The Antlers Were Extra
Records lists grew on entries from “meat hunters.” Effort and focus still lag Lady Luck!
How Sportsmen Defeated a Colorado Ballot to Ban Mountain Lion Hunting
A mountain lion peers through glass patio doors, staring intently at a young girl just a few feet away inside the house. Behind the big cat is the family’s dead house cat, freshly killed by the 120-pound mountain lion. Inside, the girl’s mother frantically yells...
Christmas Holiday Shenanigans: Part 1
When modern deer hunting seasons were first established in Georgia during the late 1950s and early '60s, it was against the law to hunt on Sunday in many (if not all) Georgia counties. Sometimes these laws were enforced and sometimes they were not, depending on the...
Zane Grey Fishing Collectables Go On the Block
On February 21 and 22, 2025, Copley Fine Art Auctions is holding its annual Winter Sale. This auction follows the firm’s recent $2 million Sporting Sale. The Winter Sale 2025, consisting of more than 500 lots, will offer an extraordinary opportunity to acquire Zane...
Cumberland Estate’s Historic Revival And The Renaissance Man Behind It
In the 1994 classic, Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne, played by Tim Robbins, delivers the film’s memorable manifesto to Ellis ‘Red’ Redding (Morgan Freeman), “Life comes down to a simple choice…get busy living or get busy dying.” For 80-year-old Texas native John...
The Final Chapter: A Nevada Bull Elk Hunt
After 14 years of applying, the author draws a coveted Nevada bull elk tag. The hunt would prove to be an epic ending of an epic year of hunting.
A Hippo For Christmas
“I wanna hippopotamus for Christmas…only a hippopotamus will do….” Those lyrics kept running through my mind as I stowed gear in Omujeve Safari’s Ivory Camp on the backwater banks of the Kwando River in Namibia’s Zambezi Strip. The comfortable en-suite tent would...
A Christmas Eve Swan Shoot
Two old renegades pull off an illegal nighttime hunt, despite a surprise collision and dunking. Shooting swan by night may seem hardly the correct thing in the estimation of many, but we fowlers of the wild and “feathery” West occasionally obtain under cover of the...
Sporting Classics TV Season 6 Episode 25 Trailer
This week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey is an adventure in the Gulf Stream as Chris Dorsey and friends are after tight lines on saltwater. The fly fishing adventure starts in Cape Cod in pursuit of striped bass, then heads south to Puerto Rico to...
The Irish Setter: A Victim of Its Own Beauty
Askew’s Carolina Lady was, and is, the foundation female—the Eve, if you will—of the field-type Irish setter as we know it today. One day a friend of Ned LeGrande’s stopped by to visit him at his Willow Winds Farm, near Douglassville in southeastern Pennsylvania. At...
Bing Crosby: A Man for All Seasons
On Christmas Day in 1941, millions tuned their radios to Kraft Music Hall, NBC’s hit variety program hosted by Bing Crosby, one of Hollywood’s brightest stars and the best-selling recording artist of the 20th century. Bing was in the middle of filming Holiday Inn with...
Luther K. Hall
How could watercolor not be the perfect medium for angling art? Gazing upon the work of outdoor artist Luther K. Hall, one may feel there is something special about the way he mixes water with his paint. It is the water of the river. “When I decide to do an angling...
How Pomp Saved Our Christmas
The no ’count yellow hound which strays into camp turns out to have a nose after all and takes his place among the immortals.
Easy Street Elk
While most elk hunting stories begin with vivid words about climbing steep and tall mountains, many long hours spent sitting glassing into timbers and then moving from location to location to glass into more brush—I missed all that effort and wasted time on one elk...
Sporting Classics TV Season 6 Episode 24 Trailer
This week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey features an epic hunt for red stag and fallow deer in the stunning mountains of New Zealand. Chris Dorsey returns to the south island to pursue big game with his old friend John Scurr in an adventure that...
The Light At Middle Ground
Fall is fading fast. Naked branches click like dry bones in the wind, and the choppy, pewter-toned lake mirrors an apocalyptic sky. Winter’s wrath brooks no quarter when the wicked weather turns minutes into hours, and few know its fury better than the late-season...
Road To Recovery
It’s one of those things I believed would never happen to me, despite the obvious odds to the contrary. When a branch broke while climbing out of a morning treestand, resulting in a 30-foot fall onto hard-frozen ground, coming to with a stabbing pain radiating from my...
Holland & Holland: Masters of the Double Rifle
In the annals of “Best” firearms, Holland & Holland holds an unambiguous place: builder of the world’s finest double rifles. For more than a century, dangerous game hunters have prepared for their great unknowns by trekking to Mayfair in London’s West End. Their...
New Zealand’s Stags
The Southern Alps are where a growing number of hunters head to be supersized.
Rowland Ward: Entrepreneur, Publisher, Big Game Guru and Taxidermist
Although the average big-game hunter may know little if anything about the life of an individual who was a man for all seasons in the world of Victorian and Edwardian sport, Rowland Ward, virtually everyone is aware of the long-running series of record books bearing...
Tested: Benelli’S M2 Field
SPONSORED CONTENT An out-of-the-box waterfowl wrecker that doubles as a do-all shotgun, Benelli's M2 Field hits a pleasing semi-automatic price point, promises flawless function and is a pure joy to shoulder and shoot. Benelli changed the game in 1991 when the...
Sporting Classics TV Season 6 Episode 23 Trailer
When bobwhite quail populations in West Texas plummeted in 2010, concerned hunters took notice and banded together to fund research to find a solution to the mystery. Now the efforts from the Rolling Plains Quail Research Foundation are bearing fruit for wildlife in...
Hal, a Dacotah: Hunting With the Sioux
The events in the following story are based on real experiences that were recorded by Henry Hastings Sibley, who used the name “Hal, a Dacotah” as a pseudonym for Spirit of the Times, a popular 19th century publication in New York.
Wolf Secrets
“Incoherent,” she paused. “The sick man was incoherent.” “Incoherent.” My left arm curled around the top of the page hiding a small scrap of paper. On the paper several words were written in tiny print. She continued with “incomprehensible,” “divisible” and 17 other...
Nate Smith’s Dairy Farm
The right or wrong of hunting has nagged at me from the beginning, and after a decade of hunting I finally set out to think it through. I agree with the sentiment of writer Edward Abbey: “Hunting is one of the hardest things even to think about.” As is my way, I...
Wilcox Pass
Paynesville, Minnesota, 1875 It was cold. A damp kind of cold that reached into the bones and could scarcely be shaken away. The lateness of autumn had arrived and soon winter would descend on Minnesota’s once rugged back country. Before long, tens of thousands of...
A Red Oak Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving 1964, one I’ll never forget. I was 14 years old. Mother was decidedly against it. “They’re different, Lane, not like us,” she said. “I don’t mean that they’re bad. They aren’t... just different. They’ll have family and friends down from Jackson and...
The Christmas Gift
That year Tony’s mother forgot all about Christmas. None of us was surprised, and nobody blamed her. She had many other things on her mind. Tony and I lived a few houses apart on Long Lake and for years had spent many of our spare hours together, exploring the lakes...
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...
Sporting Classics TV Season 6 Episode 22 Trailer
The world’s most watched outdoor television series embarks on an unforgettable safari adventure in Tanzania as Chris Dorsey and Steve Hicks hunt myriad plainsgame on this week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey on Outdoor Channel. The two intrepid...
Immortal Dogs: The Sporting Art of J.M. Tracy
Before there was an Eldridge Hardie, a Tom Quinn or a Bob Abbett; before there was a William Harnden Foster or a Percival Rosseau; even before there was an Edmund Osthaus or a Gustav Muss-Arnolt, there was John Martin Tracy. And J.M. Tracy, to use the name he signed...
A Good Dog Always Knows
Ain’t nothing to writing Papa Hemingway said, you just sit at the typewriter and bleed. I sat at the keyboard and cried for Zebo, damn near about shorted it out with my salty tears. It’s a twisted tale, as good tales are. Me and Miss Biscuits built a house on...
The Ultimate Holiday Gift Guide For Sportsmen
For many, the holidays are about family, where young and old recall the magic of Christmas morning—when kids sneak wide-eyed downstairs and witness a twinkling tree surrounded by a sea of presents. Then there is the look on the face of loved ones as they open...
Birds, Bucks, Bass and Back Road Adventures
Sponsored Content If you’re out to score a trophy buck, outwit a black beard or engage in battle with a lunker bass then take to the back roads of Alabama’s Black Belt—a region that delivers both wild adventures, lazy pleasures, better stories and the best of...
Red Legs!
When the lakes begin to turn hard and icy winds gust from the north, the red legs are not far behind!
Sporting Classics TV Season 6 Episode 21 Trailer
Get ready for an epic adventure in Greenland as Chris Dorsey and friends hunt eider and muskox in this week's episode of Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey on Outdoor Channel. The team of Dorsey, Terry Graunke, Steve Farris and Charlie Potter navigate through...
Hall Watters: Rescuer and Pathfinder
Aviator, treasure hunter, sportsman and fearless rescuer, Hall Watters was as unmatched as he was widely unrecognized.
Alvin Biesen: Riflemaker of the Coalyards
Years ago, sweating, prone, almost out of time and watching mirage slow to a crawl through the 20x Redfield, I shaded downwind just out of the X-ring and caught it. “Good call,” came a voice behind the line. I rolled over, slid the bolt open on the Remington and...
Benelli Lupo — An All-Reason Rifle
Sponsored Content The Benelli Lupo combines accuracy and adjustability features with sleek looks into a rifle to use not only for all seasons, but for all reasons. Benelli is an Italian gunmaker best known for its inertia-driven shotguns. The company history is...
A Grouse & Woodcock Ironman
This bird hunt covered the same distance as three marathons and demanded half the time required by the Tour de France.
Trouble with Lions
For weeks on end, deadly man-eaters would plague Arthur Neumann’s safari. The English hunter, Arthur Neumann, was still recovering from a terrible mauling by an angry cow elephant in the Lake Rudolph area of British East Africa (now Lake Turkana, Kenya). The year was...
October Snow
Taking advantage of an early-season cold snap.
A Thanksgiving Deer Hunt in West Virginia
Have you ever hunted deer? I do not mean in regions where all you have to do is to go out into the forest with your guide and wait ’til one walks leisurely past you; nor do I mean where dogs drive the creature to water and you can empty the magazine of your Winchester...
Herb Parsons: The “Wizard of Winchester”
Standing before an audience seated around him in an open field was a stout middle-aged man wearing a shooting vest and a white flat cap emblazoned with a big red “W.” In his left hand he held a Winchester Model 63 autoloader .22 rifle and in his right hand, a small...
Sporting Classics TV Season 6 Episode 20 Trailer
It is an epic celebration of ducks and geese at the top of the flyway as Chris Dorsey and friends hunt waterfowl in Saskatchewan in this week's episode of Sporting Classics TV. Catch the action Monday at 12:30 pm, Tuesday 7:30 am, Thursday 2:30 pm, and Sundays at...
The Legacy of John M. Browning
Never in the history of the world of firearms has one inventor contributed so much—and garnered so much attention and admiration—than John Moses Browning. Today, the Browning firearms and product line, the iconic Buckmark trademark and all things Browning, continue to...
The Extraordinary Bob Swinehart
Doing things the hard way became habit. With arrows. In Africa. At the end.
Lost & Found
Nothing about pulling a kennel from the back of my pickup and placing it on the ground in the jack pines’ shadows felt right. Tossing in a stinky t-shirt in the kennel was something you do with puppies not adult dogs. Leaving bowls of chow and water next to the open...
Fanzoj: 450 Years of Gunmaking in Ferlach
Show me a gun and I’ll tell you where it’s from,” is a cliché accommodating more than an element of truth. A sleek sidelock side-by-side with understated fine scroll engraving is likely from London while an over/under accented with fabulous bulino game scenes is...
America’s Greatest Gun Writers and Their Books
Gun writers are not a uniquely American phenomenon, but there’s little argument that collectively those who have been citizens of this country rank in a class by themselves. Sure, there have been some fine European scribes, especially British ones, who have written on...