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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I killed my first deer on public land in western Nebraska, 45 minutes before sunset, with nobody within three miles of me. The shot was good. The deer went maybe sixty yards and piled up against a fallen cottonwood. I walked up, saw he was down, exhaled for the first time in ten minutes, and […]

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Your summer buck vanished from trail cameras right before opening day. The deer probably did not leave. Your camera simply stopped telling the truth. Here is why it happens every August and what to do instead of panicking.

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I own four sets of camouflage. Sitka for late season. Kuiu for early. Some Realtree pants I bought on clearance and wore twice. A jacket in Mossy Oak Break-Up that I’m pretty sure cost more than my first rifle. My uncle Earl owns zero sets of camouflage. He hunts in a brown Carhartt jacket he […]

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The day I lost my duck blind, I was standing in a parking lot holding a cup of gas station coffee and staring at a Bobcat that had already pushed half my marsh into a pile. The guy driving it waved at me. I waved back. What else are you going to do? It was […]

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