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 must’ve crammed…

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 middle…

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 could…

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 online marketplace and…

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 the dark,…

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, Rumor, and I…