Ethics and the Meat Hunter
Contemplations on the ethical hunt. I saw the yellow Rank and the branched antlers as he stepped through a thin place in the second-growth timber, maybe 70 yards away. He was gone before I could even slip the rifle sling off my shoulder, let alone shoot. The wind was...
The Coyote – Nature’s Versatile Vagabond
Richie Nash had never seen a coyote on his family's farm south of Monroe, North Carolina . . . but all that changed on a cool December morning as Nash sat in his comfortable box stand overlooking a freshly cut cornfield. Half an hour after sunrise, Nash noticed a lone...
Tangles With El Tigre
Each day's end brought fear and a sense of unease to the small ranching community of Center City, Texas in the fall of 1903. Whispered throughout, the terrible term "El Tigre." Warner Glenn knelt on the shallow tracks of the desert floor, carefully studying their size...
The Goat And The Miner
This was the billy I had been looking for all summer and fall — my whole life, really. . .I'd found the animal I wanted, and would push myself to any limit to get him. The Rocky Mountains are a vast stretch of peaks that are young by geologic measure and by any other...
Three Bears!
The bear launched and hit the ground, eyes locked on me. Then, I heard my friend yell, "There's two!" — A second later, "There's three bears!" On May 18, 1983, I was three days into a seven-day assignment with Alaska State Parks, which had contracted me to evaluate a...
Lost In An Alaskan Blizzard
I realized then I was on my own — alone in a vast wilderness of ice and snow. Looking above camp toward where we’d be hunting brown bears, all we could see was snow and mountains, not a tree in sight. The only thing that wasn’t white was an occasional rock sticking...
Siberian Ibex – Heart of the Tian Shan
And here, among these crumbling cliffs and dizzying heights, I had come to hunt the Siberian Mid-Asian ibex in the dark heart and sharp teeth of dead winter. Eons ago, in a great battle of continents, the Indian and Eurasian plates collided with planetary force,...
Tiger Attack in Vietnam
In the dark night, the men sat listening. Originally no more than five feet from the last team member, Sgt. Phleger had disappeared. As a Marine deployed to Southeast Asia 25 years ago, I had heard of tiger sightings in the bush and an incident where a Marine had been...
Daniel Smith – Nothing Less Than Magic
In a market increasingly dominated by loose, painterly works that imply rather than show, Daniel Smith is an unreconstructed realist. “Let me show you some real cool sheep,” Daniel Smith says. He rifles through a stack of slides, pushes one of them across the light...
Leo Tolstoy and The Bear Hunt
I felt something warm above my head and realized the bear was drawing my whole face into its mouth; my nose, already in it and feeling the heat of it... Have you had summer in Moscow and St. Petersburg this year? "the bundled-up June tourist asked at the train depot...