Innholdsfortegnelse for Vol. 126, No. 1 - 2021 i Field & Stream

IT'D BEEN A WHILE. So long that I’d almost forgotten that feeling. It hit as I was standing on the bank of a canal, holding a .223 and waiting for the bull alligator to break the surface for air. If all went to plan, this would be our third tagged gator during our stay with the crew at Pintail Hunting Club. I did my job on the first two, which is to say I stayed the hell out of the way. Those hunts were wild to watch, but I can’t honestly say I felt much during the action. That all changed once it was my turn. After the gator was solidly hooked and progress had been made in easing him toward us, I took the rifle and moved to…

FLY ANGLERS in the eastern half of the U.S. are eagerly anticipating a hatch 17 years in the making: the Brood X cicada emergence. From around mid-May through June, billions of these chubby bugs will be singing in trees from Georgia to Pennsylvania to Illinois. They don’t belong in the water, but many will end up there anyway, and fish will respond just as you would expect. “When cicadas hatch, everything eats them,” says guide Patrick Fulkrod, founder of the South Holston River Company in Tennessee. “It’s incredible. I’ve had birds diving for them, and I’ve even seen squirrels swimming in the river after them. Also, fish that you’ve never seen eating aggressively on the surface, like carp, stripers, and catfish, will go for cicadas.” Tom Baltz is a fishing guide…

MY FRIEND THOMAS’ INVITATION to join him on an April turkey hunt in Texas sounded almost like an apology. “Hey, man,” he said, “I know turkey isn’t your thing, and I understand if you don’t want to go. You’d have to fly to Little Rock, and then we’d drive 500 miles to the eastern Panhandle.” He added that the outfitter charges $1,200 for three days and lets you shoot only two birds instead of the state’s limit of four. “But he’s got a pile of birds and I’ve been going for forever and I just thought I’d ask.” “Where do I send the check?” I said. To understand this moment, you need to know that thanks to COVID-19, I’d hardly left the house for 14 months. During that time, I’d…

DRIVING THROUGH the winding hollow in the dark, I followed my friend Avery’s taillights just ahead. On either side of us were steep wooded slopes creating a canyon just wide enough for the ribbon of a road we were on and the small creek beside it. If it weren’t for the internet, the place would be totally hidden. We parked before the weekend crowds showed up. Just down the road, there’s a once-sleepy swimming hole that now sees as much traffic as Rockaway Beach. People come for miles to camp and blast music and leave behind takeout containers and flip-flops. With so much activity on such a small stream, you wouldn’t think there’d be any brook trout here, but there are. The evening before had been a weeknight, and with no…

SOME GOBBLES are so faint, they sound like the briefest roar of a distant crowd. At least I thought it was a gobble. I cutt. The crowd roared. I reached for my cell phone. “Turkey just started gobbling,” I tapped out. “Tell dogs to hang on, please.” For me, hunting turkeys in the time of COVID meant crating the dogs before I left in the morning so they wouldn’t bomb my wife’s Zoom meetings, then getting home before they got too antsy. Sometimes I’d walk them and go out again, sometimes we’d walk, then nap. My self-imposed 8:30 quitting time put me crosswise of the birds’ natural schedule. Normally turkeys gobble hard first thing, shut down, then start up again about 8:30 or nine o’clock. It was 8:30 on the…

MANY OL READERS have grown up with this publication, and in a lot of hunting families, as in mine, the Outdoor Life tradition is passed down from generation to generation, like a beloved heirloom shotgun. You’ll find old issues stashed away in libraries, deer camps, and outhouses all throughout the country—​each tattered copy its own thread of a 123-year history. So it’s with more than a little sadness that I deliver this news: Outdoor Life magazine will not run in print this year. The economics of the print business can no longer support our legacy title. But it’s with much more than a little excitement that I also announce that now Outdoor Life will publish four digital editions annually—the first of which you are reading now. Instead of arriving in your mailbox, our digital editions will…

THERE ARE PLENTY of mysterious tales about Thomas Bay in Southeast Alaska, which prospectors named “Devil’s Country” in the early 1900s, but the most prevalent is the legend of the Kóoshdaa Káa. Tlingit stories say the Kóoshdaa Káa is a shapeshifting otter-like creature that lures people into the wilderness, sometimes tricking them to their deaths. Many Tlingit, whose people have lived in Southeast Alaska since time immemorial, won’t go into Thomas Bay to this day. They believe it’s haunted. Growing up in Southeast Alaska, I’d heard stories of the Kóoshdaa Káa being a furry monster that could shapeshift into the form of a loved one, or play tricks like mimicking the sound of a crying baby to lure you into the woods or out to sea. Once captured, its victim would…

WE'RE PULLED OVER on a gravel bank in interior Alaska, peering down a series of Class IV rapids named the Toilet Bowl. There are five of us in three 30-year-old rafts. No one wants a swirlie. Only one of us, Mary Katherine Fields (everyone calls her MKat), knows how to paddle. She once set a record for successfully kayaking an 80-foot waterfall. The rest of us? Not so much. Dry bags, rods, fly boxes, a chain saw, and cases of Coors Light are strapped down with bungee cords, zip ties, and fishing netting. We’re the Clampetts on rafts, and we’re making a DIY trip down Lake Creek, a blandly named river in a part of the state often overlooked by most of us in the lower 48. MKat pops up and…

HAVE YOU EVER WORN A COWBOY HAT WHILE HUNTING? BE HONEST. —Ronald Sullivan Jr., San Antonio, Texas In November 1977, while driving from Cody, Wyo., to Billings, Mont., to go on an elk hunt, I hit an icy patch on Highway 72 and went off the road in spectacular fashion while listening to Linda Ronstadt sing “Blue Bayou.” For reasons that are now unclear, I figured this entitled me to wear a cowboy hat, so I bought one in Billings, a very handsome silver-gray Stetson. On the hunt, people were too polite to say anything, but the mirror did not lie. So I gave my Stetson away and never wore another. I’M RUNNING OUT OF ROOM IN MY GUN SAFE. SHOULD I TRADE SOME GUNS FOR A HANDFUL OF REALLY…

SO YOU REALLY, most sincerely, want to get away from it all? I have bad news for you, Bunkie. There’s a Florida family named Means who have made a hobby of finding the most remote spots in the U.S. Of the 33 states they’ve visited, the average remotest spot was 6.8 miles from a road and 0.8 mile from a trail, and two-thirds of these places had cell phone coverage. This does not speak well for your chances of seclusion. However, I have a solution. It’s called the caribou, and it lives in the far north where the weather and the bugs are so extreme that the only people who can live there are the Indigenous ones who have had thousands of years to adapt. I got my caribou-hunting start…

FOR SOME REASON, when I think of the trip, what I remember most is the smoke—first from the tailpipe of the lime-green Ford Pinto that belched a black cloud at every ignition and kept coughing until the speedometer hit 30. On top of the Pinto was a 17-foot Grumman canoe, and inside the Pinto were me, my best friend Tim, a disassembled bike, and enough camping gear to last a week. When we rumbled out of my folks’ driveway, my dad turned to my mom and said, “They’ll make 100 miles if they’re lucky. Don’t stray far from the phone.” Tim and I had just graduated from high school, and with a full week off from our summer jobs, we were off to northern Wisconsin to camp, fish, and run rivers.…

I DIDN’T KNOW HOW the kid got his pudgy hands on my little secret. I just knew I was dead meat. I was 12, and I’d torn some pages out of a buddy’s magazine and stuffed them into a soft glasses case that my brother Frank never used, then jammed that behind the baseboard heater beside his bed. No one would ever find it there. Weeks passed, and almost every day after school I went hunting with my best friend, Jo. We were too young to hunt with real guns on our own, but it was all the same to us. We carried our BB guns and roamed the woods like feral cats, chasing chipmunks and starlings and frogs. Then, one day, the youngest of the toddlers my mom used…

I’M NO SHUFFLEBOARD PLAYER, and the odds of my learning to play inside a West Texas water-silo-turned-hunting-camp powered by solar panels seem slim. But the 22-foot, regulation-size shuffleboard table is here nonetheless, and my three aoudad hunting companions—all of whom have been into the whiskey—are goading me to slide a puck across the sand. “I’ve never played shuffleboard in my life,” I say. “You weren’t a long-range shooter until this morning either,” says the outfitter, Jim Breck Bean. “But you did fine with that, so step up. It’s your turn.” FAR AFIELD I’ve been wrestling with it all day, having taken a 400-yard shot on an aoudad— and with a 6.5 Creedmoor no less. What would I say for myself if asked to explain? I’ve written some not-so-nice things about…

A big bull caribou, with his tall sweeping rack and snow-white mane, is one of the most iconic animals of the North. And in my opinion, caribou is the perfect big-game species for lower 48 hunters dreaming about their first Alaska adventure. Caribou are a species of constant population change, and some dwindling herds, like the Leaf River herd in Quebec, have been closed to hunting in recent years. While some of Alaska’s caribou herds have been in decline, don’t let that dissuade you, because there are plenty of herds up here that are booming. You can hire a guide or go the DIY route. You can hunt from road access, do a float hunt, get dropped on a ridge or lake by air taxi, or climb into sheep country…

THE LURE OF THE LAST FRONTIER struck me well before I learned to hunt. With Jon Krakauer pages in hand and a middle schooler’s fascination, I figured it must be where true outdoorsmen go to test themselves. Someday, I thought. Fifteen years later, with 50 pounds of gear packed tight on my back, I got my turn, Alaska bound for my first drop-camp caribou hunt. I met my three friends—Tess Rousey, Sierra Langbell, and Nicole Belke—in Anchorage before making the flight to the small fishing town of Kotzebue. Our women-only group raised a few eyebrows on that tarmac. But these women aren’t just my friends; they have played a huge role in my development as a hunter, and I was eager to show them they could count on me. Planning an…

ONLY 20 YEARS AGO, half of all whitetail bucks tagged by hunters were just 1½ years old. Barely 1 in 5 was 3½ or older. Since then, the yearling take has steadily dropped while the mature buck kill has skyrocketed. New data from the National Deer Association (NDA) shows that hunters have set an all-time record for the percentage of mature bucks in the whitetail harvest. NDA chief conservation officer and deer biologist Kip Adams was shocked by the news. “We’ve seen the yearling buck kill drop gradually over the years, but when it fell to just over 30 percent of the 2017 harvest, I was sure we’d bottomed out,” he says. “When I saw this new data, I realized we’d reached a cultural shift.” Hunters, on a large scale,…

“BUT EVERYBODY HUNTS on Thanksgiving,” I insist year after year in late November. Not true, says my wife. She’s from an Eastern suburb where no one hunts at all. She knows plenty of people who don’t hunt on Thanksgiving. She can name them—and my name is on the list. What’s worse, Pam believes that on this holiday, a man’s place is in the home, cleaning, peeling potatoes, and making token dishes like cranberry relish. This applies not only to Thanksgiving but also to the days leading up to it. Given the amount I get to hunt, I shouldn’t complain. But I do. “Thanksgiving is a harvest celebration,” I say. Someone should do some harvesting, and as she doesn’t hunt, that someone should be me. But that goes over about as well…

MY BUDDIES AND I take an end-of-turkey-season road trip to Nebraska every May. There’s a particular sand hill on the farm we hunt, and it’s where I usually spend my final day of the season. Nate and I found the spot on the last morning of the trip a few years ago, when a longbeard that had roosted alone in a stand of cottonwoods flew down, gobbled at us in a frenzy, then walked straight away into what appeared to be a square mile of nothing. We followed him, calling as we went to keep tabs, with no cover to hide us save the breaks in the landscape and scattered yuccas. The turkey answered every note—but each time from farther away, until we couldn’t hear him at all. But we…

YOU LIFT THE ROD. The guide screams. You know you’ve done a Very Bad Thing. “Not the trout set! For #@&*! sake, you never trout set!” I would rather live that classic old nightmare—standing in front of my high school homeroom class buck naked—than hear those words and feel the guide’s glare burn through the back of my neck gaiter. I have blown a thousand shots at fish, but nothing comes close to the debilitating humiliation of the trout set on a tarpon strike. The first three times this happened all came within the span of a single half hour. Fifty tarpon were rolling a half mile off the Everglades mangroves, and I can remember the sweat dripping down my face as a tarpon followed my fly. I’d already blown…

A MOUNTAIN CLIMBER I know, talking about peaks he no longer attempts, once told me, “Gravity wins in the end.” His words came back to me recently as I lay on my back on an icy path in the Poconos, wondering how much damage I’d done. The fall happened so fast that my walking stick remained upright for a second before it fell too. It was one of those old-man-in-a-bathtub falls—unexpected, uncoordinated, and uncushioned. By the time my companion returned from around a bend ahead, I was again upright. “Are you OK?” she asked. “It’s really nice up ahead.” Then she saw my face. “Or we could just, you know, go home.” Which is what we did. The next morning, we drove until we found a hardware store that stocked…

THE FOG ROLLS UP THE MOUNTAIN, hiding the old-growth forest below us and smothering any hopes we might have had of spotting a blacktail buck. We knew we wouldn't see, let alone shoot, a deer today, but a little walk helps us escape the claustrophobia of our two-man tent. Before handheld GPS became reliable and popular, wandering around in the mountains of Southeast Alaska on an intensely foggy afternoon was a good way to get lost—for good. But even with GPS marking our way through the gray, it’s obvious that the only thing to do is keep waiting for the haze to lift. “Nietzsche wrote about mountain climbing and never left his room,” says Bjorn Dihle as we stare into the nothingness. “I always think about that when the mountain is…

"WE COULD PROBABLY GET THERE," said Striker Overly, owner of Alaska Arctic Adventures. He was running his hands through his disheveled hair and laughing maniacally like the strung-out adrenaline junkie he is. “But the plane might flip over when we land. I’ve landed in high winds plenty of times, when it’s been so bad that my guys need to be there to grab the wings as soon as I hit the ground. I’m not doing that—if I can avoid it.” I was partnered with Beth Shimanski, director of marketing for Savage Arms, and our spike camp was located one and a half hours upriver by airplane. Caribou have long tickled the top of my bucket list. It’s also been a lofty dream of mine to kill a humpback bear. I went…

A SHOTGUN BLAST echoes dully down the mountainside, muffled by the snow-covered slope. Something white tumbles from the rocks at the summit and gathers speed like a snowball. My buddy Kali Parmley has already hoofed it half a mile straight up, and now she’s running in knee-deep snow to reach the dead ptarmigan before a bald eagle does. After losing one hard-earned ptarm to an eagle, Kali knows she has to haul ass. By the time she gets ahold of the bird, she’s retching. That echoes too. Lower 48ers tend to think of Alaska as a frozen wasteland with subzero temperatures and snow stacked to the rooftops in winter. That’s true in certain parts of the state, but not here. As one of the volcanic islands that make up Alaska’s…