Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2015 - January 2016 i Field & Stream

THE GUY WHO flyfishes for steelhead once a year with his buddies on one of the Great Lakes tributaries from Wisconsin to New York can’t wait for fall. The diehard steelheader on those same waters can’t wait for winter, because the other guy and his cronies will be long gone. The trade-off, of course, for having a normally crowded river to yourself is that you have to wade in near freezing water, row around ice floes, and coax sluggish fish that have been getting hammered for months. Such are the trials of the fly anglers who call themselves the “chosen frozen,” but if you want to join their ranks, these three dirty tricks I picked up while fishing with some of the best can turn you into a hot hand…

Some bucks stand apart. It’s not that their antlers are bigger (though they often are). It’s not that they dominate the herd (because they often don’t). These bucks simply don’t act like other whitetails. They’re loners, rarely seen, even during the rut. They’re sedentary, mostly nocturnal, and hyperfocused on survival. They are superbucks. What they all have in common is old age; they’ve run the gauntlet of hunters, predators, disease, and weather and survived when other bucks couldn’t. The good news: They are at their most vulnerable right now. Here are the stories of five such bucks—and the late-season hunters who found a way to put a tag on them. SUPERBUCK # 1 : THE RETURN CUSTOMER Stats: 1887∕8" B&C, 51∕2 years old, Iowa Hunter: Mark Drury (druryoutdoors.com) Tactic: Plant…

STRIPED BASS DON’T often hit a slow- moving needlefish plug very hard. The strike feels more like the soft tap of a panfish rather than an attack from one of the Northeast’s most powerful gamefish. So as the gentle July Cape Cod surf swept my needle over the sandbar in front of me into a deeper cut, I could have easily missed the bump that came just before 3 A.M. Luckily I didn’t, because it had been made by the bass I’d been hunting for a decade and a half. UNDER MY SKIN That hunt began on the Third Street jetty in Ocean City, N.J., on Dec. 8, 1999, when I was 15 years old. I had my hands Stucked into my neoprene waders to guard against the early winter…

LEG OF VENISON ON A STRING I have a hook set beneath my fireplace mantel for the sole purpose of cooking meat this way. The venison is suspended by heavy string from the hook, and the leg spins slowly while it cooks. Every time you walk past, give it a gentle twirl so the venison spins in front of the fire. Here’s the cool thing about this method: The venison will spin until the string has unwound and then, due to the meat’s weight, it will keep spinning in the opposite direction, and so on. People get a kick out of watching how long the leg will spin without a touch. When you butcher your deer, remove the pelvic bone but keep the leg intact, and scrape down the bone…

We know you love us and only have the best of intentions when you buy us hunting and fishing gear for Christmas. We are often overcome—stunned is the word—by your thoughtfulness. (This, incidentally, is why you may not hear “thank you” when we open your gift.) There is, however, a tragic and built-in rub to buying gear for a sportsman, which is that it’s impossible. Say you’ve learned that your obsessed bass angler favors Gamakatsu extra-wide-gap 4/0 worm hooks with an offset shank. You knock yourself out to get these exact hooks. But when he opens the gift, you can tell—because of his lopsided smile and his overloud use of the word wonderful, which is not a word he has ever used before—that these are not the exact right hooks.…

My Trophy A SQUIRREL TALE If you pull a certain essay collection from the shelf in my living room, an uncharacteristically bulky bookmark all but forces you to open to a story about squirrel hunting. This doesn’t happen by accident. I find a new bookmark for every book I read, and once I finish the last page it stays inside that book for good. For this hardback, I never second-guessed what the bookmark would be: a preserved squirrel tail. The gray squirrel that once flicked that tail was the first animal I ever killed. My colleague Mike Toth invited me to hunt with him on a WMA near his New Jersey home, and 10 minutes in I spied a squirrel at the base of a tree and fired. We shot…

NEWS AND STORIES FROM THE EXPERTS THE SUN IS a hint below the horizon, but already the wind is howling. In December on the plains, the wind always blows, but rarely at this clip this early in the morning. And by the looks of the dark clouds pushing in from the West, a snowstorm is coming. I’ve got an hour, maybe two, to punch my tag before the blizzard makes conditions too tough. Here in Nebraska, muzzleloader season lasts all of December, and it’s my favorite time to stalk big mule deer. I’ll get out every day I can until my buffalo bullet intersects with a good buck. The first few days of the season see some pressure, but after that I have the breaks above the river all to…

THE OLD-TIMER STEPPED halfway out of the river cane thicket, where he’d retreated to lick the wounds of the rut. He was alone and reluctant to commit to full exposure. He’d found a welcome sanctuary. The deer looked up the swamp creek and down while I held my breath and narrowed my eyes, but his gaze never settled on my tree. I watched him angle out of the thicket and take a few tentative steps toward the creek. He was in the open now, and I had a bit of time. So I watched. When the old buck put his head down to drink, I eased the rifle to my shoulder and found him in the scope. Three hours earlier, I had left the house, alone as well. I drove…

David E. Petzal answers your questions about guns, shooting, hunting, and life Q: What is the biggest animal you have ever shot? —JACOB R. BUMP, STOCKBRIDGE, VT. A: In June 1987, I killed a bull hippo in the Luangwa River Valley in Zambia that probably weighed 6,000 pounds. I used a .458 Winchester, and shot the creature just under the ear. He never twitched. Q: Should I use my old Michigan deer gun, a Marlin 336 in .35 Rem., for timber elk and mule deer in Colorado? —BILL WILLCOX, WALDEN, COLO. A: The Marlin 336 is a fine choice, as is the .35 Remington, if you stick to the timber. Just remember that elk are filled with surprises. You may see only one shooter bull, which will be standing…

SO ACCUSTOMED HAD I become to mailing in the permit application and not drawing a tag—a 1 percent chance—that each year I forgot about it. The act was nothing more than tossing a penny into a fountain, a repeated gesture, not for the hopes of the wish. I wasn’t home the day the mail came— a big packet. My youngest daughter, Lowry, called and was more excited than I was. I hadn’t thought I’d ever get one, not in this life. EARLY DOUBTS The goat season starts in early September and runs to the last day of November. I read books about goats, but didn’t scout; I was traveling all summer. And I was ambivalent. They’re just so… well, cute. Lovable, adorable. Friends who knew I’d drawn a goat permit…

THE GREATER PART OF A LIFETIME AGO, I walked softly for a mile through the darkness of the Rombo country of southern Kenya. Sunrise lay two hours ahead, and I found the leopard blind via a process akin to Braille. The professional hunter, John Fletcher, the tracker, Mmaku, and I felt our way into the small boma of woven tall grass and wild-palm leaves and hunkered on the ground, not speaking or moving. It was 90 minutes later, still night, when we heard the big male feeding in the tree. I slid the muzzle through an opening in the boma and waited for light. There was the slow dilution of the dark, like cream added to black coffee, until the curled-tail silhouette came into view. Now, I needed to make…

› PHOTOGRAPHER: BILL BUCKLEY + LOCATION: PLUM ISLAND, MASSACHUSETTS Hank Garvey, an award-winning decoy carver and avid waterfowler, was hunting black ducks on the Merrimack River off Plum Island, a Massachusetts barrier island, when the rising tide forced him to reposition his layout boat and spread. “One of the challenges of hunting the salt marsh is that the tide fluctuates 10 feet over the course of six hours,” says Garvey. “So you can’t stay in one spot.” It was a bitter-cold January nor’easter, with the snow blowing sideways, but Dorie, his 9-yearold black Lab, was eager to hunt even with the brackish water freezing up. “People ask why I want to go out in those harsh conditions. For me, it’s a test. There’s a thrill to withstanding it, and the…

GREG MUNTHER MISSOULA, MONT. Glassing the Bitterroots for goats. IN 2013, A STATE plan to create road access to the Marias River through the 5,845-acre Marias River Wildlife Management Area, a rare prairie river canyon ecosystem in northern Montana, was unveiled. Greg Munther, chairman of the state chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, immediately began battle plans, mobilizing his membership and that of state hunting and conservation groups. The proposal would also have traded off 483 acres of the WMA along the Rocky Mountain Front in order to gain access to adjacent private land, through which the road would run on its way to a planned recreation site at the bank of the Marias, which Lewis and Clark had explored 200 years ago. Munther, a former biologist with the U.S.…

A drake mallard is a trophy that can be found just about everywhere. But the most sought-after species among diehard duck hunters are more rare, more specialized, and more challenging to kill. Enduring the bitter late season is often required just to see one of these birds in full plumage. All of these species are revered for their striking beauty, but the journeys required to find them—from southern sheet water to the Alaskan surf— are as much a part of the trophy as the ducks themselves. THE SUPER SPRIG NORTHERN PINTAIL Estimated 2015 Population: 3 million Preferred Habitat: Ricefields and other open, shallow habitat Pintail numbers are down slightly this year, and the breeding population is 24 percent below the long-term average. Still, they’re an abundant duck within their favored…

THE FIRST SKIN MOUNT I EVER bought was a dusty 22-inch brown trout hanging in the corner of an antiques store in Columbus, N.J. The shop owner told me the fish was caught near Punxsutawney, Pa., but that’s all he knew. What I knew was that whoever hooked this trout must have been extremely proud of the catch and felt a strong connection to the fish. I knew this because I felt the same thing when I picked up the first fish I ever had mounted. As far as I was concerned, this forgotten brown trout deserved to be on the wall of an angler who still appreciated its meaning. So for fear of its ending up next to a neon Stella sign in a hipster bar, I pulled out…