Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 4 - 2020 i Field & Stream

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU SAW BIGFOOT WHILE HUNTING? —Pat Mackler, Boise, Idaho I would congratulate him on keeping so much hair when so many have been after it for so long (to plagiarize from “Bear Claw” Chris Lapp), and I would wish him well in the Sixth Great Extinction, which is upon us. DO NICKEL-PLATED BULLETS FOUL A BARREL LIKE COPPER? IF SO, HOW DO I REMOVE IT? —Chris Todd, Springfield, Mass. I haven’t used them in a long time, but my recollection is that the nickel plating, which is very thin, is quickly stripped away by the barrel’s rifling, leaving you with an excellent fouling mix of nickel and copper. You can get both out by scrubbing thoroughly with J-B Non-Imbedding Bore Cleaning Compound. IN THE…

Michelle took our son, Anse, noodling three days before he was born, and every June and July, we host a rotation of nieces, nephews, in-laws, and friends, all of whom are eager to wrestle a flathead. At the end of it, a few are just as eager to go home and never come back. But most can’t wait to do it again. Even seasoned noodlers are a little afraid of noodling. It’s half the fun. You’re going to get cut, beaten, and bruised. But you’ll probably catch the biggest catfish of your life and become the family no one messes with at reunions. To truly make your summer complete, you need to get your arm bit by giant catfish.…

A.J. McClane was The Compleat Angler brought to life. He knew more about fish and fishing than anyone I can call to mind. He was also able to write about it better than anyone else, and he excelled at the unglamorous art of how-to. A.J. knew that the secret to writing great instructional prose is not to make it sound like instructional prose. Read what follows and tell me it sounds like information. I should add that he was one of the nicer guys ever to flog a stream. —D.E.P. I REMEMBER THE RIVER IN spring with its rosy-fingered dawns mirrored on hemlock-shaded pools when bankside cobwebs were spangled with luminous dew, and in the fall, when the sun fell like a golden melon over the edge of the…

There are kids—more than a few—who never hunt or fish with Dad. Some fathers lack the patience or the interest. Some are snatched away by fate. No matter the reason, it’s the youngsters who are left with a hole where their hearts should be. Eddie Nickens could’ve been one of these kids, but he was not. Eddie was sublimely lucky. He ran into Keith Gleason, a former Marine with more than a normal share of compassion. —D.E.P. A MONTH AFTER MY FATHER’S death, Keith Gleason, a 25-year-old man in our church, asked my mother if he could take me squirrel hunting the next Saturday. Keith had helped my dad with the boy’s group at church, and though he knew my father, there was no strong connection between them. He…

I’d seen a lot of things for the first time from that truck. I remember driving alongside pronghorn in Idaho and clocking them on the speedometer. Weeks later, I’d haul one from a sagebrush flat to the tailgate and drive back to camp. Every opportunity that truck had to let me down, it didn’t. No matter where I was—in the woods, in the desert, waking up in a Walmart parking lot—my truck was always there and ready to go.…

It started as the Sagebrush Rebellion and it has now grown into what will be the biggest ripoff in American history—if it succeeds. And it will succeed unless the victims, the American people, raise such a hue and cry as has never been raised before. It is the proposed “privatization” of the public lands, both the national forests and the range lands now under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management. The real plot was slow in coming into the open and only this fall did it finally emerge in its true form. It has been concealed by double-speak, lies, subterfuge, and smooth-talking advocates who seek to rob the American people of their great land heritage before they are aware. Appointing Watt to head interior was like finding…

TED TRUEBLOOD AND PETER BARRETT, our great executive editor, were as close as brothers. After Ted died in 1982, I asked Peter why he had never written about their friendship. Peter glared at me and said, “Hurts too much,” and that was the end of it. The classic excerpts that appear in this section are all from the magazine’s more recent history. That’s because if you go back through old issues of FIELD & STREAM, you notice the writers then hunted and fished, and told us what it was like and how we could be better at it, but as human beings, they remained mute. This was the custom of the time; writers were only eyes and ears, and what they felt and thought as individuals didn’t matter. As…

True friendships in middle age are seldom. So, we take them less for granted. They merit signifiers, and Leroy’s signifiers were light. When I think of Leroy, tall and lank in a stained cowboy hat, I remember his relationship to kinds of light, like a dusk filled with bull bats in the cottonwoods on the band of the Wind River as we fished. Or the mineral-dull winter light of the shrub steppe, hunting chukars on rocky hillsides. Or the gleam in the tall-set black eyes of pronghorns, when Leroy and I knew we’d stalked into range.…

IF THERE IS ONE KIND OF STORY THAT’S generated the most overwhelming response from readers, it’s a story of a gun dog that has passed. As heartbreaking as these essays are to read—try writing one, by the way—they remind us, time and again, that there truly is no greater hunting companion than a loyal dog. “And I Do Not Walk Alone” I’ve sat alone in a sad house and cursed my fortune while the dog curled at my feet had a faith in tomorrow I could not find. I’ve seen dogs break ice to retrieve a duck, stand on point with a thorn in a pad, go down a 70 percent grade to corral a sheep, chase a car cross-town to be part of a family outing, sniff out…

Norm Strung was born into a well-to-do family and sent off to prep school with the expectation that he would go to a prestigious college and become a bank executive. But when he graduated, he got on a train to Bozeman, Montana, put himself through college, and became a writer who did not own a suit and would not have worn one if he’d owned it. Tommy was one of Norm’s many disreputable friends. I met him only once. It was a snowy afternoon, and Tommy, or what was left of him, sat in a corner of Norm’s cabin, wrapped in a blanket, staring up at the flakes falling where elk would leave tracks in them. “Oh God, how I miss them mountains,” he said, and Norm was there…

Ed Zern is an absurdist. He starts off with a sensible-sounding premise (which it isn’t when you stop to think about it) and then quickly descends into the muck of complete unreason. But by the time it’s too late to wade clear, he has you. And the really shameful part is that he got away with this every month, in his incomparable “Exit, Laughing” column, for more than 35 years. —D.E.P. A NUMBER OF READERS HAVE written, asking me to provide them with my crow-shooting system. As both are regular subscribers I can’t afford to ignore their request. The system is based on a study of crow behavior by biologists at Phelps University which showed that crows are actually able to count, but only in multiples of three or…

As we put together this anniversary issue’s cover story, “Modern Classics,” we relied heavily on help from our legendary rifles editor, David E. Petzal, who first joined the magazine on May 28, 1972. CK: What’s your earliest memory of FIELD & STREAM? DEP: I saw my first copy of the magazine in 1953 in Simon’s Sweet Shop in Shrewsbury, N.J. The earliest issue that I bought and still have was August 1956, which was an African hunting special. I was already a Robert Ruark fan, and it was full of him. CK: As you went back and read through old stories for this issue, what era of the magazine impressed you the most? DEP: The 1950s, when I was just starting out in the outdoors, and everything was magical.…

1870–1879 The B&C book’s earliest 200-plus-inch whitetail was taken by Howard Eaton in 1870. The South Dakota whopper measured 250 6/8 inches and would have been a world record but wasn’t officially scored until 1988. 1940–1949 The first whitetail to break the 300-inch mark was found in Portage County, Ohio, in 1940. Known as the Hole in the Horn buck, the giant scored 328 2/8 and portended the Buckeye State’s future trophy potential. 1980–1989 The 300-inch mark was reached again in 1981 with yet another found buck, the now-famous Missouri Monarch—a 333 7/8-inch colossus that remains the club’s all-time No. 1 nontypical whitetail to this day. 2000–2009 The first decade of the new century saw two new world-record bucks, both legendary nontypicals: Tony Lovstuen’s 307 5/8-inch Iowa stud (above),…

EVEN IN 2020, we managed to put virtually every new gun, bow, rod, reel, knife, broadhead, and more through its paces. Some were very good. A few were truly outstanding. And the 20 products featured here were in a class entirely by themselves. While most gear items are offered with the mundane goals of meeting a need and separating you from your money, these are meant to raise the bar—to set new standards of form and function. That deserves recognition. And it’s what makes each an F&S Best of the Best Award winner. Mathews VXR 28 Mathews bows with the Cross Centric Cam System have been so good that they’ve won or finished runner-up in every F&S flagship bow test since 2016. The VXR 28 was the smoothest-drawing, quietest,…

Lefty Page led an improbable life. A Harvard graduate, he began as a prep-school English teacher, served as a Naval gunnery officer in World War II, and emerged from the service an alcoholic so far gone that he was not expected to live long. But live he did, and he remained sober the rest of his life. He applied for the fishing editor position at FIELD & STREAM in 1947, but that had just been taken by a young veteran named Al McClane, so Page joined as shooting editor and gave himself so thorough an education that, in his time, no one knew more, and very few knew as much. Warren Page was not only a hard-case hunter and a dead shot, he was a first-rate reporter with a…

WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT, THE very marrow in the bones of FIELD & STREAM is how-to. It’s gratifying that we are “The Soul of the Total Outdoorsman,” but pulsing just beneath that heart and soul is a loud voice insisting, “Yeah, but how do you do stuff?” And we have always listened to that voice. In all good how-to there is an element of forehead-smiting why-didn’t-I-think-of-that? I saw a classic example of this in Africa when I shot a Cape buffalo cow and our four trackers had the job of getting the 1,200-pound carcass onto our truck. Rather than lift the animal 4 feet up to the tailgate, they dug two narrow trenches deep enough to accommodate the rear tires up over the hubcaps, and backed the truck…

Horace Gardner “Tap” Tapply was the distilled quintessence of Yankee outdoorsman, a flyfisherman and grouse hunter to the bone, but “Tap’s Tips” had universal appeal. Over the course of 35 years, from 1950 to 1985, he probably wrote 2,500 of them, each a perfect creation of 40 to 50 words. Wreathed in pipe smoke, throwing erratic punches at a typewriter, the basement floor littered with yellow copy paper, Tap turned out little jewels of outdoor wisdom, never more or less than five lines, writing with the same discipline as a Japanese haiku poet. —D.E.P. TO MAKE SURE YOU CAN always find a swivel when you need one, string a dozen or so on a large safety pin and fasten the pin to the underside of your shirt pocket flap.…

SOME YEARS AGO, THE NATIONAL Shooting Sports Foundation commissioned a study to find the reasons people stopped hunting. What they found was: lack of opportunity, lack of time, declining health, loss of interest, and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. But No. 1 on the list was a surprise. My friends stopped, so I stopped. Hunting and fishing friends are special among all others. This is because hunting and fishing test people, and therefore test friendships, in a way that nothing else does. It is one of the great truths of the outdoors that a person who is normally cheerful and agreeable can become a first-class son of a bitch when it rains for a week solid, or there is no fish or game, or the…

2017, DAY 4: I had just sat down on a dry, flat rock to rest and take some notes when I heard a gunshot. These woods were brand-new to me, so I couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed as though the sound had come from where Greg was hunting. This was our last day of hunting—and the first without rain. It was getting late in the afternoon, and I knew that if I had any chance at filling my buck tag, I should stay put. Instead, I followed my gut and left to see if my friend needed help. I waited by the trailhead, hoping to see Greg at any moment with a grin on his face and asking for another body to help drag his buck out…

HOW IMPORTANT IS CONSERVATION to FIELD & STREAM? Probably the best measure is how many people we have pissed off by taking the stands we have, and how long we have been willing to do it. In the 1920s, when waterfowlers believed it was their God-given right to shoot every duck and goose they saw, editor Ray Holland had the gall to suggest that we’d better impose some kind of limit on ourselves. In the 1970s, shooting editor Bob Brister angered a great many people, lots of them in the gun industry, when he argued that it was time to switch to steel shot. Conservation editor George Reiger was hated by everyone from commercial fishermen to oil companies to James G. Watt, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior, but…

Conservationists have always known that some things are beyond price. What good is money when there is no breathable air, no clean water, no fish, game, trees, grasslands, farmlands—or food? Of course, some development is inevitable. People must have shelter, and they must have jobs. But does that shelter have to be built along the edge of the Hudson River on landfill that would destroy an important breeding estuary for striped bass? Do ski resorts have to be constructed in the midst of important elk or bear ranges? Must water be contaminated with toxic wastes so that industries can make greater profits to share with stockholders so they can buy vacation homes built on land that once was a duck marsh or a woodcock covert? When profits come first,…

Susan Casey is given plenty of space to explain everything in this article about choosing not to kill, so I’ll add a little about her instead. She is a former editor-in-chief of two major magazines and has also written five books—including one on great white sharks, which involved going to the Farallon Islands and socializing with the awful beasts, and a book on surfers looking to ride 100-foot waves, which, in case you’re thinking of doing it, is twice the height of a wave regarded as extremely dangerous. I’ve killed more elk than Susan, but she has a lot more guts than I do. —D.E.P. THREE HUNDRED YARDS away, visible through the trees, stood the bull we had been looking for. As he ripped up mouthfuls of sawgrass, everything…

ACCORDING TO MARK TWAIN, “THE humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it.” That may explain why the best humor writers are not themselves a bundle of yuks. Ed Zern was reserved; he laughed very seldom. Bill Heavey’s usual demeanor is that of a vulture whose most recent meal is not sitting well. Personalities aside, hunting and fishing lend themselves to humor better than any other sports I can think of. When was the last time you heard a tennis story that made you wet yourself? Come across any really funny golf stories lately? Hockey jokes? I have no idea why this is, but the truth of it is indisputable. There’s…

DANDAN NOODLES have a cult following worldwide, and it’s easy to see why. These lush, spicy, meaty noodles, which originated as street food in China’s Sichuan province, combine a mouth-dizzying array of flavors. Chef Cory Bahr at Parish Restaurant in Monroe, La., is the source for this field-inspired variation, in which ground venison is dressed in a sweet-hot-sour-salty sauce before meeting a mouth-numbing chili oil. Bahr likes his noodles spicy—he’s a Louisianan, after all—but if you want to play it safe, use ¼ cup of the chili oil in step four. This is a great use for meat from an older deer, due to the riot of seasonings. Use any leftover chili oil as you would hot sauce. Added to eggs, it’ll wake you quicker than even the blackest…

I’VE KNOWN I was losing my hearing since 1971. Most of my generation of shooters has gone deaf because when we started in the 1950s, no one wore ear protection. I could have stopped at any point, but a day without gunpowder is like a day without sunshine, so I went ahead and shot, and I am now paying for it. There are four categories of deafness starting with One, where you have some trouble sometimes but don’t yet need hearing aids, to Four, where there’s nothing left at all. I’m high up in Category Three. I have digital, computer-tuned hearing aids that cost a fortune. They help, sometimes, but in the course of a day, I understand maybe 20 percent of what is said to me. Most of…

NEVER MIND HUNTING. NEVER MIND fishing. The adventure story is one of the great cultural staples of mankind. Homer’s epic poem, The Odyssey, which dates to the 8th century BCE, is one of the first adventure stories, and it is still very much with us. Adventure stories are based on the sad reality that most of us don’t get to go on adventures. We’re too old, or out of shape, or tied down by responsibility, or strapped for cash. Moreover, adventures are frequently not fun for the people who have them. They often involve starving, freezing, pants-wetting fear, exhaustion unto death, and sometimes real tragedy. It’s much better to experience all that vicariously. A good writer can take you where you will not be lucky enough to go yourself.…

John Merwin loved fishing, but flyfishing was a sacrament, and he took the magazine’s piscatorially oriented editors streamside to show them how it should be done. There, Merwin hovered like a malignant heron, watching the water, doing God knows what computations, and finally he would cast, and there would be a fish where his fly landed. No one who watched Merwin did not come away awed, and no one was able to duplicate what he had seen. He applied the same grace and expertise to his writing, and readers were often left similarly awed. —D.E.P. AS WE WALK TOWARD THE inn, I can hear the occasional creaking of rocking chairs from the front porch. It’s an old-fashioned kind of place; a horseshoes pit out back and a rolling lawn…

SUMMER OF 2020. GARDENING AND CANNING supplies sold out. Ammo shelves empty. Fishing tackle sales booming. Gun sales breaking all records. Kayaks, canoes, and rafts sitting in the beds of pickups, strapped to the roofs of every imaginable make and model of car. Campgrounds full. At nightfall on an eastern national forest, so many campfires burning that a survey of the landscape from a high point seems to show the Mongol hordes invading. Over the past decade, and especially in the pandemic year of 2020, Americans have rediscovered our public lands and waters in a way that has no precedent. Our politics, for so long mired like an overloaded wagon in rain-wet gumbo clay, is lurching forward to catch up to the people. For most of my life, a…

The squirrel twitched, and Poppa pulled the trigger. The leaves exploded, and the squirrel scrabbled around the trunk uninjured. Poppa’s face clouded. I had guilted him into this outing, our first squirrel hunt together. He’d taken some of his grandsons squirrel hunting when they came of age, but none of them took to hunting. His granddaughter did, but he never asked me to go. So, when I was almost 25, I demanded a squirrel hunt with my grandpa. In the end, he killed one, and I never took a shot. It was perfect.…

In a crystalline moment on a November morning, I knew exactly the right thing to do. And with an animal struggling, I failed. It’s not like I don’t have other failures, but those have no totems to burn them in. If I were an honest man, I’d bleach the skull, clean up the antlers, and hang this magnificent buck on the wall with all the others just outside this dim little room. Instead, I put the whitetail skull back on the workbench near the bins of dirty laundry—and close the door behind me.…

EVERYTHING IN LIFE depends on how you look at it. Take the events of the past 10 months. My life has been pureed by the pandemic. The stupendous income I generated as a freelance writer has dwindled to the point that my vintage Bentley Azure (assessed price $690,000) has had to go. Like many in financial straits, I’m now looking for a Hyundai Accent from around 2010. They used to give those cars away. Poverty has led me to spend a lot of time on websites that claim lentils and chickpeas can be made to taste like prime rib and lemon meringue pie. While my social life is Zooming, it’s not going well. I have trouble relating to people the size of newspaper comics. My background image might not…