The 270 Winchester: A Very Fast Ball
The Model T, Coolidge, then Depression defined the 1920s. Winchester added the 270. It alone endures. Night’s chill lies late in Spoon Creek. I slipped into cold wool and left the tent before dawn was a pale smudge. Breath white, I climbed through the timber to a bald...
Roosevelt the Rifleman
With horse and rifle he explored frontiers, indulging a lust that would transcend politics. Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. defined the bully pulpit, spared the teddy bear and led the strenuous life. “I do not believe,” he declared in a late retrospective, “that any...
Buffalo Bill: Life, Legend and the Wild West
In the echoes of our Civil War, the West drew a tide of emigrants from the rubble of battlefields once communities. Rootless, embittered men drifted across the prairies, in and out of crime. Hostile tribes imperiled settlers who’d endured the privations of wagon...
Chasing the Caribou
A witless beast could hardly inflict the trials, even perils, visited on caribou hunters. Could it? Had the rain paused more often, I might have looked longer. But the ceiling had a deliberate set, as if the low, lugubrious clouds were screwed in place. Dawn’s veil of...
Paul Mauser: The Man Who Repurposed the Door Latch
His rifles armed world powers in titanic wars, and hunters in the greatest game fields on Earth. The spoor, braided at first, was unraveling. “Ready to bed,” John mouthed the words. Short yards ahead, a patch of dried mud came to eye—two feet off the ground....
Tiger, Tiger, in the Night
Elsewhere, man-eaters were quickly shot. In Corbett’s India, they kept killing. Deeply rutted pads and a cleft across the right forefoot distinguished the prints of the eldest cat. The toes were also exceptionally long. By February 1929, the tigers -— by their sign an...
Baron Bror von Blixen: Farmer, Charmer, PH & Adventurer
In Kenya he found big game and adventurous women–peril and economic ruin, too. He relished the risks. They started on the Congo, at the former slaving hub, Stanleyville, in a steel boat bought from a Belgian trader. Its three-ton capacity belied its small size....
The Extraordinary Bob Swinehart
Doing things the hard way became habit. With arrows. In Africa. At the end.
