The Shining Tides: Spring

The Shining Tides: Spring

Roccus the striped bass had survived man’s hooks and nets and the ocean’s deadliest predators…and now, in her last years, she’d become the largest of her kind. Sun and a wafer edge of dissolving moon rose a few minutes apart. From a late roost...
The Hunt for the White Unicorn

The Hunt for the White Unicorn

The packs grew heavy on their backs, the rifles like lead in their hands. But they continued on.  Neither knew how many miles lay ahead. It is said that the ancient shamans knew when a man’s last day had come. They could see it in the stars, the smoke, the shadows,...
The Anniversary Gift

The Anniversary Gift

She would leave him soon, and for this reason she had insisted that he fish the opener without her, the only gift she wanted for their anniversary. The first day of trout season usually filled him with excitement. Even as a man he felt like a boy awaiting Christmas...
‘Ol Settler of Deep Hole

‘Ol Settler of Deep Hole

No fish had ever exerted a greater influence on the thoughts, the imagination, the manners or the moral character of his pursuers. Uncle Eb was a born lover of fun. But he had a solemn way of fishing that was no credit to a cheerful man. It was the same when he played...
Hunting for Happiness

Hunting for Happiness

Man or woman, dog or gun, you never know when you might say goodbye. Fixing to write this down before I forget, the days and years slipping away the way they do, that blaze of autumn to water the eye, the flames of maple and oak and the dry-bone rattling aspen, that...
Uncle Perk’s Deer Lure

Uncle Perk’s Deer Lure

Originally published as one of his “The Lower Forty” columns in Field & Stream, this story is Chapter 29 of The Best of Corey Ford (1975). It is vintage Ford in not only the cast of characters but with wry humor and a disparaging poke at all the folderol...
Excerpt from Blood Red Mackinaw by Ryan Stalvey

Excerpt from Blood Red Mackinaw by Ryan Stalvey

Inch by inch, the afternoon sun steadily dissolves, casting an orange and pink haze over the sparsely populated landscape of rural Pennsylvania. From the front window of a seedy boarding house, Curt Sloan peers through the unclean glass panes, then disappears back...