Innholdsfortegnelse for No. 1 - 2022 i Outdoor Life

GENE COUGHLIN’S WIFE hates it when he hunts alone. But the 64-year-old bowhunter prepares as best as he can and goes anyway. The lifelong Montanan has rules: Don’t go anywhere without a shotgun. Load it with alternating slugs and 00 buckshot. Never cow call from the ground. Get meat out fast. Expect to lose some anyway. When he hikes in to one of his treestands along the Blackfoot River, Coughlin carries that 12-gauge in one hand, his bow in the other. Strapped to his chest is a can of pepper spray and a .44 Magnum; a 10 mm Glock rides on his hip. This is how he was geared up one evening a few years ago when he ran into some paddlers. They didn’t look like locals. “I’m going across the…

SPRING I was ready to go home. I’d been fishing for a couple of hours and had nothing to show for it. No follows. No strikes. No reason to hope for either anytime soon. It would’ve been one thing if I were on a brand-new stretch of water. But I had been coming here for years—and in that time, I’d yet to have one truly good day of fishing. There were trips when I might land one or two trout, but those outings were the exceptions. This day seemed destined for another skunking. Doubts ran through my head. What the hell am I doing here? Does this river even hold trout anymore? Or have I just forgotten how to fly fish? I was a few hundred yards downstream from the car,…

CEDER AND SUMMIT—​a pair of German wire-haired pointers—​sprinted around camp while Matt Hardinge and I laced up our boots. Hills funneled down into a pocket of aspens across the river from us. Mist hung over the water, as a fly angler cast downstream. I turned around to look at the rugged country we’d be hunting. Even from down here in camp, I could see for miles, as if I were staring out into an ocean of rolling sagebrush. It all looked so barren to me. How could upland birds live here? Hardinge had just pulled out a stove to make coffee when we heard a chukar cackle in the distance. He quickly killed the stove. “We can have coffee later,” he said. “Let’s go find these birds.” CHUKAR CAMP I…

FROM 1971 TO 1991, I hunted out of a town in Montana that I learned to think of as home. It consisted of 18,000 people when I started going. The airline terminal was so small you could spit across it, which people sometimes did. To get a nonresident big-game license, you went to the gun store and put $151 on the counter. It entitled you to an elk, two deer (I think), and a black bear. Down the street was a clothing store that catered to working cowboys. Outside was a life-size white wooden horse. Occasionally a cowhand would come by at night and deposit a load of equine excrement under the horse’s tail. There were several bars, and if you weren’t carrying a gun or a knife when you entered,…

A TURKEY HUNTER’S LIFE, to paraphrase what they say about a soldier’s, is 99 percent boredom, 1 percent sheer excitement (instead of terror). You make plans, scout, walk for miles, and wait for hours, days even, in hopes of a momentary thrill. But those few minutes can change your whole season, even your entire spring. Like many Americans, I am blessed, and slightly cursed, to live a comfortable, unexciting life. According to the fitness tracker my kids gave me for my birthday, not much gets my heart going these days. And so far this season, turkey hunting hasn’t helped. My outings have been heavy on boredom and extra light on excitement: no close calls, not much gobbling, and not many turkeys. This morning, I’m trying a new place. It’s a…

WHEN I ARRIVE in camp, I let my pack drop from my shoulders. It’s the first day of a four-day backcountry trip, and after putting in the miles, I could use a good meal and a crackling fire. I typically carry a lighter in my pocket and fire steel in my pack. But when it comes time to ignite the fire, I don’t reach for these gadgets. Instead, I choose a length of goldenrod and set to work on a hearth board of umbrella magnolia. This warms me twice: once by the effort to spin the hand drill to produce the coal, and again when the fire is kindled into flame. A lot of people refer to such fire-starting methods as bushcraft. Earth skills. Primitive technology. Whatever you call it, the…

I FOUND the 10-foot 1970s-​model camper on Craigslist just after my wife, Michelle, left for work. I called up the owner, talked him down by a hundred bucks, and then drove into Tennessee with my brother, Matt, to make the deal. The seller’s name was Bo Kelly, and he had the camper plugged into a temporary service pole when we got there. “The air conditioner on this thing will freeze you out, son,” he said. His house was just 100 yards off, down a long driveway. I had just handed over the fourteen $100 bills when I noticed a car coming down the drive toward us. It stopped, and a bleached-blond woman called Bae emerged. She seized the money from Bo Kelly’s hand, licked her thumb, counted the bills, stuffed…

I HAVE to stretch onto my ​toes to make it fit, but I push the gun vise to the top of a power-​tools-​and-​ammunition cabinet in the basement, next to a metal snowman sculpture that only recently was removed from the front porch. The vise scrapes Frosty’s sheet-metal side with a complaining creak, as if neither one of them likes the fact that it’s going into storage. When I stand back, the smell of Hoppe’s No. 9 prompts a little catch in my throat. What a great hunting season. Five months passed from the dove opener to the last duck hunt, and I’ve spent some quality time at the basement gun-cleaning station. But the times they are a-changin’. Such a bittersweet moment occurs twice a year, in this very spot: once…

I WON’T tell you his name. It’s not important, really—besides, he’s a good friend of mine, and I’d like to keep it that way. And what happened to him could happen to anyone. Maybe it’s happened to you. It’s certainly happened to me more than a time or two. In that regard, my buddy is a sort of everyman. There’s no reason to bring him any more pain. But this I will tell you: I outfished the snot out of him that day. Fish after fish, on the left bank, on the right bank, and in the middle of the river—it didn’t matter. For most of the morning, he couldn’t buy a bite, and I was up to my ears in fish. And I was fishing out of the back…

THIS DISH is a medley of springtime flavors: sweet, mellow fennel, sharp and sour pickled radishes, and, of course, the lush taste of freshly caught rainbow trout. Or salmon, if that’s what you happened to catch. Or crappies or smallmouth bass—both would shine here (just make sure to adjust the roasting time to account for the size of your fish). The pickled-radish vinaigrette is easy to make and supplies some much-needed acid to balance out the dish, but if you’re not feeling it for whatever reason, simply slide some lemon slices into the cavity before the fish enters the oven and squeeze lemon juice over the whole shebang just before serving. INGREDIENTS4 whole trout, gutted and cleaned, heads and tails left onZest of 1 lemon3 Tbsp. freshly squeezed lemon juice1½…

MY FRIEND SAGE and I took the old truck so my cousins would know it was me. They own the farm now, and I didn’t want them to think we were trespassers. It’s a 7-minute drive to the farm from my house—down Wilson Hollow, turn right, and up Oak Hill Road. I’ve always considered the farm my home hunting grounds, which is one of the reasons my wife and I bought a house so close. It’s where my grandpa and his siblings grew up and where I shot my first deer. It’s a place I’d always felt I would hunt until I couldn’t go hunting anymore. The land is a hardscrabble 100-acre dirt farm with old cars and farming equipment lying fallow in its unused fields. My great-uncle, who had…

J.P. HAND sits at his workbench placing a freshly painted rig of 10 brant decoys into a slot bag while we get ready to hunt in the morning. He constructed each brant from three pieces of Atlantic white cedar with the kind of tools most people have in their woodsheds—a hatchet, some knives, and a bit of sandpaper. But when you pick one up, it’s light, as a bird is light, and looks so natural it’s as if it hatched from a wooden egg. Everything about Hand’s shop seems to be from the past. The furniture looks as though it was made more than a century ago, and there’s a noticeable lack of power tools, save for a band saw, a drill, and a table saw being used only as a…

THE DRIVE to my folks’ house is about three hours if you stay on the blacktop and about 10 minutes longer if you go the back way. I always go the back way. Past the old barn, I turn left onto the washboard gravel of McCabe Road, and as soon as the alder swamp comes into view, I can just about see the woodcock. My buddy Jo, who lived just down the road at the time, had been up at dawn and spotted the dark forms twittering over the tops of the alders and floating down into the boggy slash in the gloaming. When we walked into the cover, woodcock flushed everywhere—pudgy little aliens lumbering up through the branches. They hung in the sky like helicopters. We’d never seen a…

I DIDN’T grow up in the tradition. You won’t find any pictures from deer camp of me and Dad and Grandpa with our arms around each other. If Norman Rockwell ever saw our house, he didn’t stop. My people were career military going back at least four generations. They moved around a lot, fought in wars, and never took to the outdoors. Great-​Granddad lost his ear during the first Army-Navy game, in 1890, when a midshipman bit it off at the bottom of the pile, served in the Spanish-American War and WWI, and became a general. Granddad was captain of the West Point polo team—​although he hated horses—and led the 2nd Engineer Special Brigade in 82 combat landings in the Pacific, earning three Purple Hearts. Not wanting to compete with…