Innehållsförteckning för Vol. 228, No. 3 - 2021 från Outdoor Life

I’M NOT MUCH OF a record-keeper when it comes to hunting. I have no idea how many ducks I shot last year. I’ve never had any of my bucks or bulls officially scored. I can’t remember the last time I put a tape measure to a turkey spur. After all, you can’t measure the things I’m really after, like the joy, hope, awe, frustration, and heartbreak of hunting. But there is one record I do keep: I’ve killed at least one whitetail deer every season since I started hunting as a kid. Some seasons I’ve shot multiple big bucks (there have been plenty of small ones mixed in too), while other seasons I’ve been lucky to tag a doe. But for 23 seasons and counting, I’ve killed at least one whitetail…

JASON HEWETT KNEW how to grow food and habitat for wildlife. He’d been managing land in one way or another since he was 16 years old, and he oversaw 15,000 acres covering three counties in South Carolina. Those properties raised plenty of quail, but they weren’t producing the quality of deer Hewett had hoped for. “We had a lot of resources, and 600 acres of food plots with the average food plot at 3 acres,” Hewett says. “But we weren’t growing 160-inch deer.” He knew South Carolina wasn’t a typical big-deer state—the state record is 176—but still, Hewett had a feeling the bucks on his properties weren’t reaching their full potential. So Hewett called Craig Harper, a University of Tennessee professor with a reputation for a new way of thinking about…

IT WAS DARK AS A TOMB as I slipped through the sagebrush and down a steep slope, my flashlight slicing through the black. The moon and stars were smothered by low, scudding clouds. Snow was in the air. I’d arrived at the tent camp in Utah after nightfall the evening before and had no idea what the country looked like in the daylight. It was 1961, and it was my first mule deer hunt. As daylight broke, I was astounded to find myself in a sea of sagebrush. There wasn’t a tree in sight. I was born and raised in the East, and the whitetails I’d hunted there were always in the woods. Doubt crept in. My father-in-law, who was a local, had told me to slowly work my way…

WHENEVER SOMEONE in my old Michigan deer camp tagged a whitetail, that evening they would take a shot of kirschwasser, a smooth, clear, fiery brandy distilled from cherries. Even if the hunter was a few years shy of 21, their lips would touch the glass, and they’d feel a hint of the heat on their tongue. Why? Tradition. All deer camps and deer hunters have their traditions. Some camps have been holding kangaroo courts for decades. If you’re found guilty of missing a deer, your shirttail gets cut off, though with a properly spirited defense—​the more outrageous, the better—the sentence might be suspended. Some traditions might seem nonsensical, but they are a vital piece of the glue that binds hunters together from one season to the next. However, one consequence is…

THE WORST WAY to learn about corrosive ammo is to shoot some in your rifle and then let the gun sit for a few weeks. In my case, it was surplus 8mm machine-​gun ammo that I’d shot through my Yugoslavian Mauser. After reading about how some military primers can rust a gun, I ran to my safe and held the rifle’s barrel up to the light. What had once been a shiny bore looked like a mine shaft. I scrubbed the barrel for hours with every solvent I could find before I realized that my rifle would never be the same. And then I realized something else: I had nothing to lose. There wasn’t a thing I could do to the gun to devalue it further. It was a blank…

MOST PEOPLE pay no attention to the pancaked predator, the unlucky ungulate, or the vaporized vermin they speed past on their way to their next pickleball match. But we hunters, who take a special interest in all creatures and who deal more than most with life and death, take notice. We slow down and look on with at least a modicum of morbid curiosity, if not a pang of hunger. Here’s how we remember five of the fatally flattened. One Tough Trucker This happened in the early 1970s, when truckers were heroes in the less cultured parts of the United States and country music was filled with songs about them. An acquaintance of mine drove an 18-wheeler in Montana, and one night, along the eastern part of I-90, he saw a…

I SHOT my biggest buck over a cut cornfield not a quarter mile from the farmhouse where we were staying. He stepped out just before the end of legal shooting light, and when I first spotted him, I nearly fell to pieces. My hunting buddies and I had all kinds of trail-camera pictures of this deer, and I’d been hunting him for months, but this was the first time I’d seen him on the hoof. I held it together just long enough to make the 100-yard broadside shot. Even after a half hour of waiting, I was still shaking as I walked up to him. I’ve since hunted bull moose and elk deep in the wilderness and caribou on the tundra. But no critter has ever gotten to me quite…

SAVE YOUR PENNIES. Keep detailed spreadsheets. Crunch the numbers. Diversify your portfolio. Hire a consultant to manage your assets. Discuss short- and long-term strategies. Plan for the worst and hope for the best. We’re not talking about retirement planning. This is how many hunters are tackling the big-game draw system in many Western states. Because there’s a growing boil on the backside of hunting in the West. It’s called point creep, and it’s not pretty. Point creep is the spawn of the preference point system. Generally speaking—because every Western state is different—every year that a hunter applies for a limited-draw tag and doesn’t get it, they can buy a preference point. Think of these as a loyalty program: The more you buy, the more likely you are to draw a tag.…

WHEN MY DAUGHTER was first learning to shoot, she faced a challenge. She is, by most measures, a left-handed person. But we didn’t own any left-handed rifles and couldn’t really afford to buy one. She shot our old Remington Gamemaster pump .22 pretty well, even though the spent cartridges flew across her line of sight as they were ejected. Shooting the family deer rifle, a Remington Model Seven in 7mm-08, was another story. We shot at paper, we shot at balloons, we shot at steel. She missed a lot. There seemed to be no consistent reason for success or failure. She got frustrated and didn’t want to go with me to the range. I practiced every kind of patience I could muster. I encouraged, cajoled, hugged, never once berated. This…

AARON MIESSE grips the handgun between the big and second toes of his left foot and pulls back the slide with his right. He’s wearing his uniform of a dark-gray T-shirt, loose-fit jeans, and a backward ball cap. Beside the folding chair he’s perched in is a pair of Sketchers that look like clogs because their backs are permanently smushed. This is, after all, a guy who slides off his shoes countless times per day to drive a car, eat a pizza, or shoot a Smith & Wesson M&P. “Don’t let the gun own you,” Miesse tells me. “You have to own it.” I have ostensibly driven to far-western Ohio for a shooting lesson, though I also want to see for myself if the YouTube videos of the double-​amputee long-range shooting expert…

IF YOU WANT TO PROVE once and for all that your gun means no more to you than a hammer on your workbench, etch your brand into it with a Dremel tool. That’s exactly what someone did to the side plate of my truck gun, once upon a time. I couldn’t see the artwork at first, but that was a ploy by the gun shop owner who had the revolver for sale. It was sitting under glass with its good side up—and marked with a suspiciously low price tag. It would’ve gone unnoticed without the price tag, because it was a Smith & Wesson Model 64, the stainless K-frame military and police revolver with fixed sights—one of the most vanilla handguns ever made. Picture the archetypal 4-inch .38 six-shooter carried…

TWO FALLS AGO, my buddy Ryan was chasing after one of his ill-mannered beagle hounds, which wasn’t on the track of a rabbit or anything else but just running for the hell of it. Eventually the beagle led my friend through an abandoned hog farm and across the levee of one of the manure lagoons, where he flushed 50 ducks. Ryan, out of breath from running and screaming at the dog, took note for later. “We need to remember that st pond next duck season,” he said. “It was jammed full of birds.” You won’t hear wetlands advocates championing the preservation of hog lagoons the way they do for the Chesapeake Bay or Delta Marsh, mostly because ponds full of pig poop are an environmental travesty. They do serve a…

JARED SCHEFFLER’S IDEAL ARCHERY SHOT on a whitetail buck is either quartering to or facing head-on. He hunts exclusively from the ground. Scheffler shoots a longbow, and he uses heavy arrows that are tipped with stout cut-on-contact broadheads. He wants his shots to be so close that they’re measured in paces. Because of his setup and his style of hunting, Scheffler argues the forward-facing shot is even better than a broadside shot. He has no problem punching his arrow through a big buck’s front leg bone. If a deer ducks the string (as mature bucks so commonly do), a head-on shot is still likely to hit vitals. If a deer ducks on a broadside shot, he’ll likely hit no man’s land. Plus, when Scheffler stalks into close range on a mature buck,…

IF THE BACK 40 is a hunter’s domain, then the backcountry is a deer’s turf. Humans don’t make the rules here. There’s no development, no granular herd management, no excessive gear, no distractions. Instead, we must adapt to the deer’s behavior. We learn new terrain, scout on the move, glass patiently, strategize quickly, and improvise when a stalk goes to hell. Hunters prepare mentally and physically simply to survive where deer thrive. The stakes feel higher in the backcountry, and success more elusive. And that’s part of the appeal. In the wilderness, most every subspecies of deer still exists as nature intended. It’s where we can hunt deer that, despite never having seen a human before, are still experts at eluding us. True deer hunters value wild deer, and the…

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FOR ME, the ideal day of fly fishing begins with a good drive. Which, I guess, is convenient, considering that, aside from a stint in Montana when home was a double-wide trailer unremarkable in every respect save for the pristine stretch of the Missouri River that cut through my backyard, I’ve always lived an hour’s drive from the nearest trout water. For as long as I’ve been fly fishing, almost every outing has begun with a journey. Even now, nearly 24 years since I first cruise-controlled along a trout route, it’s tough for me to pin down why, specifically, I enjoy this time behind the wheel so much. Sure, I get a kick out of the anticipation that comes with gearing up and loading everything into the car. I’ve also always…

AT MIDNIGHT, the sun down finally but still casting its wick on the horizon, I hear the howling of a wolf. Or is it? A wind has picked up, and wind plays tricks with the ear, especially when the gravel bar you’ve camped on is decorated by twists of wolf scat and mounded with blueberry bear poop. Halfway into the float and we’ve already seen 16 grizzlies. Well, bear or no bear, wolf or no wolf, I have to pee. My brother’s voice is muffled by his sleeping bag. “Remember the fence,” he says. A string pulsing with 7,000 volts of electricity surrounds our tent—enough juice, the manufacturer claims, to deter a half-ton Alaskan bear. One shudders to think what would happen if one shuffled too close with one’s zipper…

I DIDN’T EXACTLY grow up in the bed of a pickup truck, but I spent a lot of time there, as well as in the cargo area of a Chevy Suburban and an Oldsmobile station wagon. Being one of the three youngest in a large family, I was often relegated to what my dad called the “way back” portion of whatever vehicle we owned—as in, “David, Mary, and Barbara, get in the way back.” During the fuel crisis of the 1970s, my two younger sisters and I rode in the hatchback of a Dodge Omni. Dad would open the hatch, like you might to retrieve groceries, and the three of us would crawl out. One “way back” that I loved riding in was the covered bed of my best friend’s…

I FLINCHED when I heard the shot. It was one of those involuntary, nearly full-body shudders that occur when the unexpected happens. The sun was barely painting the tops of the pines, and I was so immersed in the act of looking for deer, the rifle’s crack jolted me badly enough that I knocked my spare hat off the treestand seat. The shot came from up the hill and back toward the pond, but it was close enough that it could only have been my buddy on the trigger. Good, I thought. I’d taken a big 8-pointer off this farm the year before, and I didn’t want to shoot another solid buck before my pal had a chance. After all, it was his family’s farm, not mine. A minute or…