I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you’re allowed to fish for bluegill. You’re allowed to sit on a bucket with a can of worms and a $20 Zebco and have a perfectly good afternoon. Not every fishing trip needs to be an expedition. I forgot this for a long time. Somewhere along […]

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I used to think a rangefinder was a luxury item. Something for bowhunters who needed exact yardage, or long-range guys doping wind at 800 yards. I was a woods hunter — my shots were under 150, almost all of them. I figured my eyes were good enough. I’d look at a tree, guess the distance, […]

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Nobody wants to talk about gutting a deer in the dark. The photos you see are always trophy shots — clean hands, big smile, antlers in frame. What they don’t show is what happened an hour before that photo, when the sun set, your flashlight died, and you were kneeling in leaves trying to remember […]

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There’s a particular look people give you when you tell them you ate a squirrel. It’s somewhere between “are you serious” and “are you okay.” I’ve seen it a hundred times. And I get it — squirrels are rats with better PR. They live in trees instead of alleys, but the family resemblance is there. […]

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I used to think “conservation” was something other people did. Biologists. Government agencies. Guys with wildlife management degrees and clipboards. I bought my hunting license, followed the regs, and figured that was enough. I was a responsible hunter. That’s conservation, right? Kind of. But also no. The Day It Stopped Being Abstract Three years ago, […]

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I don’t talk about this hunt much. Not because it’s embarrassing — although some of it is — but because it’s the one that taught me something I wasn’t ready to learn. It was the last day of rifle season, 2019. I’d been hunting hard for nine days straight. I’d seen deer — does, spikes, […]

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