Table of contents for No. 3 - 2020 in Field & Stream

Not sure about you, but I sure as hell can’t wait for deer camp. Typically, for me, the anticipation to get to our camp in New York’s Adirondack Park kicks in around late August or early September. Not this year. I can recall one particularly unproductive afternoon this spring when I killed a good bit of time scrolling through old photos from camp. I’ve also cooked and eaten meals that I usually save for our wall-tent kitchen in November. I’ve even had a couple of dreams about camp. All this, and it’s not even July yet as I write this. Must be an unforeseen consequence of being cooped up at home for the last 94 days. Not that I’ve been counting or anything… I will say that putting together…

EAST TO WEST, from September all the way into November on some waters, the fall bluewing olive hatch is the last, best dry-fly action of the year for most anglers. In some places, like on Utah’s famed Green River, it’s a full-blown event. In others, bugs by the thousands sail downstream under cloudy autumn skies and the trout feast—while we sit in our treestands and duck blinds. If you’re smart enough to be on the water, you’re likely to see the heads of trout bobbing rhythmically. But you’d better be ready. These fish have been cast to all summer. They’ve seen every BWO pattern sold at the local shops. And they can be maddeningly selective. They might be taking duns of only a certain size or only emergers, or…

Let’s get one thing out of the way first: When it comes to bear protection, no handgun is ideal. For years, the default sidearm has been a .44 Magnum, such as the Smith & Wesson 329PD I’ve carried in grizzly country in Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska. Though portable—it weighs 20 ounces empty—it is a beast to control with full-power 320-grain hard-cast loads. This is why many backcountry hunters and anglers have shifted to semiautos, specifically 10mm pistols like the Glock G20 here. The logic is that 15 rounds of easier-to-shoot 220-grain hard-cast bullets trump a six-shooter’s payload. I sent my G20 to Doug Holloway at ATEi to get it tuned up with these modifications, turning the stock pistol into a legit bear fighter. AMMO Underwood Ammo’s flat-nosed hard-cast 220-grain…

AS THE FIRST AUDIBLE WHOOPS AND whistles neared, I heard one of my uncles yell, “Buck up!” and four does bombed out of the spruces. I could hear another deer moving slower, barely ahead of the drivers. I’d just turned 19. My eagerness to bull through cover and hop bogs made me the perfect candidate for pushing brush, but that day I was assigned posting duty on the Spruce Swamp Drive. In a rare command decision, one of the elders told me to stand guard on a small open knoll overlooking the swamp—a prime outlet for escaping bucks. The does bounded through the marsh grasses ringing the swamp and then turned on the burners as they hit the ag fields behind me. I heard the slow-moving deer stop, caught…

BEFORE THE ALARMS go off; before the locals drive in with their truck tires crunching gravel; before the groans of middle-aged men unfolding themselves from bunk bed mattresses; before all this, I lie in my own deer camp bunk and listen to Tommy Krisulewicz in the kitchen. Usually, by the time I’m awake, he’s already prepped the flour: four cups, self-rising, handcranked through the sifter. Tommy chills every tool he uses to make biscuits. He opens the freezer door and grabs the grater, which he uses to grate two sticks of butter into the flour, stirring the chunks with a butter knife to coat them well. Then he cuts the butter into the flour with the pastry blender. Thump-thump-thump. The buttermilk, he says, is a feel thing. Maybe a…

Pat Missed the 8-Pointer, Twice IT WAS OPENING MORNING at our Minnesota bowhunting camp, and our group had gathered in a rough circle in my yard after the morning sit. We were trading stories when Pat straggled in, wearing a sideways grin directed at Dave. “You look like you have a story to tell,” Dave said. Dave Diesslin was a high school shop teacher whose constant grin and twinkling eyes always hinted at mayhem. Pat Townley, Dave’s best friend, was sincere and affable—the perfect foil. “Well, it was still too dark to see when I climbed into my stand this morning,” Pat said. “I just sat there, listening to the owls. When morning finally broke, I got this funny feeling that I wasn’t alone, so I turned and saw…

Boiled down to the essentials, a proper deer camp requires only a few things: a source of fire for cooking and warmth; coffee in the morning and sipping liquor in the evening to enjoy around said fire; and a gun rack—the centerpiece of camp. ¶ A deer rifle is a magnificent thing—a tool perfected to work with the human form to fulfill a timeless purpose. Sitting at the crossroads of design, function, aesthetics, and tradition, it’s no wonder these implements are revered by hunters. ¶ Compared to the old classics, this collection of current-production rifles is diverse, reflecting a variety of shapes, colors, sizes, and most importantly, niche configurations that would have bewildered our forefathers. Purposebuilt rifles for applications like mountain hunting or long-range shooting look quite different than…

IT’S 2 A.M., and I’m thinking that the best thing about puppies is that it’s not long before they’re dogs. That’s grouchy and uncharitable, but I want to be in bed at this hour, not waiting in the backyard for a German shorthair pup to pee. At least I’m not standing in snow. Pick a puppy born between March and May, and those middle-of-the-night outings take place in late spring and summer, and the puppy is just old enough to hunt during his first fall. It’s a long journey compressed into a few months, and there’s a lot to do. SPRING TRAINING Zeke yowls in his crate the whole way home from the breeder. I remember now why I waited until my old dog, Jed, was 11 to start…

FOR A FEE, Travis Reed and Miles Fedinec of Western Sky Outfitters will treat you to a week of misery in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. There are no showers and only restless tent sleep. You’ll burn so many calories each day that you’ll eat about anything when you get back to camp, which may be why the highest praise I’ve ever heard about the food there is that it’ll make a turd. Their hunting camp is not for everyone. But in September, it sits in some of the finest elk country anywhere. It’s all public land but not pressured much, because you really need horses and mules to pack the 10 miles in. Still, it would be bad form to hunt the place, kill an elk, and then share…

SPEED IS KILLER. Shooters love to geek out over muzzle velocity just as much as bowhunters go nuts for compounds and crossbows that keep getting faster and faster. And that’s to say nothing of the natural speedsters we encounter in the outdoors—from a spooked pronghorn buck putting on the jets to a sizzling sailfish peeling line off your reel to a canvasback blitzing into a big-water spread. It was with all of that in mind that we decided to put together this bit of speed reading. So enjoy—and, please, take your time. 4160 Speed, in feet per second, of a 40-grain handloaded .220 Swift—the fastest round David E. Petzal has ever fired 1700 Speed, in feet per second, of a Remington Hypersonic—the fastest shotgun load Phil Bourjaily has ever…

DEAD IN THE WATER Lots of fall olives fail to hatch successfully. Charlie Craven’s Mole Fly is a good cripple pattern for finicky fish. GOOD SWIMMER BWO nymphs swim to the surface, and a small soft hackle like the Partridge & Olive imitates this perfectly LITTLE BUGGER A Griffith’s Gnat is my go-to whenever trout that should be taking olives are taking something even smaller DIY DUN Show the fish something different. Tie your own, or use a pattern that isn’t common locally…

Savage Renegauge Around this time last fall, I was tucked inside a layout blind in North Dakota, waiting for the first group of greenheads to come into the spread. The scene alone was reason for excitement, but on top of that, I was among the first to hunt with Savage’s new semiauto—the Renegauge. The 3-inch 12-gauge’s DRIV (Dual Regulating Inline Valve) system has twin valves that vent excess gas, allowing the Renegauge to cycle light target loads and heavy magnums with minimal recoil. Another selling point is a stock that easily adjusts for length, drop, and cast to fit just about any shooter. By the end of that fall morning, our group of eight hunters had all limited out on ducks—and killed a few honkers for good measure. The…

SURE, YOU COULD just pick up some Victor snap traps on the way to camp. But the old bucket-and-beer-can mousetrap is fun to make and has the potential to save you up to $1.29 (if you already have everything on hand), and it only needs to trap one mouse for you to brag about it all week. And think of it this way: Would you rather kill a buck with a plastic bolt-action from a big-box store or with a self-bow? Exactly. There are all sorts of variations on this contraption, but the basic recipe is the same. First, place a wooden dowel or straightened coat hanger across the mouth of a 5-gallon bucket. Next, thread an empty beer can lengthwise onto the dowel. Then smear peanut butter on…

WHEN I WAS 12 YEARS OLD, I popped the clutch on an ’85 model Toyota 4-Runner, lurched the thing right into a 10-inch hickory tree, and said, “Well, shit.” My dad, having already braced himself for impact in the passenger’s seat, just nodded. It was midday at deer camp, and we needed to kill some time before getting into the stand that evening. So he was teaching me to drive—and cuss. “Put it in neutral and start her up again,” he said. Hunting camp is the perfect place to teach a kid life’s important skills because at midday, what the hell else are you going to do? Knowing how to drive a stick shift and curse properly have both gotten me further than algebra or poetry critiques ever did.…

AFTER OUR GUIDE CUT THE OUTBOARD, I GRABBED MY FLY ROD, STEPPED UP TO THE BOW DECK, AND SURVEYED THE SCENE. It had been a long, exhausting journey from my home in New York to way-way-way-northern Manitoba—four flights in two days, the last of which was a short stint in a floatplane that dropped us off at our fish camp on the Cree River—but the boat ride to the pike grounds was restorative. I was ready to fish. I double-hauled toward the riverbank and stripped my streamer once, and a fish struck. The pike was small, but I couldn’t help but smile at the fact that I had landed one on my first cast. And again on my second… And on my third… All of the fish so far…

AFTER THE SHOT, THE WORLD WENT STRANGELY SILENT. I heard nothing. Before I pulled the trigger, there was bedlam everywhere: The dogs bayed and snarled in a hellish clamor as the bear, 20 yards away, popped his teeth and smashed brush. There was a single howling yelp as a clawed paw found a hound and sent it cartwheeling. Before the shot, I couldn’t hear myself think. The bear stood, facing away, swatting at the five dogs fanned out in front of him. I was gasping for breath in the thicket. Blood from brier gashes dripped into my right eye. The fight had been going on for 10 minutes already. It couldn’t last much longer. I stepped to my left, searching for an open shot, and that meager movement caught…

Toasting s’mores with the group around the campfire, Connor Wakefield, bowhunting fanatic, turns to Katie Robbins, brandnew archer, on the eve of her first-ever deer hunt. “Ready to smoke one in the morning?” he asks. “Smoke one what?” she says. “What kind of camp is this?” “Smoke a deer. Shoot it.” “Dude, I’m a musician,” Robbins says. “‘Smoke one’ means something totally different to us.” Put rank beginners together with experienced hunters, and it takes a little time before everyone speaks the same language. That’s part of the point of this mentored deer camp. From little things like jargon to big stuff like turning wild game into meat, there’s so much to learn about the sport of hunting that total immersion, one-on-one with a mentor, is the most efficient…

THIS MAY COME as a shock to some readers, but I’m not the breezy ray of sunshine you might imagine from reading this column. I’m actually a prickly, antisocial loner who won’t answer your call if I don’t recognize your number. (Once the male-supplements people get your digits, everybody has them.) Being socially distant was never a personal aspiration. But if normal people frighten you and you feel most like yourself in the company of outsiders and whack jobs, it happens. In fact, some of my best friends have been stunned to learn that they are my best friends. A few have been made visibly uncomfortable by the news, as if learning that Mitt Romney’s wife has a crush on them. In such situations, I quickly explain that I…

FIRST SHOT Nosebleed Seat Photographer Nick Trehearne had been watching two big rams fend off smaller males that were trying to get the attention of the sole ewe that was in heat. “This was all fine,” Trehearne says, “until it was time for them to figure out who got her.” Their collisions echoed through the Montana valley, but for their final clash, this ram got distracted by the ewe and forgot to put his head down. The challenger smashed into his nose, and blood gushed. “He was dazed,” Trehearne says, “but he immediately went back to checking the ewe’s scent.” By then, though, the other ram had made his move.…

The Roman army issued its soldiers a dagger called a pugio, and they used it to stab anyone who annoyed them, which was a lot of people. The pugio, however, was distinctly unhandy for anything but puncturing Parthians or carving Carthaginians, so the Romans carried folding knives, lots of which have turned up in excavated legionary camps. Folders were probably an old idea when the legions marched. Although not as strong or easy to clean as fixed blades, knives with joints are safer to carry and take up less space. I’ve never seen a real working cowboy, for example, carry a fixed-blade knife. When your half-wit horse throws you, you’ll want a folder. These days, a folder is also less likely to cause you legal problems. In some places,…

I WAS AT A MULE DEER camp a few years back that had a life-size statue of a bucking rodeo bull. The rule was simple: You miss a deer, you ride the bull. The statue towered just outside the front door, and a photo parade of sheepish-looking riders in camo lined the walls inside. When one of the guys in our group rode the Bronze Brahman for the third time in two days, we all lined up to take photos, again. It actually wasn’t that funny in the moment—but it sure as hell is funny now. He eventually got his buck, his biggest ever, but we all still laugh about the misses. That’s why you need a Wall of Shame at camp—to have a dedicated place where your failures…

Fish camp wouldn’t be fish camp without a shore lunch—and I’m not exaggerating when I say that the shore lunches that the Cree River Lodge guides prepared rivaled the fishing. O.K., maybe I’m exaggerating a little, but they were the best shore lunches I have ever had. Here’s how you can replicate these amazing feasts. KITCHEN UPGRADE: Sure, it’s fun to cook over an open fire, but a stove is easier to work with and gives you more control. A Camp Chef Pro60x ($275; campchef.com) was the workhorse of our shore kitchen. HAVE THE USUAL: This is a shore lunch, so walleye and pike fillets, dredged in seasoned flour and deep-fried in hot oil, must be on the menu. Same goes for fried spuds, baked beans, and creamed corn.…

WHEN I SEE THE OLD FARMHOUSE, THE guilt hits so hard I actually stop in my tracks—as if freezing will somehow check the feeling. But it doesn’t, and I make my way to the cracked concrete slab that used to be the front porch. This visit is long overdue. I’m here to prove the deer camp still has some life left, but it’s not pretty. The paint is peeling, the roof is sagging, and the bushes are as wild as an old man’s eyebrows. The aura of abandonment is so strong it’s almost eerie. The front door remains locked, shut tight against the years. Someone has smashed the window beside it. I consider the glass hanging from the sash, then swing a leg over the sill and duck inside.…

THE TEAL boiled over the far edge of the Arkansas ricefield, each flock a giant smudge on the horizon that formed and dissipated and reformed into the shapes of giant black commas and dark towering thunderheads rising above the distant trees. I needed three more birds for a limit. There might have been 600 in a single flock. I tried not to look at the ground because, at my feet, spent shells littered the rice dike—their sheer volume a candy-apple-red reminder that I should have spent more time on the skeet range over the summer. I’ve never thought it was fair to start off this way. You’d think the early birds would be gimmes, but they are not. There should be an easier on-ramp to duck season. Snow and…

LAST SPRING, I spent a week tearing up broadheads. I shot 20 new models through sides of beef ribs to test durability and pene tration. I further evaluated them for accuracy, sharpness, and consistency. What I learned can help you pick the perfect broadhead for your 2020 season. DULL BLADES DON’T CUT IT Once upon a time, some idiot screwing on a broadhead lacerated a tendon and then sued the broadhead company. At least, that’s the only reason I can think of for why broadheads of the past decade have been as dull as Popsicle sticks. No more. This year, many broadheads are frightening to touch. I used to accept broadheads that could be easily sharpened out of the box, but there are too many scary-sharp models out there…