My Old Man
Everyone should have an old man. I’ve got one; he’s in his 80s, and he lives on a ranch on a wide, sage-studded plain surrounded by mountains. How about your old man? Maybe he stokes a morning fire in a gray clapboard house along the Chesapeake. Down there the land...
The Jewett Gap Grizzly
Using a .30-30 Winchester, the one-armed hunter would finally slay the Jewett Gap Grizzly, ending its ten-year reign of terror among cattle ranchers in the Old West. In the 1890s an unusually large and savage grizzly had been marauding the livestock of ranchers in the...
The Greatest Hunter in the World
Hey Jed, what are you doing for the next four days?” The call was from my brother who a long time ago nicknamed me Jed. “I drew a late-season elk tag and I want you to come with me. Get in your car and I’ll meet you in Cody,” he instructed. I looked over at my wife,...
Chester Saves the Day
As was the case the last several days, the bay and three sorrels had not moved far from where they had been hobbled the evening before. The dappled gray gelding, Chester? No telling where he had roamed. I had seen him run with tight hobbles as fast the other horses...
Cat’s Eyes
I have often searched the wilderness for something that is right under my nose. On this particular day I had just returned from a grueling backpack hunt deep in Colorado’s South San Juan Wilderness. Elkless again. As a field biologist working the area, I had seen...
Buffalo on the Choctaw!
“Got a question!” said Jim Bequette shortly after we had finished recording an episode for my weekly DSC’s Campfires with Larry Weishuhn podcast. My first thought was: “No, Jim I’m not going to sell you another one of my favorite rifles!” A year earlier I had sold him...
Greatest North American Hunting Trip Ever
It was the greatest North American hunting trip ever, though the men’s survival was always in doubt. Fall of 1804, Meriwether Lewis was halfway up the Missouri, St. Louis to Great Falls, though he could not name the Great Falls until he had seen them, yet many months...
Ghost Ram
Wild sheep. No hunting adventure strikes deeper into your soul than stalking wild rams – those majestic monarchs who rule fortresses of stone and ice in some of the most stunning and unforgiving terrain on earth. Blocky shouldered, square-chested and crowned with...
Eastern Panther – Myth, Ghost, Legend
The Lowcountry panther entered my dreams and my life. Haunting me when I slept, quickening my pulse and step when I was alone in the swamps come sundown. Daytimes, the Old Man looked off into middle distance. Nights, he gazed deep into campfire flames. He held us...
Borealis
It’s a fairly young river as fair rivers go, born in the mountains of far western Alaska before making its raucous way down from the heights and out across the tundra on its broad braided ramble to the sea. I have never seen its mother lake Kagati, but I know the...