Table of contents for No. 1 - 2020 in Field & Stream

Winchester VarmintX Shotshells My favorite predator-specific load is Winchester’s VarmintX, which uses Shot-Lok buffering material (same as Long Beard XR) in conjunction with 11 ∕2 ounces of lead BBs. It patterns lights-out through my turkey tube, which can’t always be said for large predator pellets. Mojo Triple Threat Predator Call $240; mojooutdoors.com This new e-caller sounds just like a dying rodent—which is exactly what you want. It comes programmed with 50 sounds, but you can play others from an SD card. The controls glow in the dark, and the remote’s range is rated to 400 yards. The Critter motion decoy on top won’t do much for you at night, but it looks killer during the day.…

Twenty years later, I remember the silence inside the car as we retreated home. The radio was on, but the three of us were quiet, and had been for some time. Sunrise was a few hours away. Joe was half-asleep in the back of the minivan, and I rode shotgun while Andy drove. He’d been driving for nearly 10 hours straight. We’d offered to give him a break, but he wouldn’t budge. Maybe driving provided him with a distraction to forget, temporarily, the last 48 hours. The closer we got to home, the deeper the reality of our defeat seemed to sink in. So, I decided to try and lighten the mood by breaking the silence. I turned the radio down, then said, loud enough for Joe to hear…

Some of the best wingshooting in North America happens between February and April along the Missouri River as snow geese migrate to their Arctic breeding grounds in Canada. This route picks up the migration midflight in the Midwest, then follows the birds north. If you have the time, budget, and commitment for nonstop 3 A.M. wake-up calls, listen up. Pound Birds in Mound City Come February, Loess Bluffs National Wildlife Refuge holds the largest concentration of migrating light geese anywhere in the Lower 48. In 2013, more than 1 million snows were counted on this little oasis just east of the Missouri River. Mound City is the nearest town, and every motel and restaurant loves hunters. Hunting isn’t allowed in the refuge, but with so many birds, it’s worth…

THE MAN BURNS HIGH-octane gas—the premium stuff, hold the ethanol. There’s no catalytic converter under his hood, no fuel-saving gizmos that might shave down performance. His only speed is flat-out, stomp-the-skinny-pedal go. My pal, Scott Wood, can be tough to keep up with, but for nearly three decades, I’ve tried my best. If you’re serious about hunting and fishing, it doesn’t hurt to have a friend or two—but no more than that—who are simply better than you. Friends who push you, in a friendly way, to keep sharpening your skills and upping your game. Scott is too good a friend to really be a competitor, but he’s not what I’d call a mentor either. In the sporting corollary of a foot race, he’s had a step or two on…

WE DROVE SOUTH FROM Albuquerque, trailing the cottonwoods along the Rio Grande, down the old Spanish royal road that once stitched old Mexico City to old Santa Fe, down to the funky town of Truth or Consequences, and then east, over the high, piney Capitan Mountains to drop through the black lava fields of the Valley of Fires, the land of crusted ember. It was a strange place for a duck trip. We sortied toward the Pecos River and Roswell, a town that attracts conspiracy theorists, UFO believers, and tourists who flock to gift shops selling alien dolls and scorpion-filled lollipops. We hunted hard and a little mean in a great southern arc across New Mexico’s Chihuahuan Desert because hidden in the heat shimmer, in the sage, mesquite, rubber…

IT WAS THE VERY FIRST cast I ever made with a muskie fly. The 14-inch mass of bucktail, feathers, and flash smacked down a few feet from the bank of one of Minnesota’s 10,000 lakes like a teal that had tangled with Remington steel. Before I could bring the dead duck back to life, my friend Robert Hawkins, who was rowing, casually said, “Bury the tip of your rod in the water before you start stripping.” Hawkins wasn’t the guy who figured out submerging your rod tip when you’re streamer fishing helps you keep better contact with your fly, which lets you feel a hit much faster, which increases the odds that you’ll nail a smooth, strong strip set. At some point, that knowledge was bestowed upon him. To…

I WAS WAITING FOR THE moment when the truck would finally break down, and I’d be stranded in a strange place far from home. After an allnight haul from New York, it seemed like that place would be a general-store parking lot in Odessa, Missouri. I got out of the cab, looked under the truck, and watched as transmission fluid hemorrhaged from the bell housing. I was traveling across the country, on my way to New Mexico, working as a hunting guide, and when I got there I planned to pull my 1995 Ford F-150 off the highway and run it hard on every dirt road I could find. The truck was a single-cab work model, designed to plow snow and make dump runs, but I had been banging…

WHEN I FINALLY REACH MY treestand on the closing day of rifle season, it looks just as I remember it. The camo cushions have faded in the last few years, and the extra-tall ladder is dinged in places, but otherwise it’s in fine shape. The stand faces a narrow field with alternating strips of food plots and cover, the northern border of the family farm just beyond. To the south, there’s an ever-expanding beaver pond; to the west, a creek and a steep hill. A dense stand of cedars grows to the east. Deer are drawn to this place, and so am I. I hitch my rifle over my shoulder, close one hand around a cold metal rung, and begin to climb. THE LAST TIME I SAW A GOOD…

A buddy of mine moved from Virginia to Portland a few years ago. He reported that there are a bunch of hippies out there—but also a staggering number of turkeys. I usually take a late-spring turkey trip to Nebraska or Kansas, and as good as those prairie states have been to me, the pressure is getting ever heavier, and in some places, the flocks aren’t what they once were. Meanwhile, Oregon’s bird populations are flourishing and expanding, and they’re relatively under pressured. Turkeys are not native to the Beaver State, but introduction efforts have been wildly successful. Growing flocks are the best ones to hunt because they usually have a lot of vocal birds. So, I’m thinking of planning a road trip to the Northwest this spring—and here’s what…

Eastern Virginia’s coastal plain and tidewater rivers sport some of the country’s best small stream fishing for panfish in waters friendly to both johnboats and canoes. It’s a region rich in history, and there’s a bonus to fishing freshwater streams this close to the ocean breakers: Throughout the spring, you might tag into a migrating striped bass or shad. Fish a Hidden Treasure The Nottaway River winds along the Virginia–North Carolina border, through stunning cypress forests, with hardly a town along the banks. The tannic Blackwater River holds healthy redbreast populations and world-class river fishing for shellcrackers, the local term for redear sunfish—a whopper can break the 3-pound mark. Live crickets on a dead drift are shell cracker candy, but small safety pin spinners can help pull boss bream…

DRIVING THE LENGTH OF THE Hawkeye Wildlife Area’s south side, I can point to landmarks all along the way and recall successes and failures over the years. They track my growth as a turkey hunter like the pencil marks on the wall record the height of my children. Hawkeye’s roughly 13,000 nondescript acres of sand, willows, and soft maples straddle a dozen miles of the Iowa River, in Johnson County, Iowa. I’m not afraid of hotspotting myself by giving its location because my spot, frankly, is not that hot. Neighboring what passes for a metro area out here, Hawkeye is no secret—not from other hunters nor birders nor a cast of more nefarious characters ranging from mere vagrants to meth dealers. But what it lacks in pristine beauty, it…

The Casanova LEE KJOS NAMES ALL HIS DUCK dogs after Louis L’Amour cowboys, and Cap is no exception. When Kjos went to pick out a Lab five years ago, he had his heart set on a reddish male. But the same yellow pup kept tumbling into his lap until Kjos gave in and took him home. Cap is loyal to everyone in the family, including Kjos’ son Luke (above), but his real best friend is any hunter with a shotgun. “He’s the coolest combination of a total powerhouse and a lover,” Kjos says. “Water, land—it doesn’t matter. But as soon as the hunt’s done, it’s like he’s in a coma. He’s the best dog we’ve ever owned. And I’ve owned a lot of them.” —Natalie Krebs The Class Clown…

I LIKE TO SHOOT A PISTOL AS much today as I ever did, but I haven’t shot in a pistol competition since the day Logan Baker cut his thumb off. We were buddies fresh out of college, and we both had the plinking bug, spending money we didn’t have on ammo destined to be burned up on cow turds and Clorox bottles. Jay, the owner of the little gun shop we frequented, fancied himself a tactical guru. He had a hell of a belly and manned his gun counter from a roller stool surrounded by an ever-present cloud of Marlboro smoke. He’d roll one way to get us more boxes of FMJ pistol ammo, and then roll back to take our cash. One Friday, Jay told us about an…

IT’S 5 A.M. AND FEBRUARY in northern Vermont. Virtually all of New England is asleep and cozy in their houses, wisps of wood smoke slipping from their chimneys. But not us. Norm and Marcel and I are in a dimly lit basement, in line with a bunch of other groggy and disheveled men, all of us clutching bait buckets. A guy in a T-shirt is standing behind a table with a minnow dipper in his hand and a money bucket in front of him. Behind him is a whiteboard listing the prices of the various sizes and kinds of live bait. Norm whispers that we’re being gouged by the shiner prices. The guy ahead of us turns and says, “Yeah, but if the fish don’t bite, you can fry…

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON IN February, and the farmer gave me the usual post-deer-season response when I asked if I could hunt coyotes on his land. “Go ahead,” he said. He even pulled on a weathered Carhartt coat, stepped onto his porch stoop, and motioned toward a creek drainage separating his cornfield from the neighbor’s hayfield. “Right down in there is where we usually see them cross.” Then he added, “They eat my chickens, so kill ’em all.” I said thanks and reminded him that I’d be hunting at night and not to be alarmed if he heard a shotgun blast or two in the dark. Then I drove home for supper—and to charge the batteries for the spotlight and e-caller. By the time my buddy Tim and I…

MY FRIEND PAULA SMITH IS helping me look for the mate of a shed antler that I found two days ago on a hillside in these thick woods that back up to a fence and the four lanes of Cabin John Parkway inside the D.C. Beltway. I’d found the left side, a beige 5-point antler with pretty good tines and decent mass. It was big enough to set the hook and get Paula out here to search with me. Now, of course, she’s irritated. Paula and irritation go together like pie and coffee. “Dammit, Heavey, slow down!” she gripes. “No wonder you can’t find it. You’ve got the attention span of a housefly.” She starts making slow sweeps across the hillside, pointedly traversing ground that I’ve already covered. How…

DOWN THE STEEP BANK AND through dog-hair stands of invasive knotweed, the river opens up to a huge slow pool below and a riffle above. There are already a few bugs wafting by on the slight breeze, and I see two splashy rises in the tailout. But I head for the riffle, straight to a certain boulder, where I sit, waiting. I think of this as John’s rock. He would sit here for hours and watch the river go by. It used to drive me crazy. We were buddies, but being 25 years my senior and FIELD & STREAM’s legendary fishing editor, John Merwin was also enough of a mentor that I felt I couldn’t start fishing until he did. So, I’d sit next to him on this big,…

HUGH JOHNSON WAS A good-looking, athletic kid, the kind that people of all stripes are naturally drawn to. I was his hunting and trapping partner. And unlike anyone else around me during high school in Daven port, Iowa, Hughie made me believe that life was wide-open, full of adventure and risk—even a little danger. One cold October night during our senior year, around a warming fire on the backwaters of the Mississippi, he’d prove it—not just to me and our whole class, but to the entire town and beyond. It started as nothing more than an after-school duck hunt, a simple jump-shooting loop through the Mississippi River bottoms, beginning at the WMA parking lot. But after a while, one slough began to look like another, and as dusk began…

I MET GEORGE HERRON AT the Knifemakers Guild Show in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1975. George was a presence, over 6 feet tall, with a massive gut, cold blue eyes, slicked-back graying hair, and a trademark Cuban shirt that tried to contain the gut. His voice was a gravelly bass, the drawl of northern Georgia from whence he came. It was an unforgettable voice that I can still hear. If you were a friend of his, he would never call you by your given name. He would invent a name for you. In my case it was “You Yankee,” as in “You Yankee, you eat grits?” I think he tolerated me because I was very fond of grits with cheese, and because I could shoot. George began making Randall…

THE THREE OF US RUSHED before dawn, flickering figures in headlamp beams, piling gear into Ralph’s 10-foot johnboat. Ralph and I had been chasing ducks up and down the shores of Lake Champlain for a decade or so, and we had a feeling about the November day ahead of us. As we explained to Marcel, a fishing friend on his first hunt with us, the night had been the coldest of the year and had frozen the marshes solid, and that would push the ducks to the lake’s shoreline—and right to our blind. With light creeping into the sky, we were in the two-minute drill, loading shotguns, shells, thermoses, lunches, and binoculars. Then four sacks of puddler decoys and one of whistlers, plus a dozen Canada goose floaters. Finally,…

I MET NORM STRUNG IN November 1971, after he’d issued an invitation to staff members of the outdoor magazine for which I worked to hunt elk with him in Montana. He had moved to Big Sky Country in 1959, put himself through college, taught college, and made a considerable name for himself as an outdoor writer. I had stayed in the East, gotten through college, joined the Army, taken an editing job, and was doing my damnedest to make a name for myself. I discovered on that hunt that one does not go after elk if one is flabby and short of wind. I also discovered I loved elk hunting. And Norm and I discovered that we were born only 45 minutes apart on the same day. The two…