The Extraordinary Bob Swinehart
Doing things the hard way became habit. With arrows. In Africa. At the end.
Frank Young: An Angler for the Ages
As a trout fisherman, Frank was simply the best I have ever been privileged to witness in action, and I’ve been astream with the likes of Gary Borger and Lee Wulff.
Holland & Holland’s Aim for the Future
Holland & Holland, long respected for producing firearms of the highest quality, was acquired in 2021 by the Beretta Holding Group from the French perfume company, Chanel. For three decades, the French company tried to redefine and reinvent the venerable old gun...
Welcome to Dogtown
Next to the dirt road was a field full of a tangly mix of broomstraw, wire- and lovegrass. A thick column of switch cane revealed the seep running along the back side. Off in the distance I could see the cotton in the neighboring farm’s field. It was so white that,...
Prospect Hope
A Colonial road, a looted grave and a deathbed promise. You don’t want to fall off your horse in the middle of Prospect Road. It might look like dirt, but it’s hard as concrete, paved with shell, packed solid by 250-odd years of feet, hooves and wagon wheels. A...
A Turkey World Slam
The pursuit of mountain game throughout the world has been a passion for most of my life. But now, having reached four score and three and endured four heart operations, I was not looking for strenuous high-altitude climbing. So, finding myself once again hunting at...
Why the Wye
An act of God combined with a dash of Grace creates a trout stream of royal proportion. Not far from the dirt path was a field thick with wide stalks of dark green, calf-high grass. To get a glimpse of the sun, wildflowers in nearly every hue—soft purple and blue,...
Shotguns Across the Pond
At one time, controversy raged over who made the finest guns. Americans pointed to Parker, L. C. Smith, Fox, Ithaca, Lefever and late-to-the-party Winchester. British gentleman would talk James Purdey, Holland & Holland, Henry Atkin, Grant, Lang, Westley Richards...
Harry Selby “Bwana Haraka”
“Clients tend to see their white hunter as a father.... He looms in their imagination. They are proud of him, and should he happen to visit them at their home in the northern hemisphere they will make sure that as many of their friends as possible meet him and see for...
Tutorial in Microcosm
Bream fishing with a fly rod is God’s way of making up for lack of funds. The old man wheezed as he made his way up the bank from the boat. Had to sit awhile on a stump to get his breath and reorganize his lungs. He wished he really could reorganize them. There’d...
Nervous Water
A father and son are finally reunited, on a secluded lake high in the Colorado Rockies. On a clear June morning, I took my father bass fishing into the Colorado Rocky Mountains. I had not seen or spoken to him in ten years. We ate an early breakfast at a truck stop on...
Our Gobbler
I suppose that there are other things that make a hunter uneasy, but of one thing I am very sure: that is, to locate and to begin to stalk a deer or a turkey, only to find that another hunter is doing precisely the same thing at the same time. The feeling I had was...
When 300s Were Young
What place, after a century, does a British cartridge have in the booming chorus of American 30-caliber magnums? Dawn’s hard snow was loud underfoot but the elk were noisy, too. Wind strumming the pines covered the crunch of our steps till both of us, surprised, met...
An Incidental Shooting-Iron: The Savage Model 99
Here’s a gun that carries better than some considerable few others of no greater efficiency. And a man carries a gun a blame sight more than he shoots it.
Sporting Classics TV Is Back for Season 8!
Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey will return for its eighth season on Outdoor Channel on Monday, June 30th. Episodes will air during prime-time every Thursday at 10pm ET, with additional airings on Monday at 12pm, Wednesday at 6am, Thursday at 6pm and Friday at 2...
The Devil of Bangalore
The night was warm and still and, although there was no moon, the myriad stars cast a bright glow over the village as the hunter took his position outside one of the huts. He had just arrived in the Bangalore region of southern India where he was waiting for one of...
The Suppressor Crisis Nobody Knew Existed
At a time when Americans are wrestling with inflation, national debt, border security, housing costs, energy prices, crime, foreign conflicts, infrastructure failures, as well as the lingering mystery of why airport food requires a small-business loan to purchase,...
New Dogs, New Challenges
There is a certain knitting together of warmish air temperature and moisture in the environment that forces the upland bird hunter to pick his poison. A “wardrobe dilemma,” you might call it. You can dress to prevent the moisture—in the form of rain and/or wet...
Ted Williams: The Greatest Hitter (and Fisherman) There Ever Was
They called him The Kid. The Splendid Splinter. Teddy Ballgame. And by his own admission all he wanted in life was to walk down the street and have people say, “There goes Ted Williams, the greatest hitter there ever was.” Arguably the best player the game has ever...
Andros
Shortly after one o’clock that Sunday afternoon as the plane began its approach into Andros, the first thing Tate noticed was where the deep water met the shallow bank of the coast. There, plainly visible on the white bottom beneath the clear, light green water, were...
A Boy, a Dog and a Shotgun
Over there, to the southeast and on low horizon, a 6:30, end-of-the-year sunrise emerged. This sunrise was one of those generated only by prescribed conditions, specific peculiarities not often available—late year, rain probable, skeletal trees framing muted pink,...
Wayne LaPierre and the World’s Most Predictable Sequel
There is an old rule in politics, business, law enforcement, and virtually every other human enterprise where large sums of money mysteriously change addresses: follow the money. It's not a complicated rule. In fact, it's so simple that entire industries have been...
A Night with the White Goats
Having hunted elk, sheep and other big game through the West in previous years, we were anxious to add a goat’s head to our modest collection. After many inquiries for a “sure place,” we started for Lake Chelan in the State of Washington. We left the railway at...
Failure To Launch
What on earth? I could swear I had the wheel perfectly straight. My face burned as I pulled forward again. Another restart. Another apologetic wave.
This Blessed Rage to Order, Pale Ramon
Ernest Hemingway, Wallace Stephens, Mark Twain and a Cock-eyed Consideration of Time and Space Wallace Stephens wrote an obtuse poem, “An Idea of Order at Key West,” wherein this gal was singing on the beach at sunset, about 1934 near as I can figure, and Stephens was...
Portlandia Falls: How Oregon Collected 120,000 Signatures for the Right to Arrest Fishermen
The proposed PEACE Act may be the most unmistakably Portland development in modern American politics: a ballot initiative so detached from practical reality that it sounds less like legislation and more like the product of a group hallucination that occurred during an...
Early 20th Century Affordable American Doubles
If a person wants to hunt with the same double barrel shotgun that his or her grandfather or great grandfather used in the early 20th century, the odds are ten-to-one it would not be one of the premium brands that today dominate side-by-side competitions and shotgun...
Zane Grey American Sportsman
My earliest memories of Zane Grey remain as powerful as they were when I was first introduced to his writings a few years before reaching my teens. An astute grade school teacher with exceptional pedagogical skills recognized an unquenchable thirst for certain types...
The Gray Ghosts of Oahu
Hawaii’s bonefish are bruisers, as large as Keys bonefish, but without the guide-given names. They came in sorties of twos and threes, launching off the runway at Hickam Air Base, one by one, then banking hard to starboard as they ascended into the sky above Mamala...
The Call of the Surf
There are fish in the surf that will take the angler half off his feet with the violence of their attack and cause him to shout aloud in the excitement of the combat. Game and fish are fast disappearing as our remoter sections become settled, as lakes and bayous are...
Legendary Game Warden Forrest Hanks
“There’s only two things to fear in Alleghany County— that’s God, and Forrest Hanks.” The Texas firing range was hot as blue blazes, but not as hot as Forrest Hanks’ M1. His Garand boomed, each time the .30-'06 bullet ripping another dime-sized hole in the tattered...
The Foundation Formerly Known as NRA
NRA Foundation and the Art of the Steal: A Heist So Clever Donors Must Forget Why They Donated America has produced some remarkable business models over the years. Apple convinced millions of people to stand in line overnight to buy phones that were only marginally...
Benelli’s ETHOS: One Formidable Beauty
Benelli’s ETHOS line proves they are nearing perfection in a semi-auto. “Back in the day,” when we were just beginning to discover the incredible number of gamebirds in South America, gunmakers worldwide were competing to see who could develop shotguns that could...
Full Circle
The fact that I am sitting here writing this makes me smile a little bit in serendipitous gratitude, for it is abject proof that you can, in fact, will something into existence. My journey to Sporting Classics actually started 11 years ago. I was hosting a gun...
Wolving (With Complications)
It began with a lucky shot. a cave and a rattlesnake furnished the complications.
Do Constitutional “Right to Hunt and Fish” Amendments Really Matter?
By the time Florida voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to hunt and fish in 2024, the movement had already spread quietly across much of America. More than two dozen states now have some version of a constitutional Right to...
Uganda: The Pearl
While rummaging through some of my father’s old books, I stumbled across African Game Trails by Theodore Roosevelt. It’s an interesting read regarding the exploits and African journeys of an American hunter and conservationist. One chapter, “Uganda, and the Great...
The Journeyman
I turned 16 in July of 1966. Kent Wellerby, Mr. Reed’s farm manager for as long as I could remember, took a string of Red Oak dogs every summer up to the prairies of North Dakota in Divide County. The August and September weather was much cooler there than in...
A Rogue Elephant
This article originally appeared in the December 1892 issue of Outing. Some 10 ten years ago, toward the close of the hot season, I was traveling through the somewhat sparsely inhabited district of Bintenna, in the Eastern province of Ceylon. The country was wild in...
The Ones That Didn’t Get Away
I’m A.D.D. in the extreme. Have been all my life. If you’ve ever been associated with someone who has attention deficit, it can be a real “trip.” One idea births another idea and that one sprouts two more. Pretty soon, ideas seem to be coming rapid-fire and life...
Just Another Love Story
She was married when I met her but I took her fishing anyway. She was a fender-bender, a well-put-together willowy blonde with beer sign blue neon eyes. But she was wired for 110 and plugged into 220. When she shucked her jeans, the inseam read, “Lucky You.” Great...
Oh, Lucky Man! Sigbot “Bodo” Winterhelt
Na, ja, my father hated all hunting and hunters. He didn’t understand. He thought, first of all, that all they did was destroy, and my father lived only to preserve things. And hunters in Germany wear a uniform, green loden cloth, you know, and my father hated...
The Politics of Camouflage
For years, many of America’s largest sportsmen’s organizations and media brands have carefully cultivated the image that they stand above politics. They present themselves as guardians of conservation, wildlife habitat, public lands, and the future of hunting and...
The Great Goach Gag
Stink, stank, stunk...uh, need a word here...the nth-square-to-the-10th-power expression of extreme stinkiness. A word for the gasp, cough, spit, shake-yer-head, blink-yer-eyes, spin, gag, retch, vomit kind of stinkiness. ’Cause that’s what it was. Don’t know what it...
Classic Alaska Charters: Now Booking for 2026 and 2027!
Now Booking for 2026 and 2027! 2026 marks Classic Alaska Charters' 37th season navigating the protected wilderness waterways of Misty Fjords National Monument/Wilderness Area! They offer outstanding adventure cruises for 5 days and 4 nights, including saltwater...
Shallow-Water Ducks
When the ducks come—splayed feet anticipating a frigid plunge into shallows; wings cupped, rocking in a jerky side-to-side; keen eyes scanning—there is no finer experience in the hunting world. Oh, there is the enhanced palpitation of heart when distant leaf crunch...
Never Invisible
“For extended trips, where time is no object and cross country work is intended, the ox-wagon is the best means of conveyance, especially if a bulk of heads and skins is to be collected, and carried about. The hire of a wagon, with a full span of oxen native driver,...
Georgia on Your Mind? Don’t Miss These Sporting Gems!
I walk toward an orange and white English setter that is as motionless as a leopard before the pounce, the dog puffing quail scent like a man drawing the flicker of life into a cigar. I am only a two-hour drive from Atlanta but feel more like a half century removed...
Texoma Stripers!
“We’re almost over the top of them . . . start dropping ‘em. When they hit bottom, crank up three rounds.” Chris Carey instructed Luke Clayton, Jeff Rice and me. Turning toward me specifically, Chris said with a chuckle, “Larry start stripping!” Smiling wryly, I said:...
The Phantom Setter
Originally published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1961, this story is one of the finest ever written about gundogs and grouse hunting. It is certainly the most chilling.