Our All-American Bear
Assigned to cover a draw high on Old Smokies’ spine, Kephart kindled a thin fire between roots of a mountain oak that wasn’t warm enough to thaw his fingers and toes. Rifle across his lap, he listened for the dogs to bay, announcing they’d caught a black bear’s trail....
Ernest Hemingway: The Final Years (1950-1961)
Despite the promise of great upland and waterfowl hunting, dear friends and a place where Ernest could escape fame and work without interruption, Mary and Papa Hemingway did not return to Idaho until the fall of 1958. During the intervening decade, Ernest spent...
A Night Among Wolves
The hunter becomes the hunted on a dark night deep in a Russian forest.
On the Red
During the past millennium, I was fortunate to spend time in northern Texas as a wildlife biologist and hunting in south-central Oklahoma a few miles north of the Red River, the border between our two states. Drawing from my experience as a biologist and as well as a...
The Heart of a Sheep Hunter
Wind seems to be an almost constant on mountain peaks in sheep country. Exposed on a ridgeline in Idaho’s highest mountain range, the wind whipped hard and relentlessly as our party of three picked apart the terrain with spotting scopes mounted on tripods. It had...
We Shot the Tamales
The O’Connor family enjoys fabulous hunting south of the border.
The Surrender
The old man sat on the cold ground leaning against a cherry tree, taking in the fields before him. Harvest time was past, and a cornfield lay fallow under the slate gray sky of a cold fall day. The stalks lay broken and twisted from the event; their bounty taken. The...
An Unreal Buck
“Y’all be inside our preserve, where we hunt whitetails before the opening of Oklahoma’s regular deer seasons,” said Dusty Vickrey, manager of the Choctaw Hunting Lodge. “The enclosure is big with a lot of hardwoods and pines, deep cuts, tall grass and extremely dense...
Old Ephraim Part 2 of 2
Click Here to Read Part 1 Early next morning we were over at the elk carcass, and as we expected, found that the bear had eaten his fill during the night. His tracks showed him to be an immense fellow and were so fresh that we doubted if he had left long before we...
A Christmas in Moose Land
This article originally appeared in the January 1899 issue of Outing. The world was white. Day after day the cold had held, the only changes being from fair to snow and from snow to fair. Such days as the fair ones had been! The sun blazing from flawless blue, the...