Indholdsfortegnelse for No. 3 - 2022 i Outdoor Life

ROD COLLIN, a veteran Yukon sheep guide (“Can Sheep Hunting in the Yukon Survive Another Century?”), has spent the last 40 years of his life migrating to the mountains every fall. Each August he leaves his home, his wife, and all their dogs to lead hunters into the high country, and he doesn’t come home until October, when he’s finished grunting in rutting bulls. “I hunt and guide so that I can live this kind of life,” he told me. When most hunters think about annual migrations, they conjure images of southbound ducks, or elk headed for their wintering grounds. It’s easy to overlook the fact that we’re migrating too, as we head to our deer camps and backcountry wall tents. And those instincts to go—when the breeze turns crisp and…

IT’S DARK and raining on the Canadian prairie. Most sane people are still tucked in bed or just putting on a pot of coffee. But the group of us getting soaked to the bone setting out decoys and brushing in A-frame blinds in a cut pea field are all certifiable. We’re jonesing for cupped wings, and the only way to get our fix is to wake up before the ducks and geese fly from their roost waters to these grain fields to feed. The morning is full of the usual anticipation, plus an extra helping. That’s because we’re hunting one of the oldest birds in the world: the sandhill crane, a flying, 4-foot-tall velociraptor with a wingspan of up to 7 feet. At first light their distinctive purrs break the…

HATCHET’S FIRST HUNT isn’t going as planned. Every trainer I consulted offered similar advice for our inaugural duck hunt: Set up with a good view for my young Lab. Take just one other hunter, one who won’t miss. Don’t hunt with other dogs. Keep it short—30 minutes, tops. Make sure he has fun. In other words, control everything you can because you can’t control the ducks. Instead, Hatchet and I are anchoring a line of three shooters plus two guides in a thawing North Dakota cornfield. We’ve already whiffed on a few teal. The setup isn’t bad: We’re hiding in standing corn beside a seep peppered with full body and floating decoys. Hatchet’s been heeling in paw-sucking slop for nearly an hour, trying to keep his footing in the cold…

TYPICALLY, with each issue of the digital magazine, we like to get creative with a unique theme—topics that no brand but Field & Stream could execute. Some standout issues that come to mind are Danger, Drive, Classics, and, most recently, Limits. This time around, though, we thought it best to keep things simple. Welcome to the Fall Issue. If there is one season that deserves its own dedicated issue of F&S, it’s autumn. From the first of September all the way to the end of November, the hunting and fishing opportunities only seem to multiply. Recently, I was chatting with members of the staff, asking them what they were most excited about in the upcoming fall. To my surprise, no two answers were the same. Ryan Chelius can’t wait for…

FOR A STEELHEAD fly fisherman, September is the month of the dry—when a fly skated across the surface is most likely to draw strikes. Later in the fall, when water temperatures dip into the 40s, the odds of getting a fish to look up begin to diminish. The key to success, besides checking your thermometer, is simple to say, harder to follow: Keep the faith. You can’t catch a steelhead on a dry fly if you give up on it after a few dozen casts. I find that the easiest way to resist the temptation of fishing wet flies in September is to leave your fly boxes in the car, taking to the river only a small selection of dries, along with one small wet fly (more on that bit…

AFTER SEPTEMBER’S WARM-UP, things are getting interesting. There’s more of a chill in the air now, and it’s starting to feel like fall. As the leaves continue to turn, it’s starting to look more like fall, too. There is, perhaps, no better place to experience October than on a bird hunt—be it on the grasslands or in the north woods—where the only thing that can outmatch the golden, fiery foliage are the autumnal shades of a game bird’s feathers.…

Continued from Part 1 THE ONLY PLACE I want to be in October is a certain cabin tucked off a back road in a lightly populated corner of northeastern Wisconsin. Called Andy’s Acres in honor of its owner, my friend Andy Cook, it’s been my base of operations for grouse and woodcock hunting for more than 30 years. It isn’t fancy, but it has all the necessary amenities. Dogs are welcome inside, as long as they behave themselves. That wasn’t a problem for Tina, the calmest, most imperturbable dog I’ve ever known. At night she’d curl up on the couch, indifferent to the rabble of other dogs joining her there, then follow me to bed. The core group of hunters at Andy’s Acres hasn’t changed in all the years I’ve…

THE INTRUDER is the culmination of an effort by Northwest anglers to create the perfect winter steelhead fly—one with a pulsing action that suggests bulk while remaining light and relatively easy to cast. Intruder patterns accomplish this by incorporating marabou, fox fur, and/or ostrich herl, all of which breathe in water and, just as important, displace water, sending out vibrations that will attract steelhead. For Intruder fishermen, the first month of consequence is November, when the last of the summer-run fish are turning dark, and winter-run fish, bright as polished silver, are getting their first taste of sweet water. Biologically, winter fish differ from summer ones in that they’re sexually mature when they enter the river system and seldom swim more than a few dozen miles before spawning; summer runs…

IT’S AN INDISPUTABLE FACT: Food tastes better around a fire. Doesn’t matter if it’s fresh elk tenderloins or yet another pouch of freeze-dried grub—nothing seasons a meal better than smoke and flames. Of course, these feasts are even better when you can share the fire with a friend—someone with whom you can trade stories about your day in the field.…

I’VE GOT a shoulder mount of a fine 4x4 mule deer buck on my wall, and if I look at him from just the right angle, I’ll swear that he’s wearing a slight smirk. Shooting that buck was like backlashing your first cast of the day but catching a 10-pound bass nonetheless, or peaking in high school. It was the first time I ever hunted with outfitter Miles Fedinec of FMF Outdoors, my first time hunting mule deer, and, in fact, one of my first times going out West. I’d never even seen a good mule deer buck before. Miles had put up a ground blind on the edge of an alfalfa field where he’d been watching that deer feed every day for a month. A young guide trying to…

I DIDN’T SEE IT COMING. I was in Spain visiting a friend I’d known since fifth grade. We’d driven from Madrid up into the mountains to go hiking, spending the night in a hotel, where my snoring kept him awake all night. We headed out on a 6-hour hike through rough brown country to a lake and back. Strictly speaking, the trail was paved, but paved with the kind of ankle-rolling cobblestones that were perfect for some ancient religious pilgrimage where suffering was the point. I’d felt weak and brittle from the outset, as if fighting off a bad cold. I tried to tough it out, but my head was swimming. After two hours of walking and pondering sins of commission and sins of omission, we crested a ridge and…

BY RHETT WILLINGHAM OF CRAWFORDVILLE, FLORIDA AS TOLD TO DAC COLLINS ILLUSTRATIONS BY AJ FRENA A FULL-TIME firefighter in Taylor County, Florida, Rhett Willingham says he’s always been close with his sister, Addison Bethea. While growing up in the Panhandle, they’ve spent countless days fishing, hunting, and exploring together. The two siblings also try to make time to collect scallops every summer, and Willingham says that ever since the season opened on July 1, Addison had been bugging him about getting out… You can read the full story about Addison’s rescue here. We publish true adventures. Send yours to THTM@outdoorlife.com…

I’M 7 MILES OFFSHORE from Lorain, Ohio, being verbally abused. To get here required an alarm set for well before dawn, an hour-long drive from my motel, and a backbreaking run across a Lake Erie that woke up on the wrong side of the bed. It’s the kind of rough that’s not so shitty you need to call it off, but shitty enough that your calves and ankles are going to feel it later from helping you keep your balance all day. I’m trying to get into a good position to crank in a fish, but I’m not getting there fast enough for a frantic Captain Ross Robertson. “You need to move to the front of the boat right now!” he yells. “How am I supposed to reach the tip…

THE SUN BEATS down and sweat drips off our heads as we unload rented llamas from a borrowed trailer on the west side of Wyoming’s Wind River Range. Dust puffs off the llamas’ coats and sticks to everything: our packs, our tents, and our rod tubes. Our luggage is spread in front of us on tarps, reflecting the luxury we hope pack animals afford. The two-burner stove, rollable table, marinated frozen elk steaks, and hammock feel more suitable for a backyard BBQ than a backcountry camping trip. Why not? we figure. Llamas can carry 75 pounds each. We have four, and seven people. Dehydrated meals, handleless toothbrushes, and Jetboils are for backpackers. We can bring whatever we want. Until we can’t. As my husband, Josh, and our friend, fisheries biologist…

IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF FALL, September is simply the opening act. But it can still be one hell of a show. For waterfowlers, this month brings teal limits in shirt sleeves. For bird hunters, it’s all about dove shoots, followed by a party with jalapeño poppers on the menu. And for backcountry big-gamers, September is synonymous with the sound of bugling bull elk. Not a bad way to kick off the season—and things only get better from here.…

“OH MY GOD,” I said to Randy. “Here he comes.” We plunked to our knees right in the open meadow, crouching tight to the ground as if we could actually hide behind the little wisps of bunchgrass and the last scant aster blooms. We may as well have rolled up in a couple of punch buggies for how well hidden we were. But that didn’t stop the bull. He left three cows skylined at the top of the slope and thundered down a chute between banks of neon aspens before sprinting into the meadow. At 100 yards or so, he slowed to a trot and then, at 50, to a fast walk. At 30 yards, he paused to scream and slobber in our faces. And then he kept coming—straight on.…

WE RODE the horses across the valley and up the mountain until they got too tired to go any farther. Then we tied them off, strapped on our packs, and started hiking. Our guide, Spencer Strike, led me and my friend David Herman past the treeline, into the rocks, and across a scree-covered slope where we planned to ambush a mule deer. We had glassed the buck earlier that day from the opposite slope. He was bedded when we started riding, and when we climbed to a boulder 300 yards from him, he was still down—showing only the tip of an antler. We waited for hours on the cold rocks, covered in sweat, teeth chattering, watching the sun go down, but the buck never moved. I’d only just met Herman,…

IN SOME RESPECTS, the end of fall marks the beginning of the sportsman’s season. Sure, there’ve been ducks and geese to hunt, but the colder it continues to get, the more the shooting improves. On the water, there are still giant steelhead to catch—and oftentimes now, you’ll have the river to yourself. And in the whitetail woods, there’s something in the air. You can almost feel it. The season’s main event—the rut—is about to reach its peak.…

9:27… I JUMPED into the bay to retrieve the harlequin. The water appeared calm—until I started tracking the speed at which the current was ferrying my bird. I quickened my pace, as if I were chasing a giant brown trout headed downstream. At first, with the water barely thigh-high, I could move at a pretty good clip. But as the surface rose to my gut, my progress slowed to a trudge. Before long, I was nips-deep, tiptoeing along and watching the drake drift farther away. To cut the distance, I resorted to making these quasi-anti-gravity leaps off the bay bottom, letting the current carry me between bounds as if I were a spaceman hopping across the moon. The maneuver worked like a charm. Soon my bird was just 10 yards…

WE CALLED IT the Cove—and oh man, it was a gorgeous place to hunt. Run a climber up a tree and I could see along the bank of the creek for 75 yards, with deep views into the hardwoods. A low, flood-prone opening was ringed with greenbrier and blackberry, like a timbered lagoon, and trellised with deer trails. This deep in the woods, this far from the road, the whitetails didn’t seem to mind crossing the opening. There didn’t seem to be anywhere danger could hide. But the tree with the best views, and open shots in the most likely directions, was a tall silver-barked tulip poplar smack in the middle of the Cove. It was void of branches for 30 feet. Perched up there, I wasn’t skylined, but I…

NICK SCHRIVER looks at highways the way a contractor looks at your house. He sees trouble spots that can use some touch-ups, if not total reconstructions. The maintenance supervisor for the Montana Department of Transportation’s northeast field office, Schriver is tasked with making sure roads in his district are intact and as safe as intended. His is no office job. Instead, Schriver drives a thousand miles of two-lane in his MDT pickup at least once a week, noting damaged signs, crumbling asphalt, plugged culverts, and roadkill. Always roadkill. His district includes some of the gamiest landscapes in North America, swaths of open prairie that pronghorn antelope cross on their thousand-year-old seasonal migrations, riverbottoms full of whitetails, and Hi-Line two-lanes dotted with grazing mule deer. Schriver takes me on a tour…

ON A HILLSIDE a half mile below us, three rams graze on lush, green grass. A few hundred yards to our left, four young rams are bedded in a dirt patch. And across the valley, on the far ridge, dozens of white dots flicker in my binoculars. Before today, I had never seen a live Dall sheep, though I had read about them, watched videos about them, edited stories about them, and dreamed about hunting them for years. Now there are Dall sheep all around me. Through my binoculars, the distant sheep look like Mary’s little lamb, fleece white as snow. But through my guide Rod Collin’s spotting scope, turned up to 60X, I can see their stocky, muscular frames. I can see brownish-yellow horns curling back behind their ears.…

I MOVED TO Bozeman, Montana, in the summer of 2010. I was just one of many out-of-staters resettling here, one hunter in an influx that’s gained steam ever since. When I arrived, many local friends—themselves transplants for the most part—suggested I shut the door behind me. Clearly that didn’t happen. Bozeman’s population grew by 43 percent between 2010 and 2020 and has continued to grow during the pandemic. (Strangely, one friend insisted I was too redneck for Montana, an accusation I’ve never been able to wrap my head around.) I chose this beautiful mountain town because it satisfied the checklist I’d made for myself and my family. I wanted a college town with strong schools. A quality airport close by. A state with good gun laws and shooting ranges. I…

THEY COULD’VE BEEN carrier pigeons, flying through the smoke and pops of gunfire on a century-ago battlefield to relay a secret message. But they were just doves, hellbent on eating popcorn. My buddy Ryan and I knelt in the shadow of a tobacco barn that had wisps of smoke curling from its rafters as we waited for birds to sail over the roof and into sight. Most of them had already set their wings and were gliding into the picked field by the time we saw them. As doves go, it was easy shooting. Tobacco barns, where “dark-fire” tobacco leaves are cured by smoke prior to being sold, are still common in western Kentucky, if few other places. Every year, people from town driving through the countryside call fire departments…

TINA WAS in perfect health. Well, almost perfect. At age 11, my orange-​and-white English setter had the beginnings of cataracts, visible as milky-blue reflections, in both eyes. I’d also noticed that she sometimes bumped into things—the doorway to her kennel, for example—in low light. My veterinarian, a setter man himself, assured me that this was not uncommon in dogs her age, and that while the condition wasn’t reversible without expensive surgery, it hadn’t progressed to the point that it would affect her in the field. I loaded Tina into the truck, pointed it west, and hit the road for our September destination: the Badlands of North Dakota. THE BADLANDS, a landscape of buttes, cliffs, canyons, spires, domes, ravines, towers, crevasses, stratified rock outcroppings, broad alluvial plains, smoldering veins of coal,…

IF YOU BELIEVE the legend, noted fly-tier Randall Kauffman was fishing the Deschutes River when he hooked a steelhead just as a freight train was thundering up the canyon. The unnamed fly he removed from the maw of the great trout was christened on the spot. The Freight Train is one of several traditional steelhead wet flies with a railroad theme. Others include the Signal Light, Coal Car, and Flat Car. All have in common a dark hackle, sometimes tied over a white underwing, with a band of bright color at the butt—chartreuse, hot orange, or both. I have fished for steelhead too long to believe that pattern has much to do with success, but fly size, silhouette, and color do, and a black or purple fly sporting a spot…

I HEARD THE DEER long before I saw them—their plodding footfalls through the leaves, their porcine grunts and chuffing, and then the sudden crack of a limb. For much of the year, mature bucks slip through their world like vapor; these sounded like a herd of feral swine on a panicked sprint. It was the morning of November 5—my birthday—and I was in a panic of my own. The Iowa dawn had already broken, and I was standing at the base of my stand tree, still in the business of setting up, when an open-mouthed doe blazed past in easy bow range. On her heels was a tall 8-point buck. Then a heavy-beamed 10 trotted past so close I could smell him. I glanced at my bow, thinking I should…

Continued from Part 2 ON THE WIDE-OPEN prairies of South Dakota, Tina’s compromised hearing wouldn’t be a factor. And even with her foggy vision, she’d be able to see well enough to pick me out against a backdrop composed of grass and sky. That was my working theory, anyway, and while it was heavily laced with wishful thinking, it proved surprisingly accurate. On a November hunt on private land in the central part of the state—a spectacular piece of native prairie that I fancy looked little different from when the buffalo roamed there—it was as if the clock had been turned back and the years melted away. Tina was never better. One sunny, crackling-cold morning, on a sort of annex to the main property that was managed for pheasants, she…

CLINT BREAKS a long silence in the blind. “I read in some waterfowling magazine that this is a bucket list hunt,” he says. “Canvasbacks on Pool 9 is one of the top five hunts to do before you die.” He gets the reaction he’s looking for, a rueful chuckle that breaks the boredom for a moment. No one on the lake is shooting. Yesterday, before I arrived, Clint’s crew hunted all day to kill a few gadwalls and teal. This morning we have one hen gadwall. The cans aren’t flying. Six of us guard a decoy spread bobbing on unimaginatively named Big Lake, a broad, open expanse in the mile-wide maze of channels, islands, and backwaters that comprise the upper Mississippi—bordered by Iowa’s bluffs behind us and Wisconsin’s in front.…

IT WAS LIKE the buck fell from the sky. I’d glassed the wooded creekbottom to my left only minutes before. Then I scanned the opposite timber, stared at my boots for a few seconds, and heard the slightest scuff in the leaves. Or I thought I did. This was my third straight morning in the stand, the point at which I can begin to hear phantom, wishful-thinking noises. But when I turned to look in the direction of the sound, there stood the buck, just 25 yards off, his hooves planted in a scrape. I wasn’t nervous at first. In profile, his tines looked OK but not towering, and his ears were hiding whatever mass was there. But then he arched his neck to reach for the licking branch, and…