by Roger Pinckney | May 4, 2020
When the shark hit the end of the line, it came up, shook his head just like those mahi did. The dock bowed, creaked, groaned, sagged. Clink, clink, clink. I was bent over the gunnel of Maggie C, a 26-foot Maine lobster boat rigged for ocean-running. Six weeks, 600...
by Roger Pinckney | Apr 30, 2020
You can cuss wild hogs, just don’t cuss them with your mouth full You can run them with hounds and chase them on horseback or on foot. You can wade into the slashing, squealing, howling melee and kill them with a blade if it’s too tight to shoot between the dogs. You...
by Roger Pinckney | Apr 21, 2020
The unlikely life, art and death of legendary artist and adventurer Peter Beard. Peter Beard was a hard man to peg. A photographer of wildlife and beautiful women, a writer, an ethnologist, explorer, hunter, naturalist, conservationist, ladies man, married man, wise...
by Roger Pinckney | Apr 3, 2020
Man or woman, dog or gun, you never know when you might say goodbye. Fixing to write this down before I forget, the days and years slipping away the way they do, that blaze of autumn to water the eye, the flames of maple and oak and the dry-bone rattling aspen, that...
by Roger Pinckney | Mar 28, 2020
Mind-boggling numbers of mallards, mallards like blackbirds, tornadoes of mallards, more mallards than sky. Way down in October, in The Moon of Falling Leaves, me and Joe Merganser on the back loading dock of the farmer’s co-op elevator. Joe Merganser was full-blood...
by Roger Pinckney | Mar 25, 2020
Black magic, junk pistols and lessons learned thereby. Pappy was county coroner 36 years; an elected position. It didn’t pay much, but he got to keep all the murder and suicide guns, and he was the only man who could arrest the sheriff, which he did when the new...
by Roger Pinckney | Nov 29, 2019
We had a voodoo sheriff when I was coming up. He and Pappy were best friends. Ed McTeer turned to the black arts to extract confessions and make himself bullet-proof. It served him well one night when a desperado cut loose in some dim-lit island juke joint, five shots...
by Roger Pinckney | Nov 21, 2019
Some damn fine mathematics, brothers and sisters, when you can put two rifles together, factor in family and years, subtract both guns and come up with a fine old straight-shooting .22 to boot. But the equation is not for the faint of heart, the weak of mind or the...
by Roger Pinckney | Nov 16, 2019
I threw in with the Swedes about 1972, broke down on my way to Alaska. Ten Mile hill outside St. Paul but my old truck only made nine of them. I called a buddy with a log chain. “Come get me!” He found me a garage on an alley behind a mansion on Summit Avenue, just...
by Roger Pinckney | Sep 16, 2019
In August of 1886, Roosevelt set out with two companions for the Wyoming Big Horn Mountains, some 300-odd miles southwest of his Elkhorn Ranch. There was a prairie schooner wagon, a string of horses—saddle, pack, and draft. Barrels of water, flour, and lard, bacon,...
