa field is the stand of green ash and slag-bark cottonwood trees on its east side. I don’t go into this treeline much except to hunt for shed antlers or to push out the neighbor’s cows—or, every few years, to consider hanging a treestand. To call it woods is to exaggerate its size and density, but it’s always dark in there, cool, and slightly unsettling, a place you could imagine finding a human hand or the lid of an old chest. I don’t often enter the trees, because their inhabitants come to me. That woodlot holds an astonishing number of whitetail deer, and most evenings in the fall,…

MY FIRST bleary-eyed thought as I wake up in my apartment at 3:30 in the morning: If there’s a bus running right now, I don’t want to see what kind of people are on it. It’s close enough to when the bars let out in Philadelphia that any public transit will probably be full of folks coming off the tail end of a long night. There would also be those who’ve elected to wake up at the crack of dawn—the real weirdos, in my mind. Reality doesn’t set in until I take the sales tags off my thermal underwear and pick out the heaviest coat I own that I don’t mind getting blood on. By the time I call an Uber, I’ve accepted that I’m actually smack-dab in the…

THE COYOTES were there to kill me. That’s what I believed at 12 years old, as I waited in the dark in a wooden treestand, alone and armed only with a sluggish compound bow that I couldn’t shoot all that well. I had no flashlight, no phone, no radio—nothing to depend on other than my dad’s word that he would come back to get me after legal light, once he’d climbed down from his own stand. But legal light had been over for a while, and the maniacal howls and yips of coyotes were all around me. They’d emerged from unseen dens on Mount Hebron Ridge, a place that was wild and scary enough in the daylight. As it went in my head, they’d already surrounded my dad in…

LIKE A LOT of familiar favorites (jerky, salt cod, corned beef, smoked trout), Indonesia’s rendang is the result of a preservation tactic. Cooks in the 16th century found that slow-cooking beef smothered in an intense paste of ginger, garlic, lemongrass, chiles, and coconut resulted in meat that would last for weeks, even in the tropical heat. As with other preserved fare, we don’t turn to rendang nowadays for its functionality, but instead for its flavor. Which is, yes, intense, in all the right ways: savory, spicy, nutty, garlicky, citrusy. Our version omits traditional galangal, fresh turmeric, and a few other hard-to-find ingredients, but otherwise cranks up the flavor quotient with venison in place of beef. Because this is a long, slow braise, and because of the potent seasonings, rendang…

I’M ON A HIGH RACK built onto a 1985 Dodge pickup, glassing the desert country with a good view of the Davis Mountains, where I’ve hunted for aoudads and where the elk hunting is rumored to be good too. Neither of those critters is native to the area, but neither is the milk-white scimitar oryx I’m now hunting on the flats among the thorns and Spanish daggers. In other words, I’m in Texas—West Texas, just south of Alpine, where in the 1970s local hunters and landowners learned that scimitar oryxes, which were declared extinct in their home range of North Africa in 2000, would thrive in the arid border country of the Trans-Pecos, like so many other exotic species. And that people would pay good money to hunt them.…

WHEN I WAS 21, my goal was to kill a bighorn sheep solo. In preparation, I took off most of the fall to hunt, and I went in a week before the season to scout British Columbia’s East Kootenay mountains. Just before opening day, I spotted sheep on the back side of a giant peak, and one of them was really nice. I decided to stay up on the mountain all night and shoot the ram in the first hour of opening morning. It was T-shirt weather all day, but then a sudden winter storm blew in and dumped feet of snow. I was forced to hike back down the mountain to my tent. I woke up at three in the morning and hiked through knee-deep snow back to the…

“IT’S ALL BURNED UP,” Chad Hewitt shouts over the Beaver’s roar, briefly lifting one hand off the flight controls to wave across a blackened expanse. “Everything’s gone.” I try yelling a question from the second-row seat, but my voice is lost in the drone of the single propeller. My hunting partner, Steven Kurian, doesn’t hear me either. As we approach the pond where we plan to start our 50-mile float hunt, the traveling dot on my phone screen grazes waypoints with names like “open pit” and “bulk tailings storage.” A platinum-blond grizzly observes our low passage over the tundra. Hewitt banks, sails over a few more ridges, and circles a verdant confluence of creeks before splashing down. As we glide to the bank, he leaps from the cockpit to the…

“DUDE, I LOVE YOU, but I don’t think we should be doing this in the dark.” I stop where I am, teetering between handholds on an impossibly steep boulder field, to look at Kali Parmley on the rocks above. I can’t see my hunting partner’s expression in the early-morning dark, but I can hear the unease in her voice. I can also hear bugles below us. “OK,” I say at last, and reverse course. I’m loath to abandon my plan for opening day, but Kali isn’t wrong. We left the tent almost three hours ago—plenty of time to hike 2 miles and slip into position above the elk we put to bed. Among them is the best bull I’ve seen in a week of scouting, and I want to kill…

IN 1897, a group of hunters, anglers, and explorers who loved the wilderness, but whose professions confined them to the New York City area, decided to organize themselves into a club. They were a highly educated and literate group of men, and when they looked for a name that summed up everything they cherished in the outdoors, there was only one real choice. They called themselves the Camp Fire Club of America. Humans have been staring into campfires for at least 400,000 years. The more likely figure is a million years plus. Campfires are hard-wired into our brains. When you build one and see that first real, solid flame shoot up, you feel a mixture of triumph and relief that could have been understood by a Homo neanderthalensis: If you…

FINAL FLUSH The last flights of woodcock were trickling through the Wisconsin north country, the flaming brilliance of a few weeks earlier having faded to somber gray. My friends had pulled out at first light, leaving me to do a “soft” close on our hunting cabin. Sometime after Thanksgiving, we’d reconvene to drain the pipes, shut off the propane, and close it down for the season. Geese were moving ahead of a brisk northwest wind, and bands of dark clouds scudded low. One minute, the landscape would be thrown into shadow as volleys of snow rattled down; the next minute, the brightness of the sky would be blinding. I’d budgeted an hour for our final hunt. Endings are always bittersweet, but no matter what happened, my English cocker spaniel,…

SOME PEOPLE buy a sports car when they reach a certain age. I went hunting on New Year’s Day. That wasn’t a radical life change, as I hunt a lot of days, but part of the deal I’d made long ago with my family is that I don’t go on holidays. This, I decided, would be an exception. In a few months, the first of the two boys around whom my entire life had revolved for the past 18 years would leave home for school, with the second not far behind. The start of a new year seemed like the right day to get outside and ponder exactly what my remaining days might hold, or maybe to run away from the idea for a few hours. I didn’t have…

WE MADE A DEAL: one Jolly Rancher for every mile. After bushwhacking for 30 minutes, my daughter and I sat on a steep cliff face for the second time that morning, waiting for my husband to find a barely marked trail. We agreed to amend the deal: Now it was one Jolly Rancher for every half mile. Hours later, I couldn’t argue with the bargain. Limber and whitebark pines, dead and fallen from wind and age, crisscrossed everywhere we tried walking. Hiking started to feel more and more like a chore. The trail on the map made it look as if we would climb only about 500 feet before crossing a saddle, but maps of Wyoming backcountry trails are only so accurate, and maps of Wind River Indian Reservation trails…

I’VE HAD FOUR shot opportunities on goats in my life, and none of them has gone especially well. First there was the aoudad in West Texas, where I missed a 450-yard shot before connecting on a closer follow-up. (Aoudad are known as Barbary sheep, but they’re genetically closer to goats.) Next there was the bull tahr in New Zealand, where I made a good shot but watched the goat scamper across an unscalable (for a human) crevasse. We had to retrieve him with a helicopter. Then there was the mountain goat in Alaska, which I also hit well (multiple times) before it tipped off a massive cliff, never to be seen again. And lastly, there was the feral goat on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. I took a bad rangefinder reading by…

FROZEN SAND crunches under our boots as we walk, following the dancing beams of our headlamps into the darkness. It is cold. Frost bites at our noses and fingers, and our breath forms ghostly clouds of steam. Blacktop roads and city lights are many miles away; here lives only the pungent smell of sagebrush and the hope of a monster buck at dawn. That hope draws us on, my son and me, down the desert trail and across rocky canyons. The Big Dipper rides above my left shoulder and Orion, the hunter, over my right. I offer a silent petition for a good day’s hunt. We’ve been bivouacked in the backcountry of southern Utah for over a week now, living from our packs and hunting elusive desert mule deer.…