Before the Hollywood Buck there was another deer. A big one, people said. The kind of buck that made a man pull over and stare, the kind that got a name the way most deer never do. They called him King. Nobody can tell you much about him now. That is the strange part. For […]

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The leather folder is starting to smell like river mud, which tells you how far along we are. Amos never fussed over a clean pantry. Recipe No. 4 has a boot print on the corner and a heading he wrote in pencil so hard it tore the paper: “SNAPPER. nothing else.” Underneath it, in pencil […]

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I bought the best backpacking stove on the market and never used it once. When I finally took it on an elk hunt, the handle snapped off in my hand at 22 degrees. Here is what that taught me about trusting reviews over real-world testing.

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The first deer I shot, I butchered in my garage with a YouTube video playing on a laptop balanced on a tool chest. The guy in the video made it look like surgery. Clean cuts, perfect seams, beautiful roasts that looked like they belonged in a butcher shop display case. His knife never slipped. His […]

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The first time I walked into the deer woods by myself, I carried 42 pounds of gear. I know this because I weighed my pack afterward, out of pure self-loathing. I was 24 years old, hunting a patch of public land in Missouri, and I was prepared for every scenario known to man except the […]

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The first year I hunted, my pack weighed 38 pounds. I know this because I weigh everything now. Back then I didn’t, and that was part of the problem. Thirty-eight pounds for a four-hour morning sit in a box blind my buddy built out of scrap plywood and hope. The blind was maybe 300 yards […]

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Amos had opinions about possums. He wrote them into the margins like he was arguing with himself. Recipe No. 3 in the leather folder has more margin text than actual recipe, and the first thing he scrawled across the top is what he clearly wanted you to know before you touched a knife: “tastes better […]

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Last season, opening week, I hunted the same oak flat six mornings in a row. It was the kind of spot that had everything — rubs, trails crossing, acorns like marbles underfoot. A deer should have walked through there every 45 minutes. Instead I saw one doe the first day and nothing else. I moved […]

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The doe came out of the treeline at about 60 yards, quartering away. I had my .308, a soft-point load I’d used for years. Off a shooting stick, solid rest. I held behind the shoulder, squeezed. The rifle barked, the doe jumped — all four legs splayed out like some cartoon deer — and she […]

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You wake up because a mosquito is drinking from the corner of your mouth. Late June, 1843. The canvas glows gray before dawn. Somewhere outside, the wagon master is coughing up dust and yesterday’s bacon. Tom Miller’s wife is already yelling at him for something. It’s always something. Six weeks out from Independence. Somewhere in […]

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