Sweet Elsie: A 1970s Childhood Revisited

Sweet Elsie: A 1970s Childhood Revisited

It might be hard to believe, but there was a time before hunters posted "Who hunts in the rain?" and "Not seeing any deer!" updates from the treestand. A time before the rise of Deer Hunting & Food Plot Facebook Groups, before forums for just about every hunting...

Great Writers and Their Guns

Great Writers and Their Guns

If the thought that literary liberals once hungered for London doubles doesn’t fill you with doubt, then read on. Russian author Ivan Turgenev, whose efforts to free the serfs produced the Sportsman’s Sketches, bought a Joseph Lang gun. Ernest Hemingway acquired a...

The Evolution of Adventure Rifles

The Evolution of Adventure Rifles

Sheep hunters often get obsessed. Not just with rams, horns and mountains, but backpacks, boots, optics and rifles. Especially rifles.  Just as backpackers cut the handles off toothbrushes and labels off shirts, so do sheep hunters shave superfluous ounces from...

The Cartridges of Townsend Whelen

The Cartridges of Townsend Whelen

It arrived in a small box not on its first trip. The return address, hand-scrawled, was unfamiliar. I slit the tape. Inside, a nest of paper held an old hunting knife, a fixed-blade Marble’s of the type popular in deer camps when I was young. It had been well used,...

Where Rifle and Shotguns Meet

Where Rifle and Shotguns Meet

"East is east, and west is west, and never the twain shall meet.” So said Rudyard Kipling, and it’s been gospel since the day he wrote it. It’s elementary stuff, but if you’ll bear with me a bit, there’s a point at the end of this little discussion. Shotguns and...