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...
The Old Maid
Good covey dogs are, as Lincoln said of Civil War generals, “as plenty as blackberries.” Hardy, spirited rangers that will put up whatever there is to be put up and give you your money’s worth day in and day out. That is, in good bird country. But if you are ever...
A Man-Killing Bear
Shocked and angered by his friend’s horrible death, the old trapper was determined to get revenge. Almost every trapper past middle age who has spent his life in the wilderness has stories to tell about exceptionally savage bears. One of these stories was told in my...
Autumn’s Greatest Hits: My Favorite Upland Bird Hunts
Choosing a favorite upland bird hunt is like choosing a favorite dog. You may have an answer, but it is probably best not to say it too loudly within earshot of the others. Besides, upland hunting was never meant to be ranked. Its pleasures are too varied, its birds...
The Last Of the Outlaw Gunners
Or they were going to be, until a gator got in the way.
‘Ol Settler of Deep Hole
No fish had ever exerted a greater influence on the thoughts, the imagination, the manners or the moral character of his pursuers. Uncle Eb was a born lover of fun. But he had a solemn way of fishing that was no credit to a cheerful man. It was the same when he played...
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...
Rite of Passage
In a single defining moment, a young boy comes to understand both privilege and purpose. I suppose there is truly a time for all things, and that only in their own time will they spark with the unique consecration of all that is original, as in a scarlet dawn, a...
Great Misses
“I have never missed a deer!” proudly proclaimed a relatively new hunter sitting across from me at a late November campfire. I glanced at Luke Clayton, my longtime friend and hunting partner, who was sitting next to him. He smiled and wagged his head in a negative...
Death of the Red-Winged Mallard
A classic Story from 1900 by H.S. Canfield. It took Robert Lee Briggs five years, working off and on, to slay the red-winged mallard. The pursuit got to be so much of a passion with him that it hurt his business, for he was a market-hunter on the southwestern coast of...
A Pair of Jacks
When I looked out the kitchen window one September morning and saw the first tinges of yellow on the big maple’s leaves, I knew it was time. Hurriedly, I scarfed down a light breakfast and put Katherine’s kettle on the woodstove, knowing full-well that she would...
Aim of the Hunterman
Pitted with rust and powder-scalds, the old musket would explode with a roar that sounded like the crack of doom. And now, in the dusky hands of the Hunterman, it was all that stood between life and a terrible death. The negroes in the golden-wide ricefield, as they...
My Dog’s Better Than Your Dog
America’s most popular hunting breeds—and the people who wouldn’t dream of owning anything else. Tell a hunter his truck is junk and he might agree. Suggest he bought the wrong dog and you’d better arrange another ride home. Breed loyalists run unpaid publicity...
Don’t Fence Me In
Pronghorns numbers are benefiting thanks to funding by Pittman-Robertson. A state highway that reels off into the distance looks like a sun-scorched, gray-black ribbon laid over tawny grassy hills. Lonely locust trees here and there over much of the West favor their...
Why I Taught My Boys to be Hunters
I have said that my hunting has often been solitary; but that was chiefly in the early days. During the last 25 years, I have rarely taken to the woods and fields in the shooting season without having one or more of my own sons with me. Few human relationships are...
Uncle Dan’s Last Hurrah
Not many American guns are more thoughtfully designed nor better built than Uncle Dan's New Lefever. Dan Lefever had a knack, if you want to call it that, for getting crossways with business partners. In a career that spanned fifty years, he invented some of the...
When I Was a Boy
Things were different when he was a lad—back when nothing was artificial or contrived, and the days and seasons were filled with high adventure. It’s a popular pastime among adults, when the hair begins to gray and the aches of middle age grow stronger, to look back...
Zane Grey – High Seas Prophet
So what can we say of Zane Grey, this dentist turned novelist turned outdoor writer? He was a dentist and photographer and a storyteller. He was one hell of a baseball player. He was husband and father and perpetual wanderer and a hunter and fisherman who once held...
Nothing To Do for Three Weeks
He was a pine knot millionaire—hunting partridge on the tote roads and ducks on the lake, catching big crappies and trout in the rivers, gathering blueberries for food and pine knots for the fire, all work fit for a king. I left long before daylight, alone but not...
The Adults in the Room: Why I Support the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation
Washington is full of people willing to tell a sportsman what he wants to hear. Finding someone who will tell him what he needs to know takes more insight. That is one reason the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation stays near the top of my call list. I’ve served on...
Down in the Bend With Riley
The eloquent writings of Nash Buckingham (1880-1971) were relatively unknown until Derrydale Press published several of his books in the 1930s. But “Mr. Buck,” as he came to be known to his legions of devoted readers, had been writing magazine articles for years. This...
The Sport of Kings on the Yorkshire Moors
The incomparable electricity of driven grouse. Some sporting destinations allow success to be manufactured to some degree. Pheasants and red-legged partridges can be reared and released. Fish can be stocked. Habitat can be improved, predators controlled, and...
Bones In the Heat
At first light, Core Hart climbed the outside spiral stair onto his flat roof. He sat down at the rooftop picnic table and, using a spotting scope, scanned the turtle grass flat that was his front yard. A half mile out, at the edge of the flat, he marked a pod of...
Sporting Classics TV Season 8 Episode 6 Trailer
Make sure to catch this week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey, featuring a bird hunter's paradise as Chris Dorsey and Dominico Orzi visit Uruguay’s stunning Estancia Santa Elena. The series airs on Outdoor Channel on Monday at 12pm, Wednesday at 6am,...
Fred Selous: Heart of Steel, Frame of Iron
In the words of his contemporary and close friend, Teddy Roosevelt, Frederick Courteney Selous (1851-1917) was "the greatest of the world's big-game hunters." Certainly, there were few sportsmen of the late Victorian and Edwardian period who would have disputed the...
Preserving Antique Shotguns
As someone who spends a lot of time working to preserve late 19th century and early 20th century double guns, I have thought a lot about why some high quality and once very expensive shotguns have been well preserved and others have not. The formula for the...
Culmination
Ancient walls of huge, dry-stacked, weather-worn boulders hint at a distant past and parallel us as we travel through crisp morning air along a sandy, sun-dappled road toward our shooting pegs. They look European. Beyond the stone walls, giant hardwoods rise over the...
Papa’s Cuba: Hemingway’s Home Away from Home
Cuba offers a party atmosphere: sunshine, sparkling seas and miles of white sand. It also offers some of the best cocktails and cigars on Earth. But as anyone knows who visits here, when it comes to attractions, its people are its greatest stock in trade. Cubans are...
Piotti Round-Action
Dan Moore has a long-standing relationship with the Italian gunmaking firm of Fratelli Piotti that goes all the way back to the days of his father, William Larkin Moore. Dan also is a great fan of round-action side-by-side shotguns, especially those from the hands of...
A Perfect Companion: Memories of My Brittany, Ginger
I was raised around pointers and followed them afield with my Dad and his hunting partners through the rolling hills and plains of Texas. We had a plethora of bobwhite quail back then and I developed a great love for Mister Bob. As time passed, I married and pursued a...
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...
The Eyes Have It!
It was an embarrassing moment to say the least. I, an experienced wildlife biologist, lifelong hunter, had pointed toward three animals on a broad New Mexico plain north of Roswell and proclaimed them to be pronghorn antelope. “I don’t think so,” said my wife. “I...
AI in the hands of fishermen? What could go wrong?
"All fishermen are liars; it's an occupational disease with them like housemaid's knee or editor's ulcers." - Beatrice Gray Cook in her 1949 book Till Fish Us Do Part: The Confessions of a Fisherman’s Wife. Artificial intelligence. The breast implants of the digital...
North Dakota’s Camo Party Has 300,000 Members. Now It Needs a Senator Who Can Count.
Kevin Cramer is threatening to gum up the federal government because compensated wetland easements are still being treated like contracts. The ducks, hunters and arithmetic would like a word. North Dakota is one of those rare places where a political movement could be...
Sporting Classics TV Season 8 Episode 5 Trailer
Make sure to catch this week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey as host Chris Dorsey heads north for an epic adventure to hunt the largest land carnivore on Earth - polar bear. The series airs on Outdoor Channel in prime-time every Thursday at 10pm ET,...
Rogue Male: Ewart Grogan
There is a certain kind of man who can get away with damn near anything. They generally come from a line of charming rebels and often combine good looks with a devil-may-care attitude and a distaste for authority. Standing alone is their superpower, vanity their...
Monarch of the Zselics
The stag understood who he was. He stood next to a tree line in Hungary’s Zselic Mountains where his hinds could admire him and the smaller stags hidden in the forest would know they were trespassing. The stag’s head was crowned with heavy antlers that stretched out...
Rebirth of the Centenarian 270 Winchester
Few things get faster and stronger with age, but the 100-year-old 270 Winchester does. When this little “coyote cartridge,” as Elmer Keith deridingly called it, officially stepped onto the stage, it was driving a 130-grain spire point 3,140 fps, according to its...
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...
Hunter’s Guide: Classic American Hammer Shotguns
Some of the finest shotguns ever made in America were hammer shotguns produced in the last decades of the 19th century. However, by the end of World War I, most had been retired to gun cabinets to be only admired, not fired. Their barrels had not been designed for the...
Of Men, Mentors and Muskellunge
Two men wandered into the Ontario Central Airways (OCA) office one afternoon while I was manning the front desk. How strange it was that I could instantly tell that they were used to being in charge. They wore short brown leather jackets and the standard issue khaki...
Joseph Thomson: Mystery Man of Africa
Over the course of the 19th century, phenomenon sometimes referred to as “the opening up of Africa,” hunters and explorers, along with a solid sprinkling of traders, were in the forefront. They pioneered the way into the interior and their tales of grand adventures,...
The Most Important Question at the Bass Pro Checkout Counter
There may be no more elegant conservation program in America than a cashier asking a customer a ridiculously simple question: Would you like to round up for conservation? It takes only a few seconds. The answer might cost 17 cents, 43 cents, or 86 cents. Yet what...
Sporting Classics TV Season 8 Episode 4 Trailer
Make sure you don't miss this week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey, for a gorgeous quail hunt in the South Carolina Lowcountry while supporting American heroes. The series airs on Outdoor Channel on Monday at 12pm, Wednesday at 6am, Thursday at 6pm...
Bones Among the Blazes
How A Wildfire Almost Sent My Ram Tag Up In Flames Only 30 minutes into the first day of the season on a brisk December morning, I am at full draw on an old battle-scarred ram. A slight breeze coming up off the North Fork of the Big Thompson River is trying its best...
Woodcock Shooting on the Upper Mississippi
In few places has there ever been woodcock shooting that for certainty of finding the birds and ease in following them equaled the sport of the bottom lands of the upper Mississippi River 20 years ago. Scarcely any of the resident sportsmen then troubled this charming...
Conservation’s Greatest Weakness Is Not Science. It Is Silence.
Conservation has a communication problem, and pretending otherwise may be one of the greatest threats to its future. We have extraordinary scientists, experienced land managers, passionate philanthropists, dedicated hunters and anglers, conservation organizations,...
The Best Plains-Game Rifle for Africa
The gun has to be capable of dropping everything from ten-pound dik-dik to 2,000-pound eland.
The Strange Saga of Henry Bauman
The place was called Boise City, which was something of a joke to anyone who had actually been there. It wasn’t even a town, much less a city—a few cleared fields around a dirt track where trappers and Indians pitched their teepees and caravans of covered wagons could...
The “Don’t Shoot” Buck
“It was him!” said Charlie as he strode into our Game Trails Kentucky camp kitchen. “He was at least five miles from where you saw him last November. He was with two other bucks near the end of Bell Road close to the river. No doubt it was him! Same antler style, but...