Fair Winds, My Brother: Daufuskie Family
Forget about deer stands,” he said. “Just boost your woman high up in a live oak late in the afternoon. That way you’ll know she’ll still be there when you come to fetch her home after sunset.” We were on his front porch, out of the wind on a chilly afternoon, easing...
A Man In Full: Roosevelt Becomes A Man
Daddy sent Theodore off to Harvard in 1876 with this advice: “Take care of your morals first, your health second, and your studies third.” Predictably, young Roosevelt was a better boxer than student, much preferring independent inquiries rather than activities...
Three Boys and a Cannon Barrel
It was a Federal Criminal Conspiracy: three boys, a cannon barrel and scaup to drive them crazy. The saltwater scaup are mostly gone now, but back when I was a boy they would raft offshore, a thousand, ten thousand at a time. It would take a booming gale to get them...
Little Windy and the Wingshooting Woman
She was a great Nordic beauty, and she came with a duck lease. She was a green-eyed freckle-faced redhead, long of hair and limb, married a couple of times before I met her but neither lasted too long. Her name, literally translated, meant “the daughter of an...
Hemingway’s Pilar – Chasing Billfish and German U-boats
Papa called her Pilar and she was a fishing machine, a 1934 Wheeler Playmate, custom built to his specifications in a Brooklyn boatyard. She was 38 feet at the waterline, with a low-cut transom rigged with a roller for sliding fish aboard. She held a ton of ice, had...
When the Turkeys Busted Loose
Me and Poach and the Window Wizard, walking this scrubby sheep pasture west of town. Sheep got buck teeth and clip the grass right down to the dirt. Canada thistle and prickly ash take over, tight clumps around the boulders the glaciers brought when they came and...
Belle Baruch: The Troublesome Child
Ever the tomboy, Belle Baruch hunted and fished, chased German spies, surprised her family with equestrian triumphs and scandalous affairs. When it was all done, she willed 17,500 acres for public education.
Adventures in Minnesota’s Black Bear Country
They look cute from a distance but up close, they are like a 400-pound racoon. A momma coon may have six or eight coonlets in a year, a bear might have twins, rarely triplets and then only every two years. Cubs are born bald and blind at about a half pound during...
Ernest Hemingway: Angler, Fighter, Lover
Ernest Hemingway fought in two wars, battled huge marlin and tuna in Bimini and Cuba and then survived two plane crashes and deadly encounters with lions and elephants in Africa – all while creating some of the greatest sporting literature ever written.