by Jeff Hale | May 30, 2025
Returning to his favorite squirrel woods after 40 years, he would rediscover the land and a few things about himself. Dank black pools of standing water enveloped the timber, mostly oak and hickory. The trees were massive in their maturity, casting the woodlot and its...
by Mike Gaddis | Feb 25, 2025
When the old house was occupied, its splintering walls were stout, its diminutive shelter a fortress of good spirits, its heartwood hale and its ambiance light with ale. Way long ago now, in the antediluvian and simplistic age in which I knew boyhood, circa. 1954,...
by Mike Gaddis | Aug 19, 2024
Had a man once who said, “The older the boy, the younger the man.” Strikes me he was right. No matter how old you are, you got to hang on to him—the boy—never let him go. Hardly back from Chile and Patagonia, languishing in a chair before the fire—even as the...
by Phillip D. Yearout | May 13, 2024
And then, one day, there he was — a guy was standing by MY lake, and what the…he had a fly rod in his hand! It wasn’t much as waters go — probably a couple acres at best. I’d passed by it many times always on the way to somewhere else. It lay a few hundred yards...
by Michael Altizer | Feb 6, 2024
It tumbles off the east face of Big Back Mountain, leaping and flowing down its stony, laurel-lined course as it has for eons. Dad and I had fished its lower reaches when we’d first moved to Tennessee back in the early sixties, and many times we had talked about...
by Roger Pinckney | Sep 21, 2020
A scent can conjure up emotions and even specific memories. In the brain, smell is the closest to memory; in the heart, the closest to love. She meditated. She would not eat the venison I brought her. She worshiped some Hindu holy man whose name I wish I could forget....
by Dwight Van Brunt | Jul 10, 2020
In reflecting on the hunts of my past, I surprised even myself with hopes for the hunts still to come. It wasn’t long ago that my personal odometer turned 60. Other than a passing mention at an unrelated family gathering, no one seemed to care. That suited me just...
by Mike Gaddis | Jun 1, 2020
I thank God most weekdays, and sometimes twice on Sunday, that there’s not a Trout Angler’s Sportsman Society. That, in modern matter, the fine art of fly fishing for species Salmo continues quietly and foremostly a gentleman’s endeavor, largely...
