The long pull uphill meant standing on both the bicycle pedals pumping for all I was worth. Sweat rolled down my face to top out as our small town faded away behind me. At the top stood an old abandoned almond orchard, or what was left of one. Scraggily trees with...

Responses vary greatly when someone hears the unexpected. There may be a blank stare or emphatic sigh or even a look of mild alarm.  There may be the sudden gasp accentuated with a rhetorical, “Really?” This is not so much a question as it is spontaneous disbelief. Or...

The pursuit of mountain game throughout the world has been a passion for most of my life. But now, having reached four score and three and endured four heart operations, I was not looking for strenuous high-altitude climbing. So, finding myself once again hunting at...

I suppose that there are other things that make a hunter uneasy, but of one thing I am very sure: that is, to locate and to begin to stalk a deer or a turkey, only to find that another hunter is doing precisely the same thing at the same time. The feeling I had was...

Over there, to the southeast and on low horizon, a 6:30, end-of-the-year sunrise emerged. This sunrise was one of those generated only by prescribed conditions, specific peculiarities not often available—late year, rain probable, skeletal trees framing muted pink,...

When the ducks come—splayed feet anticipating a frigid plunge into shallows; wings cupped, rocking in a jerky side-to-side; keen eyes scanning—there is no finer experience in the hunting world. Oh, there is the enhanced palpitation of heart when distant leaf crunch...

I walk toward an orange and white English setter that is as motionless as a leopard before the pounce, the dog puffing quail scent like a man drawing the flicker of life into a cigar. I am only a two-hour drive from Atlanta but feel more like a half century removed...

For South African Trevor Comins, perfection is a safari on the fly. The beast is dead, but that’s when it becomes dangerous. Forty yards in the sky, the 22-pound spur-winged goose plummets toward my blind like a feathered meteorite. When calculating the lead on the...

He was a young man, barely past his 25th birthday, slim and fit in the way of young men who follow dogs in the high mountains. His companion, Big Sam, was a huge, muscular, raw-boned pointer with a head like a mule—in size as well as temperament. Sam was a “big-going,...

It is said that in the early days of the world, the ocellated turkey (Meleagris ocellata; in Maya, Yuum kuutz) was a bird of pedestrian plumage with a melodious voice while the nightjar (Antrostomus badius; in Maya, Pu'ujuy) was clothed in resplendent finery. So, Kuutz...