Horned Moon – One Last Time
Willard, it's time. I want to track one more mountain lion, maybe kill it. I've got this feeling! Somewhere in the forest came the warbling song of a night bird. Melodic, sweet sounds, but urgent and unanswered. It was quiet after that, except for the gentle breeze...
William Cornwallis Harris – Africa’s Audubon
Though engaging as a literary craftsman, Harris is even more appealing as an artist. The game-rich veld of southern Africa was his studio; lions, elephants, and even a now extinct species of wild horse were his subjects. Although he would spend less than a year...
Bedtime Story
The bear pounced on him like a dog on a gopher and was soon shaking and mauling both Earl and the canvas. Some of the best hunting in North America is to be found south of the Mexican border along the Sierra Madre Mountains, from western Chihuahua and extending down...
The Lunatic Express
The gruesome exploits of the maneaters, together with those of Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson...form one of the most fantastic tales in the annals of African adventure. In the 1890s Britain's far-flung empire covered a quarter of the globe, including a number...
The Time and The Wounded
A man of lesser conscience would have it easier. Regret and self-hate have plagued Casey every day, almost every waking hour, since the shooting. Casey Ryan's bull elk crowds his study. Not many days had passed since the exciting hunt that he hadn't thought of it....
The Bronze Age of Mike Barlow
Some kids are suited for learning in a classroom, for others education begins when they leave. For six-year-old Mike Barlow, paging through his father’s extensive collection of art books on African wildlife awakened a muse that would lead to his life’s work, and an...
Weary Be the Cat’s Eyes See
Walking silently through the wet snow, I . . . reached the kill site, but another solitary hunter was already there. I have often searched the wilderness for something that is right under my nose. On this day, I had just returned from a grueling backpack hunt deep in...
Chamber of Horror
American hunter Joseph Grew sat on the small pile of straw that settled as his bed in the comer of a dilapidated temple, listening intently to the savage tales of the 10 hunters sitting around him. From beneath a bluish-gray cloud of stagnant opium smoke and burning...
Of Ice and Men: Part II
Part II Of Ice and Men I helped him get to his feet and got him moving toward camp. He walked like a crippled man. I quickly pulled the cord attached to my pack and it came up full of water. I turned it upside down and jammed the frame into the snow. I left the rifles...
The Last Bear
Generally, he would have welcomed the chance to leave the hunter behind and go alone to finish the hunt. It would've been a good way to end his bear-hunting career. But this time, he couldn't. Kernels of snow splashed from the tracks for several feet in every...