Field & Stream Vol. 126, No. 2 - 2021

IT CAME DOWN TO THIS: Just how far would I go for a damn steelhead? My fly fishing guide had spent the better part of the last hour plowing past the other drift boats on the Deschutes to ensure we’d be the first ones to reach the Power Line Hole—a known steelhead hotspot on the river. “We could pull 10 fish out of there if no one has messed with it,” he told me. I’d netted two steelhead on the trip so far and had learned two things: 1. The steelhead cliché is true: The tug is the drug—and I wanted more. 2. The murderously slick rocks of the Deschutes live up to their rep. In fact, wading that river was one of the more dangerous things I’d ever done…

ANNE GORDEN-VEGA notices a yellowish glint in the brush and slams on the brakes. She’s out of her Chevy Colorado pickup before I can even process what’s happening. The 62-year-old art teacher is basically operating on muscle memory as she dives into the brush with a flashlight, searching for the Burmese python she knows is there. Gorden-Vega certainly understands more about Florida’s ecology than I do, even though I’m from here and she’s originally from Missouri. In fact, she knows more than most “herpers,” people who head out nightly into the Everglades to scan the coco plums and pond apple trees in search of invasive reptiles. She’s also aware that she has to be careful. Pythons are constrictors that kill by biting and then wrapping tighter and tighter until their prey…

JUST MINUTES AFTER I DOVE into the water, out of the blue, something hit me so hard I thought it was the propeller of a boat. The blow tore my diving mask off, and I felt a tug at my hand. I shot to the surface, expecting to see a craft motoring away. Instead, I was face-to-face with a 9-foot alligator. We were only feet apart, staring at one another. I reached around to the back of my head and felt hair in places I’ve never felt hair before. I didn’t really comprehend it in the moment, but parts of my scalp must have been hanging in flaps. When I brought my hand back, it was covered in blood. I’ve been trained to deal with shark encounters, so I knew to stay as…

THERE’S SOMETHING in the human psyche that requires us to slay monsters. Werewolves must be shot with silver bullets. Vampires must have wooden stakes driven through their hearts. Witches must be burned at the stake.  All of these beings are imaginary, but in the animal kingdom, there’s a monster that is not. He goes by the names of nyati and m’bogo and Syncerus caffer. We know him as the Cape buffalo. Probably no one has done so much to cloak the buffalo in monsterhood as the writer Robert Ruark. In the early 1950s, Ruark made an extended safari to Kenya and Tanganyika, hunted Cape buffalo with PH Harry Selby, and discovered that he was petrified of the beasts. As Selby’s trackers put it, Bwana Ruark had “bad legs and much…

BEFORE THE ACCIDENT, it was a beautiful day. We caught mahi-mahi, tuna, and a wahoo. We were joking about how we were just a marlin shy of a pelagic grand slam. That’s when it bit. After a 45-minute fight, we had a blue marlin at the side of the boat. And it was big—500 or 600 pounds. Our 22-foot boat didn’t have a transom door that we could slide the fish into. We had to lift the marlin and pull it in. But the dead weight was too heavy for us. Then the captain had the idea of wrapping rope around a cleat and using it as a pulley to hoist the fish in. Two guys would lift the marlin, while the third would pull on the rope. I’d been…

THE RESERVATION IS ON FIRE. Two hundred thousand acres are already gone. Smoke covers the scrublands, chokes the valleys, fills the sky. And yet, as Matt Mendes races over Oregon’s high-desert hills this dark autumn morning, his thoughts are dominated not by fire but by steelhead. And not just any steelhead but wild, pure-blooded steelhead—fat from gorging themselves at sea and currently charging up the Deschutes River. He grips the wheel of his silver F-250; tribal war chants boom over the radio. “We fished hard yesterday,” says the 31-year-old fly fishing guide. “We got blank.” And Mendes hates catching blank more than just about anything else. It doesn’t matter to him that getting blank is a foregone conclusion for most anglers fishing for notoriously hard-to-land, and increasingly scarce, steelhead. Because most…