Tabla de contenidos para Vol. 126, No. 4 - 2021 en Field & Stream

THE MOMENT I stood at the bow, ready to cast, took me back. I could remember watching fly-fishing shows on ESPN as a teenager, hoping to catch an episode in which Trevor Gowdy or Andy Mill would also take the bow on a skiff and wait for his chance to cast to a tarpon. I enjoyed the freshwater episodes of their shows just fine, but I loved the ones set on saltwater—even more so the ones on tropical flats. To a Missouri kid like me, those scenes of anglers sight-casting to silver sport fish in impossibly blue water seemed to come from another world. And for so long, I assumed that the other side of a TV screen was the closest I’d ever get to that world. But earlier…

SAM HAD a grouse pointed in a hillside tangle of blackberries where the cover thinned to reveal a hollow dotted by cattle, old barns, and hardwoods, their leaves just shading from red and yellow to dried-blood brown. Change a few details—say add a stone wall, make my 20-gauge Ruger a 16-gauge Parker, turn Sam from a shorthair into a setter—and you’d have a vintage magazine cover. I stood ready to shoot in case the grouse flushed early as I urged Tim over. When we had grouse in northeast Iowa, I made day hunts, driving six hours to hunt for three birds in the hope of a moment or two like this one. As host and guide, I was anxious for Tim to see it for the first time. He struggled…

“NEVER SELL A GUN,” someone once told me, and it’s a good rule of thumb for the first two-thirds of life. But once you reach a certain age, you start thinking, What am I going to do with all these guns? That’s where I am now, and cutting down feels right. My two sons like guns, but there are only so many they need to inherit. Some decisions on what to get rid of have been easy: My slug guns are gone. If I shoot another deer, it will be with a rifle chambered for a straight-wall cartridge. I use semiauto shotguns only for ducks and geese these days, and that made the autoloaders I once used for birds and clays expendable. After that, the decisions got harder. I’ve sold…

THERE'S a common refrain in the hunting community: Trophy hunting is the dishonorable pursuit of the rich man trying to boost his ego, while meat hunting is the noble pursuit of the everyman trying feed his family. The general public approves of hunting for meat and disapproves of hunting for a trophy or for sport, as Christine Peterson writes in “Heads & Horns.” As hunters, we often celebrate the former and distance ourselves from the latter. However, these lines of division are inaccurately drawn. Take, for example, a simple late-​season mallard hunt. I paddled my old canoe through a few hundred yards of skim ice to reach the middle of the marsh, determined to end my season with a strap of northern greenheads. This was not because I needed the…

YOU'RE LOOKING OUT over the tundra, trying to reconcile the vast emptiness of the landscape with your own expectations, when they begin to appear. You’ve been waiting for hours, maybe days, and now that the caribou are here, they seem almost unreal. You lift your binoculars. Your heart races as the trickle of caribou filing through the tundra becomes a stream. After all the researching, saving, planning, and traveling, the living, breathing Arctic is suddenly all around you. This is a moment many public-land hunters dream of. But it’s also a dream that will never come true for many of them, especially Lower 48ers, if an ongoing effort to end nonsubsistence hunting on federal land here in Alaska is successful. MANY USERS, MANY OPINIONS The Western Arctic Caribou Herd, which inhabits…

WHEN TWO BUDDIES and I returned from our backcountry Coues deer hunt (p. 38) to the ranch house where we’d parked our trucks, we were greeted with good news. The woman who’d grown up on this dusty ranch had killed her first deer: a heavy-horned Coues buck that would surely make the record books. She was beaming, both thrilled and modest in the face of her accomplishment. That night, her friend joined us for dinner and told us how he’d snuck to within 80 yards of a nice buck and killed it in its bed. In the morning, all five of us lined up our deer skulls on a crumbling adobe wall and fell silent as we looked at them. A trophy is, by one definition, a souvenir of an…

YOU MIGHT call Dennis Dunn a romantic pragmatist. His romantic side fuels a lifelong love of pursuing wild animals with only a stick and a string. It has motivated his unreasonable quest to harvest all 29 species of big-game mammals in North America. His practical side, though, reckoned that, at 79 years old at the time, he likely didn’t have enough years left to successfully draw a limited bison tag in one of the five states that offer them. So two years ago, Dunn cut the line of unsuccessful applicants and bought at auction what is called the Arizona governor’s bison license, which goes to the highest bidder and gives the holder 365 days to hunt. Last year, Dunn spent 71 of those 365 days in a ground blind on the…

JIM MASSETT thinks the buck we’re tracking is a poser. A big track almost always means a big buck, and this track is definitely big. But the 80-year-old North Woods tracker has come across a few small bucks with big feet and big bucks with small feet. So he’s leery. It’s an overcast, windless November afternoon in a hemlock forest near Old Forge, New York, in the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park. An inch of new snow fell last night, covering 3 inches of harder stuff. Normally, this kind of day has a brooding, melancholy feel. But being on a fresh track has a way of making things vivid, almost urgent. There’s a whole drama unfolding at our feet if you can tease out the story. Or you’re with someone who can.…

I GAVE AWAY my saddle scabbard a few years ago. I had to accept the fact that I was too arthritic to do any more serious riding, so I sent it to a fellow who has bought a good many of my rifles over the years, and I hope he’ll use it because it deserves a better fate than hanging on a hook in the basement. I got it for an elk hunt in New Mexico in October 1977. It was made by a rancher who lived in Wyarno, Wyoming, named Bill Hape. Mr. Hape did leatherwork as a hobby and was very good at his avocation. When I parted with the scabbard, it was scarred and dented and stained with the sweat of who knows how many horses. It got one…

ANSE AND I smell like Hell Fire predator lure, and Michelle won’t let us into the cabin until we leave our coats and coveralls on the porch. Anse, 7, worms out of his Carhartts and giggles “Hell Fire” over and over again until Michelle gets after him for his cussing. “It doesn’t count, Mama, because that’s the name of the lure!” he says, and then he looks at me for support. “Quit cussing,” I say. Hell Fire is a gelled predator attractant that smells pungently of skunk and is sold in a tiny glass bottle. In trapper’s lingo, the smell is “loud.” I won’t touch the jar without rubber gloves, and I only apply the lure to the grass near a finished set with a stick. Anse got hold of…

DURING AN ELK HUNT in Colorado (which you can read about on the next page), I met an old trophy mule deer hunter. Our outfitter was mildly disgruntled with this veteran hunter because earlier that morning he’d passed on a 160-to-170-class buck—a stomper by almost anyone’s measure. The old man was totally unfazed. He was holding out for a 180-class mule deer, and he’d either kill one or eat the tag. I had just shot a bull, and the outfitter and the old man had pulled up in a side-by-side. The old man left his beautiful, weathered Model 70 in the passenger seat while he helped us gut the elk. He held a leg while we worked and halfway through asked politely, “Are you planning to keep the heart and…

A PERVASIVE NARRATIVE across whitetail country is that there are only two types of deer hunters: those who shoot for meat and those who shoot for antlers. Meat hunters kill any doe or young buck that walks by their stand to “harvest” the best-tasting venison possible. Big-buck hunters care only about the size of a deer’s antlers and aren’t concerned with the quality of the meat. These two types of hunters simply hunt for different reasons. The problem with this narrative? It’s total bullshit. Even the most diehard meat hunters won’t pass up a shot at a giant buck. And self-proclaimed trophy hunters love to eat venison. Besides, most of us fall somewhere between these two camps. We all like to shoot big bucks, and we all like to eat them.…

JUST OVER a century ago, hundreds of record racks and skulls were being amassed in New York City for the National Collection of Heads and Horns. Inscribed above the front entrance was this dedication: In memory of the vanishing big game of the world. At the time, President Theodore Roosevelt, famed naturalist George Bird Grinnell, and other conservation leaders did what seemed illogical in the face of massive big-game species extinction across the continent: They encouraged people to shoot trophy animals. Their efforts set the stage for the game laws, licenses, quotas, restrictions, and habitat studies that make our North American Model of Wildlife Conservation unlike anything else in the world. In the decades that followed, those game species whose representatives hang in the museum returned to their former glory, or…

IN EARLY NOVEMBER, on a warm, breezy evening a few days after my high school’s football team lost a state playoff game, I filled my deer tag. After nearly three hours of glassing on the fringe of an alfalfa field and seeing no signs of antlers, I was sure the hunt would be a bust. But just before last light, out stepped four beautiful whitetail bucks. As they fed closer to my grassy hideout, I focused my attention on a tall, heavy 5x4. He wasn’t the biggest buck in the field, but he offered the best shot. When I wrapped my tag around his antlers, he became my biggest whitetail in seven years of hunting. More remarkable than the rack and body mass of my buck was the experience. I’m…

WE WAIT with the Old Men, each of them rooted in the muck, worn and furrowed. In the early light, their limbs and branches overhead are kinked and storm-shattered, like the arthritic fingers of the ancients. We watch the sky together. With the first sound of wings, and shots booming in the distance, we lean into each other and wait. The water reaches only to my waist, but this is a full-immersion baptism into one of the great rites of winter. For many duck hunters, timber hunting is the ne plus ultra of waterfowling. Wading deep into flooded woods, hunkering close to towering oaks and cypress and willows, ducks sucked into a woods hole where every bird with cupped wings is in range—such a scene is the dream of nearly…

FORTY YEARS AGO, college student Mike Jensen took an L.C. Smith .410 he’d bought for $150 to the Olathe Gun Shop to learn what it was worth. The owner kept offering Jensen more money for the gun. He wouldn’t sell. Instead, he bought a gun, which turned into 1,000, and now Jensen rents space in that same Olathe, Kansas, store, where he offers one of the country’s finest collections of truly obtainable classic shotguns from the golden age of doubles—1875 to WWII. Here’s a tour.…

THERE ARE four moments common to any true Colorado elk hunt. First, you climb a mountain slope so steep and so thin in oxygen that you find yourself counting each step. Second, you take a nap in the sunshine above 10,000 feet and dream vividly of a bull bugling—and you startle awake wondering if it was, in fact, a dream. Third, you make a lonely hike through the darkness, going back to camp after an unsuccessful day of hard hunting, and stop for a moment because your feet hurt, and so do your knees, and then you look up and finally notice a starscape above so brilliant that it makes you laugh. Fourth, you run your hands over the antlers of the dead bull at your feet and know that this…

WE’RE STARTING to get restless when Jordan spots the buck. I’m still not sure how he saw the tiny Coues deer from 2,000 yards away. The wind is making my own binocular shiver on its tripod, and there’s an irritating shimmer in the air as the morning sun heats the cold desert. Three of us camped high on this mesa last night, waking just before daybreak and hustling to the rim to post up. Even after four days’ practice glassing this canyon and each of us scouring a different section of terrain for hours, this is the first Coues deer we’ve spotted today. When Jordan has successfully walked me and our buddy Aram through the business of finding the spot in our own binos, it takes another minute to actually see…

VICTORIA FALLS, a cataract of unimaginable proportions and a natural wonder, was first documented for the West by Dr. David Livingstone in 1855, who named the spot in honor of his favorite monarch. The locals, of course, had known about the place for some time before the Bible-thumping doctor stumbled on the scene. They call it Mosi-​Oa-​Tunya—the Smoke That Thunders. That description fits. From quite a distance you can see a plume of mist rising high above the surrounding dry woodland, and you hear the roar of the falls long before you glimpse the mighty Zambezi, whose rushing waters divide the countries of Zimbabwe and Zambia. At the edge of the precipice, the falls are deafening, the roar more felt than heard as it shakes your body from bow to stern.…