The Light At Middle Ground
Fall is fading fast. Naked branches click like dry bones in the wind, and the choppy, pewter-toned lake mirrors an apocalyptic sky. Winter’s wrath brooks no quarter when the wicked weather turns minutes into hours, and few know its fury better than the late-season...
Road To Recovery
It’s one of those things I believed would never happen to me, despite the obvious odds to the contrary. When a branch broke while climbing out of a morning treestand, resulting in a 30-foot fall onto hard-frozen ground, coming to with a stabbing pain radiating from my...
Eldridge Hardie: Painter of Dogs
The greatest equine artist of all time, and arguably the greatest animal portraitist, was the 18th century Englishman George Stubbs. The toast of the town in his day, when the cream of British aristocracy beat a path to his door to have him paint...
New Zealand’s Stags
The Southern Alps are where a growing number of hunters head to be supersized.
Rowland Ward: Entrepreneur, Publisher, Big Game Guru and Taxidermist
Although the average big-game hunter may know little if anything about the life of an individual who was a man for all seasons in the world of Victorian and Edwardian sport, Rowland Ward, virtually everyone is aware of the long-running series of record books bearing...
Sporting Classics TV Season 6 Episode 23 Trailer
When bobwhite quail populations in West Texas plummeted in 2010, concerned hunters took notice and banded together to fund research to find a solution to the mystery. Now the efforts from the Rolling Plains Quail Research Foundation are bearing fruit for wildlife in...
Hal, a Dacotah: Hunting With the Sioux
The events in the following story are based on real experiences that were recorded by Henry Hastings Sibley, who used the name “Hal, a Dacotah” as a pseudonym for Spirit of the Times, a popular 19th century publication in New York.
Wolf Secrets
“Incoherent,” she paused. “The sick man was incoherent.” “Incoherent.” My left arm curled around the top of the page hiding a small scrap of paper. On the paper several words were written in tiny print. She continued with “incomprehensible,” “divisible” and 17 other...
Nate Smith’s Dairy Farm
The right or wrong of hunting has nagged at me from the beginning, and after a decade of hunting I finally set out to think it through. I agree with the sentiment of writer Edward Abbey: “Hunting is one of the hardest things even to think about.” As is my way, I...
Wilcox Pass
Paynesville, Minnesota, 1875 It was cold. A damp kind of cold that reached into the bones and could scarcely be shaken away. The lateness of autumn had arrived and soon winter would descend on Minnesota’s once rugged back country. Before long, tens of thousands of...