Table of contents for December 2017/January 2018 in Field & Stream

MY FAVORITE HUNTING knife was a gift. Some backstory: I had traveled to North Carolina to hunt whitetails with my friend and F&S colleague T. Edward Nickens. As we drove to camp, he asked, almost out of the blue, “Did you bring a knife?” As soon as the K-word left his mouth, I could feel myself groan. In my rush to pack and leave for the airport, I’d left my knife back home. I remember Eddie casually shrugging off my oversight. We’d figure something out. He and I hunted together that first evening but never saw a deer. We split up the next morning; no luck then, either. Later on, we hunted a new spot, and this time, we both fired our rifles. Eddie killed a meat doe for his…

PAST BLASTS “Overnight Flight” (Oct. 2017, Shotguns) brought back great memories. Hunting woodcock made growing up in Michigan in the 1960s and ’70s the best. Dewman, via fieldandstream.com NAKED TRUTH I really enjoyed Will Brantley’s story of taking his first moose in “Your Wildest Dreams.” But let me get this straight: Brantley wrote that he peeled off everything but a long-underwear shirt as he broke down the bull. So I guess he was naked from the waist down? Sounds like a dangerous way to skin a moose! Seriously, though, great story. Charlie, via fieldandstream.com Brantley’s story describes exactly what hunting with guide Devin McInnis is like. You’re almost always in the middle of nowhere, in cougar country. It definitely sounds as though Brantley had a memorable adventure. Connie, via fieldandstream.com…

Q: I’d like your opinion on Lubalox coating on bullets. Does it negatively affect accuracy like the old moly coatings? Is it hard to clean out of the bore? —JOHN DALE, RICHLAND, WASH. A: Lubalox is supposed to cut down on barrel fouling and keep bullets from tarnishing. Smooth bores don’t foul; rough bores do. But I’ve found that coatings of any kind make very little difference. As for accuracy and cleaning, yes to your first question, maybe to the second. I can’t recall having a problem getting it out of a bore, but then my bore cleaning is so drastic that everything comes out—except moly. Which would surprise and excite you most to see in the woods: Bigfoot, a chupacabra, or Elvis? —HERB DAVIDSON, ALBANY, N.Y. A: Elvis.…

I talk with a friend of mine who died years ago. I don’t do it all the time, and I don’t do it a lot, but I do it nonetheless. He was about as good a friend as I have ever had, and taught me as much about hunting as anyone ever has. He killed himself as we were both entering middle age, before cancer could do it for him. The irony is that while we were both alive, we spoke very little. Neither of us believed in conversation, and we were born less than an hour apart. This seemed to give us some sort of weird telepathic bond that let thoughts pass between us without words. We once drove all the way from Forsyth, Montana, to Bozeman— about four…

He emerged early, when the light was dim but legal and the December frost made ghosts of his breath. He ascended a mound toward a cut cornfield, then we began our approach. One hundred yards away, he stood—head down, left shoulder broadside—in a wind that did his kind no favors. This was all working out too well. My last two hunts out here had kind of conditioned me to failure: I’d had high hopes that were dashed; I’d made decisions that haunted me. This time, in the last chapter of what had evolved into a three- season journey, I arrived with simple goals: to hunt hard and to hunt with a friend. But now, only 45 minutes into day one, with the muzzleloader stable on the sticks and the crosshairs…

I love gear with miles. I’ve put plenty of my own on tackle, but I’ve always been charmed by gear—fly reels in particular— that already has a past, even if I may never know its whole story. At yard sales and flea markets, I’m on a quest. I’m not interested in dime-a-dozen Pflueger Medalists or reels so old that you’d just put them on a shelf. I want classics and discontinued gems that were built to be fished hard and passed on. A scratched and dented Billy Pate I found in a central Pennsylvania junk shop is always with me offshore. I’ve got a Penn International that comes on every steelhead trip. A recently acquired Old Florida is one missing part away from making it into my striper rotation. I…

Why would you spend a year anticipating the hunt, five weeks or more pursuing the animal, the better part of a week packing it out, and aging it for weeks, only to not then revel in the nextto- final act of spending a few more days preparing it for storage, awaiting the meal that is the beginning of all you sought in the first place? There is one knife, reserved only for this purpose. There is the late autumn or early winter light through the window. There are your young daughters, wrapping fascia into tight pioneer garments around their dolls. A few years later, they help you label the cuts, drawing cartoon pictographs of the hunt onto the freezer paper. Grown, they’ll cook it for you and it will be…

MY OLDEST FRIENDS are selfcentered whack jobs, shameless con artists, or six kinds of strange. If we didn’t hunt and fish together, I sometimes wonder whether we’d be friends at all. Don’t get me wrong. I love these guys. It’s just that I can’t stand them much of the time. I was telling some guy at a party about how bent they all are when he said, “Well, they’re your friends. Don’t you have to wonder what that says about you?” Actually, I decided, I didn’t. I asked if he thought the Patriots would win the Super Bowl again this year. The best thing about long-standing friendships is that you stop thinking about them. Neither of you need pretend to be other than what you are. You think aloud without…

Contributing editor Hal Herring traveled to the Everglades to report on the environmental threats facing the area in “Marsh Madness,” p. 24. F&S: What bothers you most about what’s going on in Florida right now? HH: That we have known the solution to these catastrophic problems for decades, and have done almost nothing to fix them. The polluting of the St. Lucie River destroys people’s property. It disturbs me, because what’s happening to these landowners could happen to us all. F&S: What was the most troubling thing you saw? HH: The lifeless lagoon and the river—which used to be white sand, miles of seagrass beds, teeming with gamefish— are dead and buried under feet of black muck. F&S: Was there a highlight of your trip? HH: I loved learning to…

• THE SEASON • SPORTSMAN’S NOTEBOOK • THE WILD CHEF • CONSERVATION • ESCAPES • ASK PETZAL • SHOTGUNS THE BEST THING about timber hunting is the way ducks multiply. A pair starts to circle, and that pair becomes four, then eight. Eight turn into 20. Somehow, the sight of ducks working over a timber hole draws more ducks from everywhere. It’s almost like squirrels running out onto branches to see what the others are chattering about. It can build until you’ve got flocks working at two or three levels, and there’s less need for calling than there is for air traffic control. I’ve seen that in Arkansas, but we won’t see it here—in a duck-poor state a couple hundred miles north. The two dozen mallards wheeling over our heads…

BLACK, TOXIC WATER was flowing into the Caloo sa hatchee and St. Lucie Rivers. Following the rains of Hurricane Irma in Sept. 2017, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began discharging highly polluted water—billions of gallons of it— from Lake Okee cho bee into the South Florida rivers to prevent the flooding of agricultural land to the south, but at the same time poisoning some of the richest gamefish habitat in the world. This was hardly a first. In the summer of 2016, the Corps had discharged more than 200 billion gallons of water from Lake Okeechobee, setting off a chain of catastrophes. A 239- square- mile bloom of toxic algae had been spreading across the lake all summer, and when that water was released, the Caloo sa hatchee and…

ALWAYS GO ON the last day. It’s one of my rules, and it goes double when the last day of the season is as cold as this one. Nothing puts the brakes on running pheasants like hard weather. The only problem is that for the first 20 minutes of a late-season hunt, my fingers are too weak and numb to push off a safety. They throb for a few endless minutes as the blood starts pumping. It’s excruciating, but a small price to pay for the best hunting of the year. Once my hands return to normal, we start looking for birds in earnest. My German shorthair, Jed, is unfazed by cold. Constant motion keeps him warm. Except now he’s frozen—but in the right way, on point in front of…

TOM WHITING noticed a pattern. It was the early 1990s, and fly-tiers from around the world were asking Whiting, a poultry geneticist, for a very specific feather. It had to be long, wide, fat-barbed, and without webbing or a frayed end— something more akin to a squirrel tail than a typical bird feather. The earliest British books on fishing mention such a feather, reportedly plucked from the neck of the Spey cock, an almost mythical rooster bred on the banks of Scotland’s River Spey and deeply connected to flyfishing’s 19th-century start. This chicken supposedly grew feathers that produced seamless, natural movements underwater and made for a fly no salmon could resist. For years, Whiting was fixated on finding this feather— writing letters to breeders and poring through books—yet he kept…

I spent years thinking that tagging a big buck was my ultimate goal. Then I shot a buck that I’d known for a while— mainly via trail-cam pics. One day, staring at him in my trophy room, I realized that I liked the pictures as much as the mount. Over two seasons, I’d assembled quite a photo album of the buck, and each image was like finding a puzzle piece that showed me where he lived, when he moved, how he behaved around other deer. Once I killed him, the puzzle was finished. Since then, trail cams have helped me get to know some great deer, little by little filling in the details of the animal’s life. With each new glimpse, I find myself dreaming of the buck and wondering…

Last November, Austin Pontier killed an Iowa buck that many thought could topple Milo Hanson’s typical world record. Though the Pontier buck fell short at 1941⁄8 B&C, it is the Iowa crossbow record, and one amazing animal. Here, Pontier shares the reality of glimpsing whitetail hunting’s Everest. On the night I killed the buck, my friend posted a couple photos on social media. By the next day my phone was ringing off the hook. It was almost immediately overwhelming. Everyone wanted to hear my story. I heard all the rumors: that I didn’t have a legal crossbow permit, or that I’d shot it behind a high fence. The best one: I’d shot it at night, with a rifle, over a mineral lick. At first it made me mad, but I…

TOWING SLEDS LOADED heavy with decoys and guns, we humped a quarter mile through a jungle of phragmites and cattails, 10-foot-tall reeds bent under the weight of fresh snow. Sweating and stripped down to our base layers on a single-digit day, we punched out of the tangle and into a pool of open water on the south end of Great Salt Lake. “Listen,” said Brett Bernardo, a Utah home builder and serious duck hunter, who guided us to this spot. Just beyond the water, we could hear the chatter of teal. Hundreds and hundreds of teal. After a series of delayed and rerouted flights, my friend Mike Bard and I had finally reached the marsh from New York State. Our mission: one cinnamon teal. After more than 20 years of…

LOTS OF trout fly anglers hang up their gear in winter, which is exactly why a lot of other fly guys love the cold season. While most bugs are gone, so are the crowds. The trade-off for having the water all to yourself, of course, is that winter trout aren’t typically as eager to pounce on a fly as they were back in spring. This time of year it’s a game of patience, persistence, and finesse, above all. Whether you’re after a post- Christmas holdover or New Year’s Day wild brown, these double fly rigs will keep rods bent despite those iced-up guides. THE BREAKFAST SAMPLER RIG • Let’s be honest, stocked trout can be lazy even during warmer times. Drop the water temperature below 40 degrees in a freestone…

THE RIGHT ONE BUCK: “JACKSON,” A 91?2-YEAR-OLD, 150-CLASS TYPICAL HUNTER: MISTY LOGGINS, COUNTRY ARTIST AND BOWTECH AMBASSADOR LOCATION: SOUTHWESTERN WEST VIRGINIA DATE OF KILL: DEC. 29, 2015 THE CAMPAIGN “The buck stopped, looked up, and stared right at me for 45 minutes! We have it on the clock. He didn’t move a muscle.” Before the season started, my hunting partner and cameraman Jeremy Starks showed me a trail-cam picture of this beautiful 91?2-year-old buck—and I knew. We had 10 other shooters on that property, all over 150. But this one was mine. I needed him. We named the buck Jackson. He bedded on a bench partway down a mountain, and we hung a stand where I’d have a chance to catch him coming or going. I started hunting that stand…

My obsession assumes solid form above latitude 66. There, North turns Arctic, the real Arctic found from September to March in a place of game. As the sun sweeps around the horizon between the equinoxes, land and water harden, whiten, heave, crack, and crush. And across level plains advance wild animals. The coats of musk oxen make them into brindled hillocks on graystockinged hooves, their casqued horns the color of straw, turning upward to brown tips as steam billows from square muzzles. The shovel-antlered caribou are nearly white, the herds in their thousands moving without pause, tendons slipping over foot bones, filling the air with the curious sound of clicking. And where the herds part in the distance, the air shimmering even below zero, wolves hunt—with qaavik, the wolverine, waiting…

On the chilly morning of Nov. 7, 2016, Stephen Tucker followed a sparse blood trail into a creek drainage in Sumner County, Tenn. His muzzleloader was loaded and ready for another shot, but it wasn’t needed. The blood trail improved, and at the end of it lay a 47-point nontypical buck. Tucker knew the deer was special. His brother-in-law suggested that it could even be a state record. By the next evening, Capt. Dale Grandstaff of the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency, an official Boone and Crockett measurer, green-scored the buck at 3082?8 inches. That would make it larger than the nontypical, hunter-killed record of 3075?8 from Iowa that had stood for 15 years. Grandstaff said to Tucker: “Put this rack somewhere safe. What you’re holding could be life changing.” It…

It’s a dawn thing, most of the time, so it breaks my concentration when I’m in a deer stand or closing the distance on a squirrel. I hear a wood duck’s squealing whowheeet, who-wheeet whistle and my mind starts racing. Is there a swamp over there? Did the beavers move up the creek? Could there be some new hidden honey hole I don’t know about? I’m pretty nuts over most kinds of hunting, but ducks are tops on the list. A mallard’s quack or a pintail’s whistle cranks up my heart rate, no doubt. Those wild calls bring to mind prairie sloughs and big coast marshes. But a wood duck’s whistle is a totem of home. I hear a woodie and I won’t rest until I find the beaver slough…

You’ll try to describe it, to the anglers at the bar or sitting before the fire, the fly swinging, the jolting strike, the pewter lunge of the fish half out of water and crashing down, and then the reel ratcheting as the steelhead, impossibly, jumps at the corner of your eye, upstream, even as your rod tip points down. But you won’t find the words. What you will talk about instead is the rest of the fight, the minutes your heart pounded rather than the moment it stopped, reeling frantically to get tight, the runs, the circling beyond your reach, then the second wind, for a steelhead has nothing if not heart. But the yank that almost took the rod from your hand, you won’t be able to describe that,…