Field & Stream No. 2 - 2022

I WENT FISHING on Sunday for a change. I typically stick to weekday mornings or late afternoons, when I can count on having the place to myself. But it had been a couple of weeks since I’d fished, and the need to spend time on the water was gnawing at me, so I chanced a weekend outing. I left home bright and early and made great time on the road—and still arrived to a crowded river. I spent the first couple of hours in pocket water downstream of a trio of spin-fishing anglers. I landed a few trout—all the while keeping as close an eye on the other fishermen as I did on my strike indicator. When they eventually left, I moved near where they’d been fishing. I wrongly assumed…

As the weapon became more and more effective, man imposed more and more limitations on himself as the animal’s rival in order to leave it free to practice its wily defenses, in order to avoid making the prey and the hunter excessively unequal, as if passing beyond a certain limit in the relationship might annihilate the essential character of the hunt. —Jorge Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Hunting LIMITS GOT OFF TO A SLOW START. Humans (or their ancestors) began hunting 2 million years ago. But until 800 years ago, setting limits on what you could kill and giving animals a chance to survive would have been regarded as insane. For nearly all the time we’ve been clubbing and spearing and shooting, getting enough to eat was a desperately uncertain…

BACK IN THE YEARS when I had more mouths to feed and any elk was a good elk and where it died on the mountain was of no particular concern, I drew a tag to hunt moose in the Spanish Peaks Wilderness, in Montana. I did not much think about the hardships involved in such an endeavor. To me, a moose was just an elk by another color, and I had packed elk quarters from near and far and from riverbottoms to rimrock basins, suffering no consequences beyond losing a few pounds. The destination for this hunt was a saddle on a ridge on the far side of the Gallatin River, where I was to meet up with my old friend Joe Gutkoski. Joe would hunt elk while I…

WHEN RYAN GILL was 13, his father gave him a stave—or long stick—from a black locust tree, along with a single wood rasp. By the time his dad got home from work that evening, Gill was standing over a mound of wood shavings and holding a primitive-looking bow in his hand. After stealing a string from a Bear recurve, they strung Gill’s first bow and shot it into the night—launching a lifelong obsession, Gill says, to re-create and hunt with the tools of our Stone Age ancestors. Today, as the owner of Hunt Primitive, Gill spends most of his waking hours building self bows and atlatls and crafting wooden arrows, spears, and knives tipped with stone points he knaps by hand from flint and obsidian. When he’s not making them,…

SOME SAY a big shellcracker is the most mysterious fish in freshwater. Properly called a redear sunfish, it’s three times the size of a keeper bluegill, on average, and just as delicious. But it’s notoriously finicky, apt to ignore a nightcrawler threaded onto an Aberdeen hook but then inhale a redworm thrown to the same spot on the same rig the very next cast. Most of the time they hug the bottom, where they probe gravel bars for snails. When you haven’t caught one in a year, their power against light spinning tackle is startling. For a few short days late in the spring, when the weather is warm and the moon is just so, and if you’ve been a good person most of the year and hold your mouth…

THE KLAMATH BASIN is one of the most iconic watersheds in North America. It’s also one of the most troubled. The basin, which spans 15,751 square miles along the remote California-Oregon border, was once considered the “Everglades of the West” for its network of more than 440,000 acres of wetlands. The sky blackened each fall with millions of ducks migrating down the Pacific Flyway. And the Klamath River supported some of the largest runs of salmon and steelhead in the world, which sustained Indigenous tribes for generations. With the Klamath Project, which was approved in 1905, the federal government drained much of the area’s wetlands to make way for agriculture and, soon after, began damming the river for hydroelectric purposes, blocking salmon and steelhead from hundreds of miles of spawning…