Maybe Once

Maybe Once

“I’ll send for you,” Mike said to Jackie as he kissed her goodbye. He didn’t see her roll her eyes through a big smile as she threw her arms around his neck. She’d heard the same thing every year for the 12 years he’d taken this trip. Only in the last few...
Once in The Stilly Night

Once in The Stilly Night

It plum tickled his perversity to jist think ’bout chasin’ rarecoons. A classic from the November, 1935, issue of Field & Stream. Dud Dean held the empty frying pan over the glowing coals of our little fire. The fat caught, flared and burned out. After that burst...
Road-Tripping with your Shotguns

Road-Tripping with your Shotguns

To say I travel quite a bit for bird hunting and sporting clay tournaments is a bit of an understatement. It’s a little comical if I stop and think about it, and truthfully, I only recognize that because of the strange looks I get from family and friends when I try to...
Back to Bucks and Bears

Back to Bucks and Bears

Deer hunters don’t need exotic, expensive ammo, just accurate, reliably lethal loads. Herewith an update! Hitting far-off targets, informally or in competition, has shooters spending wildly on rifles, ammo and optics. Per backyard mechanics burying speedometer needles...
Preserving Antique Shotguns

Preserving Antique Shotguns

As someone who spends a lot of time working to preserve late 19th century and early 20th century double guns, I have thought a lot about why some high quality and once very expensive shotguns have been well preserved and others have not.  The formula for the...
Q Fix

Q Fix

There’s a rifle maker named Q, Inc. This raises a question: What does the Q reference mean? Quality? Quirky rifles? Both? Quirky is defined (in part) as unorthodox, unusual, unconventional and out of the ordinary. Q’s Fix rifle is all that plus high-quality materials,...
Culmination

Culmination

Ancient walls of huge, dry-stacked, weather-worn boulders hint at a distant past and parallel us as we travel through crisp morning air along a sandy, sun-dappled road toward our shooting pegs. They look European. Beyond the stone walls, giant hardwoods rise over the...
On the Red

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...