Hemingway’s Pilar – Chasing Billfish and German U-boats
Papa called her Pilar and she was a fishing machine, a 1934 Wheeler Playmate, custom built to his specifications in a Brooklyn boatyard. She was 38 feet at the waterline, with a low-cut transom rigged with a roller for sliding fish aboard. She held a ton of ice, had...
An Excerpt from “A Toklat Grizzly Comes A’knockin'”
In seconds a section of wall was gone and the bear was on its way in.
The Ultimate Quail Gun. Really!
Quail Unlimited’s best-of-the-bunch 28 gauge shotgun modestly named “The Ultimate Quail Gun”
Sunset Bear
I visited that spot for the rest of the season, and it was like returning to the scene of a crime and every time the sunset forced me to leave, I felt a terrible weight on my shoulders.
One American’s Dream
Even as a Marine stationed in Afghanistan, Alex Russo never stopped dreaming of becoming a waterfowl guide. If there are any two places on our diverse planet more dissimilar than Kabul, Afghanistan, and Aberdeen, South Dakota, I can’t imagine where they could be. The...
A Healing Place
It was the day of his birth, the genesis of his sixty-third year, and it had been a good one. It could have been celebrated anywhere in the world, as so many times before it had. But not today. Not this time. Today, it had been spent on the small streams near home,...
The Erie Jinx
Even on the best damned walleye lake in America, sometimes you have to lower your standards a bit and catch what you can. The guy I’ll call X-Factor kept calling and leaving messages on my phone. Somebody told him that I planned to fish Lake Erie in September, and he...
Ben Lilly The Last Mountain Man
After the honorable David Crockett of Tennessee, Ben Lilly was said to be the greatest bear hunter in American history. He reputedly killed more bears with a knife in hand-to-hand combat than Ol’ Davy ever attempted to “grin” down. In truth, Ben Lilly no doubt killed...