I shot a whitetail at 275 yards two seasons ago. Good hit — double lung. She ran about sixty yards and dropped. Standard stuff. But when I walked up and rolled her over, I realized I had zero memory of my trigger pull. Not a clue. I’d practiced all summer from a bench. Sandbags. Steady […]

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My first time butchering a deer I watched two YouTube videos, bought a $40 knife set from Amazon, and told myself “how hard can it be?” About four hours later I had a kitchen that looked like a crime scene, two garbage bags of bone-and-silver-skin scraps, and some very confused-looking chunks of meat that were […]

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The first deer I ever shot, I lost maybe thirty percent of the meat. Not to bad shot placement — the shot was fine. Double lung, dropped inside forty yards. No, the meat went bad because I had no damn clue what I was doing once it was on the ground. I was twenty-two, hunting […]

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I was hunting whitetail in a patch of public land in northern Wisconsin. Late October, the rut was starting to stir, and I’d been in my stand since before dawn. Hadn’t seen a deer all morning. Around ten o’clock I heard something moving through the brush behind me — heavy, deliberate footsteps. Not a squirrel. […]

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My grandpa hunted with a Winchester Model 94. Iron sights, thirty-thirty, checkered flannel and a thermos of black coffee. He never owned a rangefinder, never dialed a turret, never glassed a field from six hundred yards with a spotting scope. And he filled his freezer every single season. I got into hunting in my twenties, […]

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There’s a stretch of the White River in Arkansas where the brown trout get big and the water runs cold out of the bottom of Bull Shoals Dam. I went there with a buddy three years ago with exactly the wrong rod, wrong line, and wrong attitude. I was a bass fisherman. I owned two […]

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I’ve got a confession: I’ve bought the same piece of gear three times. Not because I’m a collector. Because I kept buying the cheap version, watching it fail, and then buying the thing I should’ve bought in the first place. By the time I was done, I’d spent twice as much as if I’d just […]

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Most hunters practice from a bench. Bipod deployed, rear bag under the stock, nice level concrete. Ten minutes between strings so the barrel cools. Three-shot groups smaller than a quarter get posted on Instagram. Then opening morning comes and they can’t hit a deer at a hundred yards. I know because I was that guy. […]

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Venison has a reputation. “Gamey.” “Tough.” “Tastes like the woods.” I’ve heard it all. And I’ve also served venison to people who swore they hated it, watched them go back for seconds, and then told them what they just ate. Their faces are always the same — surprise, then annoyance that they’d been missing out […]

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I didn’t think much about conservation until I lost a hunting spot. It was a patch of BLM land in Wyoming — nothing special, just sagebrush and draws and a surprising number of pronghorn. I’d hunted it for four years without seeing another person. Then one October, I pulled up and found a construction fence. […]

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