by Mike Gaddis | May 28, 2026
Stink, stank, stunk…uh, need a word here…the nth-square-to-the-10th-power expression of extreme stinkiness. A word for the gasp, cough, spit, shake-yer-head, blink-yer-eyes, spin, gag, retch, vomit kind of stinkiness. ’Cause that’s what it was. Don’t know...
by Mike Gaddis | Apr 23, 2026
Regrets are scratches on the furniture of our lives that can never be polished away. The scars of fate that shoved aside dreams, the wounds of choices ill-chosen, the lesions of opportunities lost or dreams abandoned. Some are shallow; some are deep. Some settle...
by Mike Gaddis | Apr 16, 2026
Those of us who spend lifetimes hunting and fishing learn in time that skills attained wild serve very efficiently in the struggles that eventuate in tamer, but trying, environs of modern living. Attributes of stoicism, self-discipline, perseverance, determination,...
by Mike Gaddis | Dec 5, 2025
It had been a chain of thrills. First, the answer of one bull from the top of the darkening ridge, screaming, rolling into a chorus of chuckles, earnest and deep. Then a second, 200 yards right, angry and urgent. And yet another, in the canyon below, maybe a half-mile...
by Mike Gaddis | Sep 5, 2025
For restless years I harbored an unrequited craving for a 28 gauge. It came from reading too much Mcintosh, and misconceptions, perhaps, of life and love. In a hundred fantasies, the little 28 would come as breathlessly to shoulder as my high school heartthrob, a...
by Mike Gaddis | Jun 22, 2025
They mended our imagination. The most astounding canine players ever to grace the century-and-a-quarter theater of American pointing dog trials. Can we help but suppose which was best? Sioux, La Besita, Palamonium. Luminary, Red Water Rex, Native Tango. Toe the...
by Mike Gaddis | May 28, 2025
The following is an excerpt of Chapter 3 from Mike Gaddis’s From A Higher Hill, featuring 65 explorations of the sporting life, the whole of which transcend contemporary perspective, and ascend to rare and unexcelled poignancy. Pardon the indulgence, my good...
by Mike Gaddis | May 9, 2025
Dig the sun from the sunset? Retrieve the river from the sea? Beg back a life that has been wrestled to the grave? For a great part of our being, we are drawn against a metaphysical world of imponderables, an ethereal vacuum of longing, where hope is scarce and...
by Mike Gaddis | Mar 12, 2025
The light in the old dog’s eyes fell, and he dropped loosely back from the gate of the kennel run. He had reared . . . trembling . . . begging with all the equity of his years . . . hoping against hope to go. But the man he adored most in the world had offered only a...
by Mike Gaddis | Feb 25, 2025
When the old house was occupied, its splintering walls were stout, its diminutive shelter a fortress of good spirits, its heartwood hale and its ambiance light with ale. Way long ago now, in the antediluvian and simplistic age in which I knew boyhood, circa. 1954,...
