Field Skills
The Blood Trail That Goes Cold at the Creek
The Shot Felt Perfect The arrow left clean at ten past five in the evening, and for one whole second I was a great…
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35 published stories
Field Skills
Practical navigation, weather, tracking, campcraft, shooting, and field safety learned through real decisions outdoors, not armchair perfection.
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Field Skills
I Bought a Flintlock to Prove I Was a Patient Man and Spent Three Years Proving I Was Just a Man With a Slow Rifle
I bought a flintlock because I wanted to be a patient man. That is the…
Field Skills
I Let a Sixty Degree Buck Spoil Because I Thought Cold Weather Did My Work for Me
I killed a perfectly good buck in sixty degree weather and turned it into coyote…
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Field Skills
I Was Afraid of the Woods for Three Years Before I Realized I Was the Only Thing Out There With a Plan
For the first three seasons, I hunted half a forest. I owned a tag and a rifle and a spot…
Field Skills
I Hunted 200 Days and Saw Nothing Because I Wouldn’t Sit Still
For fifteen years I told myself I was bad at deer hunting. That was the whole explanation. I’d put in…
Field Skills
The Day a Treestand Almost Turned Someone Into a Lawn Dart
Competence and complacency are two very different things, and on one crisp autumn morning high up in an old oak,…
Field Skills
The ‘No Man’s Land’ Shot and What to Do When the Blood Trail Dies
I had a buck pegged for three months. A big-bodied nine point I’d been getting on trail camera since July,…
Field Skills
I Practiced on a Bench All Summer and Couldn’t Hold Steady From a Treestand
The shot was thirty-one yards, and I had shot it a thousand times. A thousand times on a cement bench…
Field Skills
I Bumped the Buck I Shot and Almost Lost Everything
Last fall I put an arrow through a big-bodied buck at twenty-six yards. Felt like a good shot. The deer…
Field Skills
Shot the Bull Two Miles In. Then the Real Hunt Started.
Everybody dreams about the moment the animal falls. The shot, the thump, the walk over. Nobody dreams about the mile…
Field Skills
He Left the Guns on the Kitchen Table and Drove an Hour to Hunt
I have a rule about the truck now that came out of the single dumbest morning of my hunting life,…
Field Skills
I Mounted My Own Scope Wrong and Let My Rifle Open My Eyebrow. The Buck Was Grateful.
The first buck I ever had a clean shot at, I never got to shoot. I got to bleed instead.…