Outdoor Life

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 multiple…

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 pull me…

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 GOOOOOOODDDDD!” Fischer…

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. These are…

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 a Black woman…

“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 feet. Dozens…