I spent $340 on a St. Croix rod last spring. Watched seventeen hours of YouTube videos about reading river seams. Memorized the hatch chart for my local tailwater. Bought a vest with seventeen pockets and filled every single one of them with something I was pretty sure I needed. My neighbor’s nine-year-old caught a 22-inch […]

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I shot a three-shot group at 200 yards two years ago that measured just under an inch. I was proud of that group. Told my buddy about it. Took a picture of it. Sent the picture to my dad. Dad said “nice shooting” and I felt like a real marksman for about four days. The […]

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I almost skipped this one. The leather folder fell open to a page with “READ THIS TWICE BEFORE YOU START” scrawled across the top margin in Amos’s handwriting, underlined hard enough to tear the paper. Below it, in smaller letters: “no i aint jokin.” Recipe No. 2 is skunk. I didn’t believe it either until […]

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I found the bear by accident. That’s the first thing I need you to understand before the rest of this story. I wasn’t bear hunting. It was September in Oregon, third day of archery elk, and I’d been glassing a clearcut for three hours without seeing a damn thing except logging slash and a raven […]

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My buddy Dale had been telling me for two years to come down to Texas and shoot some pigs. “They’re everywhere,” he said. “You can’t miss. It’s not hunting, it’s pest control.” I believed him. I’m not proud of that. I drove sixteen hours from Missouri to a patch of public land near the Red […]

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Every hunting season, someone opens their freezer, pulls out a package of venison, and hesitates. It doesn’t smell quite right. The color is off. The texture is weird. And then come the Google searches: “how to tell if deer meat is spoiled,” “what does spoiled deer meat look like.” Those searches spike hard every fall. […]

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I paid $79 for my first hunting tripod. That should tell you everything you need to know about how this story ends. It was one of those Amazon specials — aluminum legs, a plastic pan head that felt “good enough” in the living room, and a carry weight that made me feel smart. Thirty-two ounces. […]

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I didn’t plan to fall asleep. Nobody ever does. But there I was, 16 feet up a white oak in southern Ohio, chin on my chest, bow across my lap, drooling onto my release. It was November 4th. I’d been in that stand since 5:15 AM. It was now somewhere around noon. I had been […]

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A few winters ago I was cleaning out my grandmother’s attic — the kind of job you put off for years because you know it’s half mouse droppings and half guilt — when I found a leather folder wedged behind a stack of Progressive Farmer magazines from 1972. It was dark brown, cracked at the […]

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I don’t know how long I fought that fish. Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. Long enough for the sun to drop behind the treeline and for my arms to start burning in that specific way that tells you you’re not as strong as you think you are. It was August, central Kansas, a stretch of the […]

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