Tagging Wilson
January 17, 2014
When I got in the truck with John for my second pronghorn hunt with him in two years, I was expecting a similar hunt to my first: glassing for hours, seemingly without end, and walking the open prairie mile after mile in search of an antelope to shoot. I wasn’t looking for a conventional trophy, […]
Fascinating
December 20, 2013
The River’s Divide: Fascinating. I’ve already ordered the DVD. Perhaps one day I’ll have a deer like Steve to chase.
Trophy Country
December 18, 2013
When you see terrain from a distance it always seems like it’s no problem; like it’s easily navicable. The angles aren’t too steep. This hill’s not that tall. The deception was so thorough as I looked at the mountain from the closed window of the truck that even out of shape and overweight as I […]
Counting Points and Game Management
December 6, 2013
Over at Deer and Deer Hunting Nicole McClain makes an interesting point that gets lost in much of the hoopla of hunting television and magazine coverage: that hunting shouldn’t be about killing an animal with a large number of points, but about the opportunity to participate in killing and retrieving an animal. In her article […]
A Fortunate Mistake
December 1, 2013
On the first day that we decided to hunt a piece of public land about ten miles north of Upton, WY* we went straight to a spot where John had seen a group of does regularly. Just after sunrise they would feed out of the pine and cedar woods and on to the sagebrush flats, […]
Ten or Ten
November 28, 2013
When we woke up it was cold. Damn cold. A frigid six degrees in the Black Hills of Wyoming. It was what I had been waiting for in three seasons of hunting mule deer there. Cold and snow. Fresh snow. Four to six inches of it covering up everything. A perfect day for tracking. After […]
Busting My Cherry: Tagging Jackson
November 28, 2013
Our third day of hunting was a miserable day. The rain was pouring down, the wind was blowing from the north at nearly thirty miles per hour, and it was hovering just below forty degrees. It was a terrible day for hunting. The pronghorn, seemingly smarter than John and I, were bedded down and weathering […]
Why Deer Hunters Should Be Coyote Hunters
November 25, 2013
Why all deer hunters should be coyote hunters (PDF): To date, the SRS research has found that coyotes are, in fact, taking a tremendous toll on fawns. Of 60 fawns monitored over the course of the work, only 16 have survived until autumn, when they are old enough to be safe from predation and can […]
Busting My Cherry: The Search Begins
November 11, 2013
After my badly hurt yet very determined to get away muley buck leaped out of his bed he took two bounds before he was out of sight just over a small ridge about thirty feet in front of us. Rather than make another mistake by following him and pushing him any harder than we already […]
Busting My Cherry: The Moment Comes
November 9, 2013
You never know how you’re going to handle killing of a large game animal until the moment comes. Even though you’re no stranger to killing things, the deliberate killing of a deer is an altogether different proposition than busting up a bunch of rats or birds. You think you’ve practiced and prepared for this moment. […]
A Hunter
November 9, 2013
I wasn’t always a hunter. My father never taught me the skills needed to hunt because he wasn’t a hunter either. Nor his father before him. Sure, dad might have shot a squirrel or two on the odd occasion from the back porch of his grandmother’s cabin in rural North Florida, or killed a woodpecker […]