Gray's Sporting Journal - Sept 2020 Issue

Gray’s Sporting Journal The Big Game Edition VOLUME FORTY-FIVE

ISSUE 4

SEPTEMBER 2020

Features VOLUME FORTY-FIVE ISSUE 4 • SEPTEMBER 2020

14

Hunting

18 Red Stag Down Under

by Dušan Smetana

A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNAL

by Rick Bass

A distinction between the way an old and young hunter enter the woods.

26

Avarice

by O. Victor Miller A wise woman warned you, “Don’t you go near that river.”

32

Deer of My Fathers

by Thomas McIntyre

They could be what I wanted to be, unlike what I might have been.

42 36 Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire by Nick Trehearne A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNAL

Silent Through the Trees

by Scott Sadil

You can do things right and still be lucky . . . or just be lucky.

46

Sika’s Grotto

by David Slovick

A sika deer, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, taken fairly and without vanity.

91 EXPEDITIONS Fever Pitch

by Peter Ryan Stuck in the middle of the Congo basin, a guy sinking hard with malaria, and only one way out.

52 Red, White & True

by Mark Johnson A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNAL

FRONT COVER: Indian Summer, by Carl Brenders

mixed media on paper • 28 × 40 inches Courtesy of The Coeur d’Alene Art Auction, Hayden, Idaho.

Columns & Departments VOLUME FORTY-FIVE ISSUE 4 • SEPTEMBER 2020

58

10 JOURNAL The Essence of Moose

T. D. Kelsey

by Brooke Chilvers

by John Barness

True grit.

58 TRADITIONS

78 EATING

The Big Game Wisdom of Uncle Ezra

by Norman H. Crowell Edited by Will Ryan From climbing peaks to sleeping in camp, hunting trips are full of surprises.

74

74 ART

66 SHOOTING Tiny Gleaming Campfires

by Terry Wieland In fact, and of the mind.

70 ANGLING

Indigenous Cooking

by Martin Mallet A new, old voice.

110 BOOKS

Boddington & Buffs Again

by Chris Camuto

112 POEM

Maine Deer Hunt

by Ken Craft

Bunch of Bull

by Scott Sadil

Bull trout tell us the origin story—what is indigenous, what is wild, what is real.

78

64 Gear & Lifestyle 90 People, Places & Equipment 106 The Listing

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Gray’s Sporting Journal Group Publisher John Lunn A s s o c i at e P u b l i s h e r Michael Floyd

(706) 823-3739 / mike.floyd@morris.com

Editorial Russ Lumpkin, Editor Wayne Knight, Art Director Terry Wieland, Shooting Editor Scott Sadil, Angling Editor Seth Fields, Digital Content Manager

(770) 696-7619 / seth.fields@morris.com

Nina Eastman, Advertising Production Coordinator Contributing Editors R. Valentine Atkinson Barry & Cathy Beck Denver Bryan Christopher Camuto Brooke Chilvers Pete Fromm

Brian Grossenbacher Martin Mallet Will Ryan Dale C. Spartas E. Donnall Thomas Jr.

Advertising Sales Northeast ~ Scott Buchmayr (978) 462-6335 / buchmayrscott@gmail.com Midwest / Southeast ~ Amos Crowley (216) 378-9811 / amos@crowleymedia.us.com Stone Wallace Communications (512) 799-1045 / jimkstone@gmail.com Write to the Editor

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Gray’s Sporting Journal (ISSN 0273-6691) is published seven times a year in March/April, May/June, July, August, September/October, November/December, and January/Expeditions issues by MCC Magazines, LLC, 643 Broad St., Augusta, GA 30901. Subscriptions are $39.95 for one year, $68 for two years. Canada and Mexico add $20 per year (U.S. funds only). Outside North America, add $40 per year (U.S. funds only). Periodicals postage paid at Augusta, GA, and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address corrections to Gray’s Sporting Journal, P.O. Box 433237, Palm Coast, FL 32143-9616.

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Gray’s Sporting Journal may not be photocopied or otherwise reproduced without express written permission from the Publisher. First published September 1975.

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JOURNAL

The Essence of Moose

by John Barsness

T

o hunt moose, we must fully accept our inner carnivore, because the essence of moose is meat. No other common North American big game animal provides so much tasty paleo-diet protein—or presents so many problems in bringing it home from the hills.

My anthropologist friend Milo calls moose “the last of the Pleistocene megafauna,” smiling slightly because he knows other megafauna survived the last ice age.

Scientists still argue about whether the humans who followed Eurasian megafauna across the Bering land bridge to North America played a larger role than climate change in the extinction of, say, woolly mammoths, but we do know humans almost wiped out North American bison during the last few centuries.

Moose fared better because they don’t graze in herds on open plains, instead browsing alone or in small groups in wetter, timbered country. As a result, what anthropologists call “moose culture” tribes hunted harder for their protein than bison-culture tribes.

Moose culture still exists across the North, where both native and European Americans (who sailed across the Atlantic Ocean instead of trekking the land bridge) hunt along rivers and lakes, where boats can help bring moose meat home. However, as noted by a pair of Canadian anthropologists, “If a moose is in the water, it may be coerced onto shore before killing, as it is difficult to pull the large animal from the water.”

This dry comment does not begin to approach the wet reality. Few experienced moose hunters have been lucky enough to retrieve them only from land, and some pulled their very first from the water, including me. While moose inhabit several states south of Canada, including my native Montana, hunting them requires winning a low-odds license lottery. After more than two luckless decades, I headed north to Alaska, home of Alces alces gigas, the Alaska–Yukon moose. Gigas is the Latin

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root for “gigantic,” and according to one study, a mature Alaska bull averages 1,400 pounds, more than the average saddle horse, with the largest officially weighed at more than 1,800.

My gigantic moose appeared during an early September hunt on the Chichitnok River. I caught a flight to Dillingham, the coastal jump-off point for much of southern Alaska; from there the outfitter flew us 150 miles north along the river in a Grumman Goose flying boat, passing over several moose and brown bears along the way. We dropped into the last pool deep enough to float the Goose, transferred our gear into jetboats, and pushed a few more hours upriver to a tent camp. Frosts had already turned the Arctic birch and willows yellow and red, and silver salmon gathered in the pools, though they had also turned red during their journey upriver from the Bering Sea. Like many moose-culture hunters, we had to look hard for bulls, which wouldn’t stir much in the warm weather until the rut started a week or so later.

Eating lunch one day on a caribou-moss hillside, I spotted a patch of ivory white inside a willow thicket on a hill half a mile away. By the time I dragged the spotting scope from my backpack, the white had disappeared—but soon reappeared as the upper surface of a bull moose’s left antler, rainrinsed almost white after losing its velvet, that soft, fine-haired hide on growing antlers that peels off as the bone hardens in late summer. The underside of the antler remained dark with dried blood, so the white disappeared whenever the bull turned its head. Unfortunately, a legal moose needed three brow tines on one antler, or an antler spread of more than 50 inches, and it had neither.

A few days later, my guide, Randy Triplett, and I spotted five big bulls at dawn, feeding and gently sparring in a pond on the far side of a mile-wide

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willow flat, their ivory antlers flashing in the low sun.

We soon discovered the flat was actually an aqueous solution (mud), too deep in places for our Alaska tennis shoes (hip waders). We finally reached the pond shortly before noon, but the bulls had sensibly retreated to cool shade and we never saw them again.

No moose appeared that evening, or the next morning, so we returned to camp for a couple of hours’ rest. I decided to catch a salmon for supper, since by then the camp food had been reduced to white bread and peanut butter. A few minutes later, as I carried a 10-pound salmon back to camp, there was a loud splashing behind me, beyond the bend where I’d hooked the salmon, and far louder than any fish splash.

Randy’s face appeared in the door of his tent just as a long moose antler slowly extended around the bend, followed by the rest of the moose. I dropped the salmon and picked up my .338 and had a quick, semisubdued conversation with Randy about whether the antlers were legal. He finally said, “Oh yeah, they’re over fifty! But don’t shoot him in the water!”

The moose heard us and climbed up the steep bank to a wall of alders, pausing just long enough for me to shoot. The bull reared up and fell backwards down the bank and into the water, then started sloshing toward the opposite bank. Randy repeated his anti-water command just as the moose sank into the deepest part of the channel, leaving one antler tine breaking the surface like a periscope.

Randy got the jetboat while I waded out. He tossed me a line and I reached down into the icy river, tying the rope around the antler’s broad palm.

We dragged the bull downstream to the shallow riffle in front of camp, where it grounded on the gravel, left side out of the water. We then spent the next five hours inside a cumulus cloud of mosquitoes, skinning the “dry” side of the moose, slicing off slabs and manhandling them to the meat rack, which was across the river from camp so hungry bears wouldn’t wander among the tents. After every hundred pounds or so, we’d grab the antlers and heave the moose a bit closer to shore and a couple of inches higher in the water.

Eventually, the moose meat and I arrived back in Dillingham, where the outfitter packed it in waxedcardboard boxes. Delta Airlines generously checked it as free baggage. (More recently, it’s charged $150 for a 100-pound cooler of game meat.)

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A

fter deep water, the primary peril of moose hunting in most places west of Hudson Bay is the big bear known as brown or grizzly, another megafauna immigrant from Eurasia. My next bull moose, not quite so big, came on an early September hunt in British Columbia, a hundred miles south of the Yukon. I drove my pickup two days from Montana, and my Cree guide, Donny Davis, and I horse-packed up a valley and over a pass into the upper reaches of the Muskwa River—whose name is derived from the Cree word for “bear”—along the way seeing a huge grizzly. The silver tips of its black fur rippled in the sun.

A decade earlier, a wildfire had burned through the upper Muskwa valley, which then revived with young alders and willows just the right height for moose munching. The next day, I killed the 13th bull we’d seen, one of a pair spotted trotting gracefully uphill to a cluster of quaking aspens. Moose look awkward but trot with a smooth, slow stride— much smoother than my black gelding.

After tying the horses half a mile from the aspens, Donny and I stalked to 200 yards and I shot the bigger bull, which rolled down the slope, breaking off several aspens before coming to rest in a small clearing. We retrieved our horses, tied them up, and started quartering the bull.

Twenty minutes later, the horses started snorting and bucking, and we guessed a grizzly had heard the shot and come to investigate. But no bear appeared, the horses calmed down, and we took turns standing guard while the other guy quartered. Then we rode back to camp and returned the next morning with packhorses to retrieve the meat. We approached very cautiously, but there was still no bear.

The following day, we broke camp and headed out.

The only practical trail for a horse carrying four feet of moose antler passed 80 yards from the clearing where we’d butchered the moose. And there sat a big brown grizzly, like a huge dog, his stomach swollen with moose innards. He turned his head slowly, watching us ride past, small eyes faintly glowing, with a slight smile on his lips, as if saying, “Thanks, fellas. You can visit my part of the Pleistocene any old time.” n John Barsness is a full-time writer who lives in his native Montana with his wife,Eileen Clarke,also a hunter and writer, and Lena the Labrador, who doesn’t write but hunts a lot.

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A distinction between the way an old and young hunter enter the woods. by Rick Bass

WINTER ALERT, BY BOB KUHN (1920–2007) COURTESY OF COEUR D’ALENE ART AUCTION, HAYDEN, IDAHO

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T

TING September 2020 · 15

I

P

’ve been hunting, and writing about hunting, for almost 40 years. It’s pretty daunting to consider saying something others have already said and thought about for a long time. But maybe that’s one of the greatest things about hunting: the currency of shared experiences.

If I describe the feeling of the bowstring held in one’s leather-capped fingertips, arrow nocked, the arrow and your mind taking in everything about the animal at that close range: the scent, the individual hairs, the dust on the hoof, the wetness of the animal’s nose, the hugeness of the eyes—the most vital and living thing you have ever witnessed, other than, perhaps, yourself, pushing up the mountain, climbing up the rock chute, leaning into the slope of the mountain in the darkness (ice pick stars above you so close you could hit them with an arrow . . .)—then I am speaking of the same things even into the future that were spoken of in precisely the same manner, across the generations.

I still like hunting. I’m not so consumed by it as I once was. But it means more to me now, if that makes sense. And what a great trade that is—the loss of a measure of intensity in exchange for— what?—depth? Comfort? I find myself working for the wild country in which I love to hunt even more so than in the past. As I age, wild country is a thing I can leave behind to the future. Its protection is a way for me to pass on my values, my passions, to others, carrying wild country forward into an increasingly fragmented and often frightening world.

In this way, hunting is perhaps even more transferable than literature, or any other form of art. Now I put as much effort into protecting the habitat of wild animals—wilderness, the places where it’s harder to find them or reach them—than I spent in the old days, actively pursuing them in that country.

T

here is often—generally speaking—a distinction and a difference in the way an old hunter enters the woods, compared with a young or younger hunter. I’ve often wondered about this from an evolutionary perspective—the blood-whispers or blood-shouting of the hunter-gatherer burning brightest in those years when the body is most suited

for the days-on-end journeys, lung-pumping up the steepest mountains and bushwhacking down into the gnarliest canyons. There is an old saying that youth is wasted on the young, but in the case of hunters, I do not believe it is. I believe hunting, when one is young, is a perfect nexus of passion and endurance. Hunting should belong to young people.

“I am glad I shall never be young,” wrote Aldo Leopold, “without wild country to be young in.”

Now that I am in middle age—or, truth be told, on the summit, looking down into the backside terrain of middle age—I continue to push myself, for some of the old reasons. My children and I love wild meat, only wild meat, and best of all, elk, and it is also through hunting that I learn, continue to learn, the Montana landscape I love with even greater intimacy. Rare are the individuals who will push themselves on their own initiative down into the jungles and hollows where their quarry leads.

And why else would one awaken at 2, 3 a.m., to be on the trail to the mountaintop before daylight, at which point, the hunt really only begins? To be looking down from the mountaintop onto all the made world, when the light first comes again to that world, and you have run out of country to ascend, and you can listen, and smell, and see: your reason for being, in the autumn. But I still push also because to some extent it is the responsibility of a hunter: to know the nature of the wild country.

The places where only quarry will lead you.

This year, hunting with my youngest daughter on the last day of the season, we headed up into a roadless area, where a week earlier I had bumped a big elk from its bed without seeing it. The snow was knee-deep, and I had no doubt it was a bull, holed up at the headwaters of an old cedar forest. Half a day’s journey to get up there.

I let it rest all week. I knew it would be cautious about someone coming in on it from its vulnerable zone, downwind, so we studied the map to figure out how to come in at a crosswind, right on top of it.

We were only halfway up the mountain, following the long rock spine upward, when a whitetail buck—rare to see one up at that elevation—came running down the ridge, right at us, shaking its antlers at us like a bull. What else was there to do but Continued on page 84

P

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September 2020 · 19

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Shipped to the South Island by Lord Petre from his County Essex herd, red deer �irst stepped foot on New Zealand soil in 1851. For the next 75 years or so, other noblemen and landed gentry from England and Scotland also shipped deer, eventually populating the North Island. These days, red deer are a nuisance, and the government culls the herds. Hunting is also permitted—year-round, even—but you’ll want to hunt the rut in March and April. Nothing like hearing the roar penetrate that heavy morning fog.

September 2020 · 21

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This is the Whanganui River valley in the central North sland. unting begins with a ride to �ind a good stag but then moves to a more traditional, British-style spot-and-stalk on foot over hills that even resemble the Scottish Highlands—right down to the feral goats.

September 2020 · 23

The stags here are among the world’s �inest, in terms of size and antler quality. The scenery, hospitality, and grub ain’t half bad either.

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For more information see page 90.

Avarice A wise woman warned you, “Don’t you go near that river.”

by O. Victor Miller

I

t is the last afternoon of deer season, a Sunday. When I was a kid, there were blue laws against hunting on Sunday, and even though I haven’t been a kid since the 1950s, I still feel a little pang of guilt hunting on the Sabbath. Having arrived by johnboat a couple of days before, I am camped downriver from my childhood home, where my sister and I are flat out of deer meat, and because I have coronary heart disease, I eat very little red meat besides venison. Also, at present, there are two more mouths to feed— my son’s ex-girlfriend Melissa and her dog moved in with us after the romance went south. The dog, rescued from a Dempster Dumpster, gave my two Boykin spaniels the mange, but we’ve learned to love Melissa like a daughter. From Wisconsin, Melissa is a pretty blond girl, strong, Nordic, and willing.

She brought a gust of fresh air into our family home on the Flint River, a blessing in our 70s to have a youngster in the house again.

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DEER IN FIELD , BY ROD CROSSMAN

September 2020 · 27

I absolutely do not mean to suggest that a bum ticker and an empty larder are acceptable excuses for killing three deer on one hunt. Reprobates can always employ hindsight to mitigate a deadly sin.

There is nothing illegal about what I’ve done, but if my son or one of my young hunting protégés had done it, I’d have raised bloody hell. Such is my hypocrisy. I guess I just got carried away in the moment, got caught up in an urgency I should never have brought with me into the woods. Some sins cry out to be confessed even though I’ll carry the brand of my sacrilege to my grave—a ruptured disc and a crooked back that suggests a more crooked soul. I only hope my confession will serve young hunters as an example of what not to do and that I’ll be viewed hereafter as a penitent more sinned against than sinning. Pure and simple avarice accounts for my ruptured disc. I deserve to be crippled. It’s my own damn fault. Listen up, dear reader.

There’s a moral lesson here:

I

am after a big buck, and I set up my climber near its primary scrape—a bare area the size of a beach umbrella on the forest floor. The cleared ground has been spattered with urine, and the heart-shaped hoofprint of a randy doe is imprinted dead center. I climb the tree as quietly as I can. Almost before I get settled, a doe with a six-point in tow bounces out from behind a privet bush, close enough for neck shots. I kill them both. I have my work cut out for me. I sling my rifle across my chest, turn around to face the tree, and start down—when suddenly, the 10-point I’ve been hunting all season comes up behind me. Oblivious to my presence, it starts pawing its scrape. I know I’ll never unsling my rifle without spooking it, so I draw my .44 magnum revolver from a shoulder holster, twist slowly around, aim behind the shoulder, and fire. The buck bolts in a tight circle and falls. It kicks a time or two and dies. Now what? I have three deer on the ground and no one to help me. I have no idea what I was doing with a pistol up that tree in the first place.

I attach my safety harness to the doe and drag it to the steep riverbank, lowering it with the safety strap to the water’s edge. I do the same with the sixpoint with a little more difficulty on account of its larger size. When it comes to the 10-point, I harness it the same way, fixing its front hooves above

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its rack so they won’t drag. This makes a sort of sled runner of its chest. With the strap over my shoulder, I start dragging the buck. It’s heavy as a horse.

With its front hooves above its rack, it seems to be protecting its ears against some hideous noise— maybe the report of a .44 magnum. I’m able to drag it only inches at a time. I lean against the strap, pull and rest, pull and rest the 50 yards to the peak of the high riverbank.

I mean to balance the buck teetering on the edge of the steep incline. Then I’ll go around behind it

Now, besides being buried under a dead deer and caught in a tangle of thorns bunched around and over me like hoops of concertina wire, I can lift only my shoulders and head. The rest of my torso is wedged under the deer. to lower it down to the river’s edge as I’ve done the other two deer. I’m almost there. One more tug should do it, but one more tug is one too many.

I feel a quick slack in the harness strap over my shoulder, and before I can get out of the way, the buck overruns me, riding my back down the steep bank. “Whoa,” I cry, “Whoa!” Thorn vines switch us every which way. During the long slide downhill, we rake up about two bushels of briars. They tear my shirt and stitch my hide, but they slow our speed until the buck’s antlers plow into the mud, stopping us from sliding into the river.

Of the tumbleweed of briar vines snagged comprehensively into my clothes and epidermis, the most formidable is a variety of smilax with black-tipped thorns colloquially and appropriately called whoa vine or dammit vine. According to myth, Smilax was a wood nymph transformed into a whoa vine after an ill-advised love affair with a mortal. Whoa vine derives its nomenclature from the sudden stop its snagged victims undertake. A smilax thorn had raked across my scalp, removing

my ball cap. Plavix-thinned blood runs down my temple and drips off my chin. The buck and I are encysted in a nest of these diverse briars that include blackberry, Cherokee rose, and some other ornery invasive stickers I can’t identify. Cherokee rose, native to China, is said to have sprung up from mothers’ teardrops on the Trail of Tears. I’m scratched up and bleeding in my bondage, buried in briars and bound cheek to jowl with a dead deer, its sardonic tongue protruding, its sightless green eyes accusing and diabolical. I’ve narrowly missed being impaled.

I’m fastened facedown on the riverbank a foot from the water’s edge. The smell of spearmint fills my nostrils. The tines have plowed through a patch of wild mint before pegging me to Mother Earth. A purple winter wildflower grows within inches of my nose.

The abrupt stop and my headlong position must’ve sloshed some extra blood into my brain.

My face flushes hot. My vision blurs. Tiny balls of fire bounce behind my eyelids, pyrotechnics. A fountain of sparkling floaters and a grand finale of starbursts drift by. A distant ding-dong of a church bell. A tightness in my chest warns the onset of angina. I lie there wondering if I’m dead or just dying.

P

erhaps it’s proper here to assert, dear reader, that I’m no absolute stranger to death. In 1986, after my first heart attack and before a coronary bypass operation, an allergy to catheter dye stopped my clock. I was awake. I watched myself flatline on the life signs monitor. Compared with other neardeath narratives, mine was unremarkable. I had an out-of-body experience, moving toward a tunnel of bright light. The sensation was not unpleasant. Dying was peaceful. I felt sad for the nurses who were frantically trying to shock my mortal coils back to life. Don’t worry, sweethearts, I wanted to say. I still have a couple of things I need to do, like make a will, finish a novel, repent, but what the hell, everybody’s got to die sooner or later, don’t they?

I didn’t stay dead for very long. The cardiologist already had a line in my heart. He gave it a shot of adrenaline that brought me back to this vale of tears. The fact that the event was spiritually uplifting may have had something to do with the sedatives they’d administered for me to let them poke a catheter into my groin and run it up my femoral artery into my aorta. A couple of weeks out of the hospital from the bypass operation, I got bit on the

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thumb by a rattlesnake. On the way to the emergency room, my throbbing thumb swelled to the size of a golf ball and the bright world was bathed in a lovely amber. I thought I was dying then, but I wasn’t. A few days later, I had a reaction to the antivenin, and my face and hands swelled up like catcher’s mitts. I itched so bad I almost wished I were dead. That happened 30 years ago.

N

ow, besides being buried under a dead deer and caught in a tangle of thorns bunched around and over me like hoops of concertina wire, I can lift only my shoulders and head. The rest of my torso is wedged under the deer. Reflected in the water is a confounded, gray-haired, sag-faced old man with a half rack of antlers growing out of the top of his head. A breeze sizzles through the trees. A cypress ball falls from the branches above me—bloop—

“Things are only as bad as you make them,” says my father’s ghost. When you circle back home to live out your seniority, ghosts are just a natural part of the landscape. Both my parents’ cremated remains have been committed to this river. shattering my reflection, centrifugal ripples spreading out to infinity. I can see open mussel shells on the sandy bottom, mother-of-pearl iridescent in the low sunlight. Water trickles by, spinning little silver whirlpools along the edge of the backwater eddy. The rising water might float the deer off me, but it would drown me first, wound and bound in brambles.

“Things are only as bad as you make them,” says my father’s ghost. When you circle back home to live out your seniority, ghosts are just a natural part of the landscape. Both my parents’ cremated remains have been committed to this river.

Continued on page 82

Trout in Autumn Gonga Brown

BRETT SMITH JIM BORTZ

Blowin’ in the Wind

Duck, Duck, Goose

KATHRYN ASHCROFT

CAROL HEIMAN-GREENE

32 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

DEER of My Fathers They could be what I wanted to be, unlike what I might have been.

by Thomas McIntyre

D

ashiell Hammett began Red Harvest like this: “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named

Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name.”

That always put me in mind of how Jack O’Connor hated what some had done to the mule deer’s name by calling it a muley. Might as well call an elk an elkie, he snarled. Then went on to call the deer the gray ghost, as if that were an improvement.

MULE DEER BUCK, BY WILLIAM HERBERT DUNTON (1878–1936) COURTESY OF COEUR D’ALENE ART AUCTION, HAYDEN, IDAHO

September 2020 · 33

Theodore Roosevelt in Hunting Trips of a Ranchman never went so far as to call them mule deer but only black-tails, the common name of the time for the big Odocoilean deer of the Mountain West. He tried to distinguish them from whitetails by describing the latter as “low-scudding, brush-loving” and the former as “the deer of the ravines and the rocky uplands.” If you are willing to entertain another literary analogy, whitetails are Faulkner—intricate and hermetic—and mule deer, Hemingway—direct and true. Perhaps most important, whitetails run, as almost everything does. Mule deer, as only very few do, stot, in something close to insouciance, reminiscent in their way of butterflies crossing a meadow, looking not to touch the ground.

More people hunt whitetails than any other big game species on earth, most taking it up from their fathers. Growing up in the West—beyond the West, in fact, in California—I don’t think I saw a whitetail in the wild before I was in my 30s. Until then, deer meant mule deer. All the deer hunters I knew hunted mule deer, whether in the Coast Range, along the Eastern Sierra, or, and especially, in yearly trips to Colorado. It wasn’t even an expectation but an assumption that my first deer hunting would be for mule deer. That it was something, though, that I would receive naturally from my father would have been a misconception.

I can’t remember when I first wanted, needed to hunt or rather when I didn’t, or just quite why.

What I knew was that hunting would not come from my father. The things he loved were unseen by me, lodged away with almost no outward sign.

He had learned long before to hold them inside, unrevealed, and to contain so much more. I thought of sepia photographs of unsmiling people in heavy wool clothes, people resembling him. In keeping things from them, there was little left free to share with any others, later.

Using the prepositional verb, to hunt, I understood, meant my having to look to other hunters, men my father knew—World War I baby boomers like him but who hunted every year on Skinner Ridge east of Grand Junction. They were to me adventurers and explorers, returning with stories of some faraway October country. They kept a place open for my father on their hunts, a place he never filled for reasons only he could say. Though it may be that he could not, either, not entirely.

If the snow fell on the ridge before they got 34 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

there and melted off, it left behind black-clay mud that made them chain up all four tires on the fourwheel drives; and then the same mud pulled those chains off by its own special gravitational force. It was a very hard place to get into and very hard to get out of. My father, an anxious man throughout his curtailed existence—whom I still see in the darkened corner of the living room in his armchair, hands gripping the chair’s arms, eyes straight forward, wordless—never hunted on Skinner Ridge with the men he knew, because he was plainly and simply unable to be that far off a paved road, cut off from what was, in his mind, an absolute necessity: an immediate, foolproof means of escape.

The hunters knew that. They may have known more that they and my father did not know how to say. Being on the ridge would mean being unable to drive off by himself when the innominate nervousness grew too great. He would have to say that something was wrong, though he couldn’t say what, not really. And he would have to tell the other men; and he had trained all his life to tell nothing to anyone, not even to say I love you. When I was 21 and before it was too late, I asked if I could go with the hunters to Skinner Ridge—realizing that if I waited for my father, I would never hunt mule deer, when it was something I badly had to do. They understood. It was as if my father’s open position on the hunt leaped a generation, and I found a means of escape in what my father forever avoided.

The men took vacation time from their jobs to make this hunt, and left in the early evening, after working all day, two days before opening morning and drove through the night 800 miles, stopping in Las Vegas for dinner, an hour of blackjack, and to register at the Golden Nugget for the “big buck” contest when such competitions were still culturally sanctioned. Everything they had in camp—including two tents: a wall tent without a floor for sleeping and a surplus pyramidal tent, model M1934 OD, for cooking and eating—they hauled in with their pickups and Jeeps and International Harvester Scouts.

The hunters were not like the man I had always known. They could sleep under canvas and wake up in the dark. Stand the real cold and the sometimes heat. They could travel through mud, or snow or rain if it fell. They could live without being able, in those days, to call out on a phone and without an electric light or running water. They could deal a hand of cards. They could tell a joke. They could laugh at

themselves without its sounding like self-loathing.

They could cook their own meals. They could find their own food, stotting out in the scrub oak. They could be what I wanted to be, unlike what I might have been. That October, almost 50 years ago, I took my first mule deer on the ridge. Then it changed.

T

here is a feeling, I found, when hunters you don’t recognize are hunting around you. It’s unsettling and invasive, and makes you want to recoil. You want to know who the hunters are you see on the sidehills across from you or, worse, turn around to find still-hunting behind you. And you want them not to be there. Within a few years, the rancher we leased the hunting from started letting onto the ridge too many other hunters we never knew. We moved to another ranch then, west of Meeker, where it could be ours, unshared.

We crossed a creek we called Strawberry that I have never found shown on a map; and getting onto the property was anticlimactic after Skinner Ridge—unlock a gate off the pavement and drive through. The ranch was one long gulch of sage, scrub oak, and autumn light. Never much land, it was good for six or seven bucks for that many hunters—later, to our surprise, elk started running on the place, too—and we had a canted line shack with a broken porch, holes in the floorboards, a propane tank, a stove, and pack rats; a rough-plank horse shed where we hung deer; and an outhouse papered to block the wind, in readable 1930s newsprint with items from the Great Depression about widows driven to attempt to do away with their children and themselves out of despair.

O

pening morning, I awoke early enough to drink a cup of coffee before putting on my orange vest and hat, taking my knife, parachute cord, license, and a plastic bag, slinging my rifle, and heading out into the time called nautical twilight when you can see the horizon, but the stars are visible as well.

The night before, we divvied up where we would hunt. By myself I crossed the dry pasture on the edge of which the ranch house tilted, my boot prints melting through the white frost on the short grass, the sling on my shoulder, and both hands in my vest pockets and shoulders hunched, underdressed because I knew how quickly it would warm when the sun was up. I wanted to be just below the

ridgeline, unsilhouetted, before shooting time, as the warming air rose from below, carrying my scent away.

After a season, I knew the land well enough to find my way in the near dark without a flashlight.

I climbed, then started sidehilling across, scented by the brush as I walked through it. A sage grouse roosted on the ground kicked up and flew off in black shadow play in that startled rattletrap wingbeat, heavy breast forward, spiked tail feathers fanned. I got to the knob I was heading for, sitting in leaves crushed by my boots, the sage smell acrid in the cold air.

When I could see into the pockets of dark on the hillsides with my binocular, I would lift the handle on my bolt before sliding it back quietly and advancing it to pick up a brass round from the magazine to feed it into the chamber. After locking it down and setting the safety, I laid the rifle across my knees. I glassed for bucks before they bedded; and if I spotted one that looked good enough—and venison for the winter, not antlers, was the purpose for being here, though there were criteria—I could try to calculate a stalk if the wind and sun and cover were right.

If I spotted nothing, I went on sitting in the chill shade under the ridgeline until the sun climbed high enough to be felt radiating across my shoulders as though I were sitting with my back close to a fireplace. I unbent my legs and stretched them out, getting to my feet. I moved and glassed across the slope through the sage and scrub oak, stopping to sit again and parse the syntax of the cover with the binocular. I looked for the flat line of a deer’s back, the scissoring of legs, the glint of hard antler of a deer bedded in the brush—the piece that fit the space in the jigsaw. By 10 or 11, I was back at camp to eat lunch, sleep an hour through midday—in the back room, where the cots were set up away from the sun, bottlebees buzzing turbulently, making random hollow raps on the window glass—then go out to hunt till dark.

You hunted as long and hard as you wanted, not having to hurry, knowing that deer camp without a deer left to hunt became just time, passing. If you never saw a buck to take, then you went home and still shared in the deer taken. Almost always, though, there would be that moment, time of day undetermined, when a buck was standing, assuming invisibility, or getting to its hooves, rear legs first and then forelegs levering; and you caught sight. Or it might Continued on page 88 September 2020 · 35

WH E RE

T H ER E’ S

36 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

SM

O KE,

T H E R E’ S

F IR E

P H OTOG R A P HY BY NI C K TR E H E A R NE

September 2020 · 37

P

Preparations for a 10-day goat hunt in the alpine of British Columbia go beyond the basic necessities of shelter, food, and water. You also carry your plans, built on considerations for outcomes and options, weather, and routes in and out; they’re your attempt to control an unpredictable environment. Wildfires from lightning strikes, however, are a wild card, and you enter the haze beneath a smoke-darkened sky despite warnings from your provincial government. In such circumstances, especially up here, your best-laid schemes can go awry.

38 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

September 2020 · 39

Y

You might even have to deviate from your blueprint and opt instead for decisions made on the fly—such as switching from bow to rifle, especially when you get a good chance at a mature billy on a relatively flat plateau. Still, you debate. . . . It’s just day three. Do we take the long shot?

Or wait for a chance with the bow? Then you look up. That smoky sky is getting heavier, a sure sign the fire is getting closer. In such circumstances, you take the long shot, take the billy— and get out while the getting’s good.

40 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

For more information, see page 90.

September 2020 · 41

SILENT THROU

42 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

GH THE TREES You can do things right and still be lucky . . . or just be lucky.

BY SCOTT SADIL

INTO THE MORNING SUN (DETAIL), BY GRANT HACKING

September 2020 · 43

ince I migrated to Oregon 25 years ago, elk camp had been an abstraction. It was something I read about, the subject of tales told by hunters around town, occasionally even a source of envy—the way I might feel if I heard about someone scaling a glacier in Alaska, circumnavigating Tasmania in a rowboat, or riding a bicycle from Cape Town to Dar es Salaam.

But like a lot of things I’ve considered doing during my life, elk camp seemed yet another one I wasn’t going to get around to—especially as the shadows of mortality crept closer and closer toward adventures already pinned to the map.

Then Joe called. He wanted to raid my wood pile, which this year covered two walls of the house, just the thing to combat the darkness when we sense the hour of life growing late. Joe, need I say, was headed to elk camp—with a third-season cow tag in a unit less than 60 miles from home.

Maybe I’d like to join him.

Maybe I’d like to take a break from working as though the end is near.

After loading his wood, Joe drew me a map; he’d have his tent trailer set up at the edge of the state

game management area or farther up the road in the national forest. A high school biology teacher, Joe’s careful about details: tidy truck, neat kitchen, his daughters get to school and practice on time.

He’s also 20 years younger than I am and tall as an NBA forward, which means I don’t worry about him while afield or on the river—not the way I worry with some folks my age.

It took me most of the day to decide this was a chance I’d be foolish to miss. The next morning while I was getting my gear together, trying to figure out what I’d wear to keep from balking at bad weather, Joe called from his truck. They’d been into animals up in a creek basin on logging company property open to the public. Nobody else there. Big herd. They’d had a chance—a good chance.

“Fact is, we shoulda had one,” he added, his voice still a whisper.

THE CAMP stood on an open rise at the

end of a rutted spur road, exactly as Joe had drawn it. Scattered oaks and ponderosa pines wandered about the gently canted hillsides; the trees closed ranks at the far reaches of the dead grass, finally plunging into dark folds of steep seasonal creeks.

Surrounded by silence, I pulled on my new orange

ELK HERD, BY JOHN FERY (1859–1934) COURTESY OF COEUR D’ALENE ART AUCTION, HAYDEN, IDAHO

44 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

knit cap and set off with binoculars, immediately aware that I was part of something new, something different—as if I had just opened a novel, discovering a voice that drew me down the page. Which meant— What? I shouldn’t whistle? Talk out loud to myself? Join with the hills in the sound of music?

The sun broke free of a faceless gray sky; I dropped as deep as I dared down a tangled creek bottom, careful about the elevation gain back to camp. The last thing I wanted to do was flake out during the real deal—especially if I was called upon to pack out a forequarter from some distant woods.

Back on the flank of the hillside, I came upon a shallow depression in the brittle knee-high grass; in the center of a bed of trampled mud lay a dead elk, intact but for the hollowing out by the usual furred and feathered suspects in these forests.“Probably shot and got this far and died,” said Joe later, when I led him to see the remains, the waste and failure clipping an edge to his voice I hadn’t heard before.

WE MADE the mistake that evening of

eating as soon as everyone was hungry. The we consisted of me, Joe, Rob—a neighbor of Joe’s who had pulled the same cow tag—and Rob’s 12-year-old son, Miles. We finished our second helpings of stew and banana bread, slid our bowls toward the center of the table, and leaned back in the luxury of foamcushioned seats. The propane heater breathed warm air into the trailer; outside the generator purred. Joe and I splashed single malt into our metal camp cups.

“You know what time it is?” Joe asked.

We looked through curtained windows into twilight fading through the trees.

Joe pointed at his watch.

“Four forty-five,” he said. “Quarter to five.”

A reaction resembling fear ran through the trailer. I recalled December steelhead trips to the Olympic Peninsula, coming in out of the rain at dark, trying to keep my last change of dry clothes free of waders and wading jacket and rivulets of condensation on the sides and ceiling of my uninsulated Dodge van—wondering how I was ever going to make it until morning, when I would drive into Forks for breakfast in a warm, well-lit café. We grown-ups turned and glanced at Miles, as if trying to remember a time we could even sleep 12 hours straight, much less wake up feeling refreshed after a night spent wrestling a sleeping bag atop anything from a couch to a cot to a pad of Thinsulate rolled

out onto stony or hard, tilted ground. Quarter to five? You got to be kidding.

I pulled on a jacket and went outside and built up the fire we had left smoldering beneath a low drizzly sky. The rest of the crew soon followed. I doled out prudent measures of Scotch, and Joe began recounting the day’s nearly successful hunt, a tale ripe with the almost, not-quite, just-about, inches-short, shoulda coulda woulda trope that scented so many elk stories from a part of the state where harvest-to-tag ratios never come close to rising out of single digits.

From across the creek basin, Joe had watched as the herd suddenly appeared through the trees on a course that would bring them directly across the path of Rob and his son—neither of whom, Joe could tell, was aware yet of the animals’ presence.

Then they were. The elk grew skittish, scuffling this way and that at the edge of the trees, but by now they were practically on top of Rob and his son. Rob raised his gun—and Joe waited for the sound of the shot.

Nothing.

“I had one in the scope,” Rob now explained, firelight flickering across his face. “But the angle was wrong. And it was moving away from me.”

He glanced at Joe, the only one of us in the group who had ever actually shot an elk. A current of tacit agreement circled the fire. If he hadn’t been sure, then he made the right decision not squeezing the trigger.

Plus, his young son had been right there with him—a time to model caution, discretion, humility, those virtues of an enlightened sporting ethics that reduce or all but eliminate chance for the sort of sad fate of the dead animal we had viewed that afternoon.

Still, as his father lowered his gun, as the forest grew quiet and the last of the animals escaped back into the trees, Miles was left with a question. Without a gun of his own in his hands, he had watched the scene unfold free of distractions, his attention on details his father seemed to miss. Why, he wanted to know, had Rob aimed through the trees at a cow elk starting to run away, when right there next to them stood a much bigger one, not yet even moving?

DAYLIGHT

remained a long way off when I finally ran out of sleeping positions that didn’t leave some part of my body cold or sore or numb.

I switched on my headlamp. Wind and sprinkles hissed at the fly of the tent. I slipped on a pair of froufrou Patagonia rain pants that I had dug out of a Continued on page 86 September 2020 · 45

I

Sika

n the course of his five-decade career, Baltimore newspaperman and curbstone soothsayer H. L. Mencken penned many memorable quips addressing a variety of subjects, but the most colorful were usually leveled at man’s vanity. For example, Mencken correctly observed that you can safely tell a fellow to his face that his wife is dim, but if you say she’s ugly, he’s liable to punch you in the nose. The history of folly records countless examples of similar vanities, and we find them today in the most

modest suburbs of human endeavor—everywhere, really, from our insistence on a fashionable but otherwise indistinguishable bottle of Scotch to the scrutiny we lavish on the progress of a bald spot between Monday morning and Sunday night.

Vanity, it turns out, is a timeless theme. To be waylaid by a lust for prestige is as old as the upright edition of our race. Epicurus warned us against it long before the ancient Romans dreamed of pushing their empire over the Danube when he prescribed nothing more than barley cakes and water as the diet for a happy man. But still we accumulate and expand, like those old Romans. And we know what became of them.

The Eastern Shore of Mencken’s home state of Maryland is a little slice of heaven consisting of just the sort of unassuming pleasures Epicurus recommended, a refuge for many of nature’s demure citizens that represent much of what’s good in this life, in this area. The tidal pools of the Chesapeake Bay watershed and its surrounding woodlands are richly adorned with green and woolly cordgrass, prim honeysuckle fingerlings, and the alluring white cups and pale yellow carpels of the magnolia flower. Even the local mud has its charm, a sootand-saline reminder of our humble origins in these same ocean eddies someplace back in prehistory.

The hunter who ventures into the salt marshes here in pursuit of the diminutive sika deer, which is a distant relation of the American elk, also shares the field with a variety of distinctive shore wildlife.

The list covers the spectrum of avian fauna from the haughty blue heron through various species of waterfowl, on down to the motley-plumed northern flicker and its carnival-colored brothers. You’ll find here scores of lesser mammals, too, and the unobtrusive 46 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

crustaceans and bivalves—arks, bay scallops, and crabs of the Atlantic blue, black-fingered mud, and Chinese mitten varieties—that live and die in cycle with the ebb and flow of the Chesapeake’s waters.

The sika fits in well here and has adapted marvelously to the riparian habitat. It’s sleek and small, even in comparison to the elfish Maryland whitetail that share its range. With a dark chocolateand-charcoal winter coat a sika hides easily, and a fetching white hide halo encircles its tail like a doily. Its features are delicate: thin horns that typically don’t branch much and that never grow to impressive proportions and a ballet dancer’s legs that taper to svelte, sharp-tipped hooves. It swims like a retriever, bugles like an elk, and barks like a monkey. One local resident assured me that sika deer also growl, but I’ve certainly never heard it.

Although comfortably in residence for a hundred years, the sika is not native to the Eastern Shore. The breed hails originally from the isles of Japan and other points east, but Maryland’s luxuriant wetlands became a sanctuary for a small expatriate herd after its introduction there sometime after 1900. According to one legend retold in the taverns along these eastern bays, the existing sika herd descends from a handful released onto James Island in the Chesapeake Bay by Mr. Clement Henry, who bought them from a traveling circus that found itself short of funds. I should add that I have no way to verify this version of the sika’s history in North America—honestly, I’ve not tried.

I realize it’s probably too quaint to be true, but for that reason I feel compelled to promote it here, for the duration of this essay anyway, as the possible truth. Between then and now, the Eastern Shore

’s Grotto

A sika deer, on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, taken fairly and without vanity.

by David Slovick

SIKA, BY GRANT HACKING

September 2020 · 47

has become the sika’s grotto, a makeshift garden in which it has gotten on handsomely even if it probably isn’t the home it would have chosen for itself.

O

n a late December afternoon at the tail end of the season for sika deer in Dorchester County, I found myself driving through the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on my way out to the evening hunt. The view over the swamp from the shoulderless two-lane road rising precariously above it suggests what this Atlantic borderland must have looked like before the first Europeans moved in. The tidewater that laps the edges of the road is mostly concealed under a canopy of tawny phragmites, grass head high and pom-pom tipped, and punctuated by an occasional open pool inhabited by black ducks and blue-winged teal. Interspersed here and there are belts of four-story loblolly pines wrapped in crenellated red bark; they tower over the surrounding wetlands like great Corinthian columns.

Between the western edge of the refuge and the shore of the Chesapeake a bit farther on, there are only a few structures, the remains of a shore community mostly abandoned some years ago, and many of the few are tumbledown or uninhabited—forgotten cottages, neglected churches with hedgerows of illegible grave markers, outbuildings attending paddocks without any horses. The overall impression you get from these holdovers and the landscape they decorate is one of emptiness rather than the repose you might expect to find in a rural seaside location like this one.

I was introduced to sika deer a decade ago by a longtime friend, Mr. John Schreiner, who was cruising the swamps with me that weekend, helping me pin down my first stag, and generally lending moral support. Sikas, you see, are as hard to spot in these swamps as bongo in the opaque rain forests of Western Africa, and for that reason, imagined or remembered but almost never seen, they will bewitch you the way an exceptional kudu bull will, or certain dark-haired women. Our guide was Adam Parks of Barneck Outfitters, operating out of Tilghman, Maryland. Evenings are the best time to see sikas on this part of the shore, and just before the sun began to set, Adam set us up on a couple high ladder stands that offered a broad view out over the swamp.

That evening was perfect for hunting deer of any sort—overcast and chilly with a periodic fine drizzle that never worked itself into a proper rain. The 48 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

flora was less congenial. Although I sat at a height of 16 feet, the phragmites curtain that stretched from the base of my stand to the tree line half a mile away betrayed no hint of what life might be moving beneath it. There were a few small clearings, including one or two within shooting distance, that could possibly offer a glimpse at a passing stag, but many of these patches were water holes. I shrank from the idea of plinking at a waterborne sika in failing light.

I had an hour or so to consider my predicament before the deer really started moving, and yet when that time had elapsed, I was no clearer about how I was supposed to locate a stag in that mess, let alone shoot one.

But as the night crept in and my apprehension increased, the puzzle solved itself. At a hundred yards to my right, I heard—only indistinctly at first—the symmetrical rhythm of footfalls in water, like stones skipping across a pond. The increasing volume of small splashes plotted the route of the advance through the grass labyrinth, but what beasts may be responsible for them was at the time a perfect mystery. The swamp hid the little dark deer so successfully that, until they were nearly in my lap, they were invisible. The shot when it came was therefore quite close, about 20 yards, a welcome development as far as anchoring the animal was concerned but otherwise uncomfortably close quarters with the perceptive cervid. This situation is especially problematic with sikas, which learn from birth to keep a lookout skyward for the hawks and eagles that monitor the swamps, and no sooner had the stag stepped into a clearing than it lifted its head to have a look at me. I’ve played the same game with Midwestern whitetails for most of my life, so I managed to sit still, but as we considered each other from whistling distance I wondered how I was ever going to move into position for a shot under the scrutiny of those disapproving eyes.

After a few more glances at my tree, the stag settled down and began to feed around the small yard, only 15 or so feet across, which provided the window that allowed me to put the scope’s red dot on it before it disappeared again into the grass. When hit, it sprinted back to the matted stalks and muddy pools and came to rest in less than a minute at what I estimated to be about 75 yards directly in front of me. And just as quickly as it fell, the evening quiet closed in again—no more splashing or footfalls, only blackbirds and woodpeckers and wind.

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I

t seems to me today that what I was satisfied for many years to call good is, on closer inspection, not nearly as valuable as I supposed. As often as not it was only someone else’s preference that I adopted without much consideration and which, I would guess, that someone else adopted in turn from another someone. I attribute my change in perspective to a kind of plate tectonics that drives the imprecise impressions of your youth beneath the accumulated experiences of middle age and turns up a jagged fault line where there once appeared to be a tight seam. Or maybe it’s that everyone has to share among us a finite quantity of good, and I’ve already used up my allotment. Someone else is now enjoying theirs. In any case, there comes a point where you’re forced to settle accounts with yourself and choose a fixed definition of good, to name it with certainty, and pace off its length so you can recognize it and pursue it, or so you’re able, in hindsight, to tally up your losses when you don’t.

My sika was good. It wasn’t like the bottle of Château Gazin I enjoyed one warm August evening on the veranda of the Restaurante Rekondo, overlooking the Bay of Biscay from the hills that ripple into the distance above San Sebastian, when I knew I could sleep late the next morning and that I had plenty of cash in my pocket to cover the bill.

Nor was it like a kiss from Kelly Lynn Woodward, my high-school girlfriend, who smelled like summer even in the winter. But it was a good stag: fat bellied and firm chested with 10-inch spikes, robust about the hams, and perfumed all around with the sweet, vegetal musk of the deep swamp. It would provide me with fine tenderloins after the season was closed and the snow was deep in my part of the country. And I won it fairly.

The day was done, but from the place where the tops of the pines joined the horizon, I could still make out a soothing rosé glow. Below the pines, the serrated tops of phragmites stalks pulsed in unison under the winter wind the way wheat fields do in Kansas and Minnesota. Bisecting the phragmites walls ran two mud tracks that had trampled beneath them toppled grass husks until they formed a latticework runway leading into the swamp from the main road. This rolled up to and disappeared below the soles of my rubber knee boots, which were encased in cocoons of amber mud and suspended 50 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

a foot above the two-track, swinging at a slow march from their anchor points at my knees. The rest of me was perched on the lowered tailgate of the pickup truck, the sika stretched out like a sleeping dog in the dust below.

M

encken was a strident opponent of marriage through most of his life but eventually got himself hitched nonetheless at 50. After studying the matter carefully for a couple decades I’ve determined that all men should marry by 60 at the latest, whether they think it suits them or not. The basis of this belief has to do with the space of ground already covered at that time in life, the simple extent of progress along the arc that connects delivery to dotage. I hold no strong opinions about what a man should do with his first 59 years so long as he doesn’t impose on his neighbor unnecessarily. Mencken beat my prescribed cutoff by 10 years, but he was born at a time when folks didn’t expect to live so long, so we can safely discount the difference.

I’ve often wondered what it was that made him change his mind. Was it a late dawning knowledge that, after all, he shared a few qualities with those unfortunates he had satirized so mercilessly in print over the years? A creeping suspicion as he came to his maturity that, for all his wit and erudition, all his success, he was at bottom just a regular guy from Baltimore with failings and appetites similar to those of the man who repaired his furnace and the lady who sorted his mail? In other words, was it that, as he aged, he, too, just wanted a good-looking wife he could show off to his friends?

I looked back down at my sika, lying on the twotrack in the glow of the taillights, wet and worse for wear after a long drag through knee-high water that was necessary to recover it. Thankfully, my friend John had returned from his evening sit and had been on hand to assist with the task. The evening had grown cold but not yet uncomfortably so, and the reverberations of a measured quantity of alcohol through my limbs and sentiments rewarded but did not intoxicate. And my sika was still good. n David Slovick lives in Manhattan and hunts Maryland’s Eastern Shore as often as he can.

8 kids a day are accidentally killed or injured by FAMILY FIRE. FAMILY FIRE is a shooting involving an improperly stored gun, often found in the home.

ENDFAMILYFIRE.org

RED W HITE TRUE

&

Photography by Mark Johnson

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September 2020 · 53

THE first snow of the season sends a jolt through the rut—and the deer are on the move, some off in the distance and these just below. All these eyes . . . This is the hard part—drawing the bow under the scrutiny of a mature buck with all those does already on high alert.

Fail here, and all the tuning and practicing mean nothing.

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September 2020 · 55

56 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

MAKING the shot was an easy part. All the tuning and practicing . . . The shot twanged true. Now for the easiest part—tracking the buck through the snow . . . All that bright heart blood. It won’t go far.

For more information, see page 90.

September 2020 · 57

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TRADITIONS

Edited by Will Ryan

MOUNTAIN HUNTER, BY BRETT JAMES SMITH

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h The

Big Game Wisdom Uncle Ezra of

From climbing peaks to sleeping in camp, hunting trips are full of surprises.

by Norman H. Crowell (Two stories excerpted from Outing Magazine, 1907 & 1908)

k “Ezra Bogg’s Goat Hunt” (NOV E MB E R 1 9 0 8 )

Ephrum Smith laid down in his chair and rested his feet on the ashpit of the stove. After chewing his whiskers reminiscently for a moment he remarked: “Had a letter from ol’ Job Withers, who’s runnin’ a ranch out West somewheres, an’ he says he’s got two Chicago lawyers boardin’ with ’im an’ puttin’ in their spare time killin’ goats. From what Job says I drawed an idee th’ critters was rather shy an’ hard to get.”

Ezra Boggs cracked half a dozen finger joints in slow rotation after which he pushed his cap back and smiled condescendingly at Mr. Smith.

“Don’t you ever believe, Ephrum, them Chicago fellers are killin’ any goats. They may be huntin’ ’em all right, an’ huntin ’em hard, but when it comes to say they’re actually killin’ goats I can prove an allybi.

“Bill Fikes an’ me was out huntin’ goats once—in th’ year of th’ big wind in Kansas—an’ we found out enough about goats to last us to date an’ maybe to th’

grave. If I was to take my choice betwixt huntin’ goats, typhoid fever an’ bein’ blowed up by dynamite I’d pick th’ last two every time. Unless a feller is trained down till he can digest tacks an’ you can pound ’im all day with a hoe handle an’ not damage ’im any, he ain’t got no business chasin’ goats with th’ idee of killin’ ’em.

Otherwise it’s a snare an’ a delusion.

“Our hunt was out West where th’ Lord got pressed for time an’ throwed all th’ surplus material into Colorado an’ never’s been back since to straighten it out. Most of the country out there is so high that you have to shovel th’ clouds away before you can see to hoe your back garden, an’ them goats are naturally high-lifed critters as a consequence. Nobody ever saw a goat under th’ two-mile line unless it was one that had fell off an’ was climbin’ back again.

“We got a guide—or maybe this one was a tramp that claimed to be a guide—an’ he said he was th’ only registered an’ pedigreed guide in th’ Rocky Mountains who could guarantee shots at goats. Bill asked him how about guaranteein’ some of them September 2020 · 59

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shots to hit goats an’ th’ feller said that was where he drawed th’ line—said he wasn’t takin’ none o’ them obscene chances. He said a Colorado goat that was healthy an’ wasn’t afflicted with ingrowin’ sin would lug off enough lead to make a mule stagger an’ never let up chawin’ his cud. Therefore, he said, if every goat we shot at failed to drop like th’ price o’ wheat jest after you’ve loaded up, we needn’t feel assassinated over it.

“With them inspirin’ instructions ringin’ in our ears me’n Bill took a squint up th’ side of th’ mountain where, accordin’ to th’ guide, goats was swarmin’ by th’ millions.

“We got an early start an’ we clim’ steady for two hours before th’ guide let us stop an’ get our wind back. After we’d puffed an’ blowed a spell we started up again. It was hard travelin’. In some places it was so steep we could look back over our shoulder an’ see right down th’ chimney at th’ hotel two miles below.

Bill asked th’ guide if there was any danger an’ th’ skunk said there wasn’t a bit unless we happened to fall. In that case, he said, we might get hurt. He said more people got hurt fallin’ than did hangin’ on.

“We got up another mile or so an’ come to a place that looked about as enticin’ as th’ edge of a case knife. Th’ guide said it was a hog’s back. It was probably a razor-back hog judgin’ from th’ way it treated me’n Bill’s pants a-crossin’ it. “‘Look out for goats here,’ says th’ guide.

“Bill started to look, then grabbed th’ mountain in both hands an’ emitted a groan. “‘You do th’ lookin’, guide,’ he yells. ‘That’s what you’re paid for. If I’d go to squintin’ around I’d land square on th’ back of that cow four mile down below.’

“Th’ guide bit off a big chew of tobacco an’ looked over th’ edge. “‘Huh!’ he says, ‘that ain’t a cow—it’s a church!’

“After we’d crossed th’ hog’s back Bill was wheezin’ like a little leaky engine an’ th’ guide cheered ’im up by tellin’ ’im his heart was probably weak an’ might stop at any minute. He said th’ climbin’ an’ th’ thin air had killed lots of ’em. He rec’lected how he’d had to throw two fellers over that identical hog’s back only th’ season before as they’d died an’ he couldn’t get ’em down any other way. That didn’t help Bill specially, but judgin’ by his remarks I figured his wind had come back strong. . . . “‘Goats,’ the guide says. ‘They’re thick here.’

“‘Are they?’ says Bill. ‘I hadn’t noticed it. But if it’s all th’ same to you I’ll jest keep on tryin’ to stick to this mountain. If you notice any goats pointed my way kindly shoo ’em off!’

“Th’ feller sort of ridiculed Bill some an’ we started on again. By this time I’d wore off both kneecaps an’ dislocated every toe on both feet tryin’ to sock ’em into th’ rocks. About noon we got to what th’ guide said was th’ top. We crawled up slow expectin’ to look a herd of about fifty million goats right in th’ eye but not a blame billy did we see.

“After we’d snorted around a spell Bill let out a yell an’ pointed across to a big rock. Sure enough, there was a whalin’ big goat on it. Bill grabbed his gun an’ was jest goin’ to shoot when th’ guide told ’im that goat was eighteen miles away, up in another county.

“That made Bill a little disgusted, but he got even when I tried to draw a bead on a couple I’d spotted just across a little ravine, an’ th’ guide said he was between ten an’ eleven miles away.

We seen half a dozen more goats but th’ nearest one was six miles off. Th’ guide said he guessed he’d picked th’ wrong mountain an’ we’d better go back down an’ try another next mornin’. Bill told th’ feller to take his guns an’ fixin’s an’ let ’im die where he was peaceable, but he wouldn’t hear of it. Said he was in duty bound to get us down as he’d guaranteed us shots at goats. Bill said if he’d jest let ’im take a shot at himself he’d call th’ contract closed as far as he was concerned.

“We slid down, leavin’ our clothes an’ most of our hide along th’ trail an’ th’ minute we hit terra firmy we headed straight for a hospital. We didn’t go back up next mornin’. We’d had all th’ goatin’ we wanted. Them Chicago lawyers may be bound to kill goats, but if they do, Ephrum, they’ll be boardin’ with ol’ Job this time next year. Eh? Well, a mere cheekful, Bill—thankee!”

k

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“Bill’s Bear”

(OCTOBER 1907)

Uncle Ezra sawed a chunk off the salt cod with his jackknife and gently inserted it into his mouth. After a moment’s quiet rumination he suddenly cast his eye at the cobwebs in the far ceiling corner and chuckled.

There ensued a disconcerting clatter as we drew chairs up within firing distance and crossed our legs expectantly.

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“That there Bill Fikes had some o’ th’ most peculiar idees for a human bein’ I ever see,” began Ezra, as he remarked the interest we exhibited with an air of conscious pride.

“Recollect onct me’n Bill was huntin’ carryboo up on th’ Waxahatchy. Hunted a few days an’ Bill says to me: “‘See here, Ez. What in thunder be we huntin’ them carryboo for? They hain’t worth nothin’. Let’s hunt somethin’ worth somethin’—carryboo be hanged!’ says he. “‘What’re ye thinkin’ we better hunt, Bill?’ I says. “‘Bear,’ says he. ‘This here district is infected with ’em. An’ their hides is valuable. I can’t recall jest what they bring, but it’d pay a feller to drop everything else an’ hunt bear. I’ll start in to-morrow mornin’.’ “‘Ye enjoy skinnin’ bears, do ye, Bill?’ says I. “He give a little snort. “‘I’ve skun as many bears as ever you shot, Ez,’ says he, real indignified. “‘Maybe ye have,’ I remarks, ‘I hain’t shot more’n a couple o’ hundred of ’em, though.’

“Well, after playin’ a few games o’ peenuckle we rolled in, Bill remarkin’ how terrible anxious he was to locate a bear bright an’ early in th’ mornin’, so he could show me what a wonder he was with th’ skinnin’ knife.

“Th’ next I recall is hearin’ Bill raise up in bed an’ emit a yell. . . . “‘Is it colic, Bill?’ says I. “‘Colic, nothin’,’ he snaps, ‘it’s one o’ them pothunters’ dogs tryin’ to get them trout I had cleaned fer breakfast. Guess I scairt th’ purp into a fit, though, when I—huh?’

“Jest then somethin’ shoved over our summer kitchen an’ th’ tinware raised petikelar cain with the solertude. Bill jumped out o’ bed an’ reached fer ’is boots. “‘I’ll kick a field goal with that dog or my name is Mudd,’ says Bill.

“Ka-plunk—Bill landed with his boot.

“There was enough moonlight leakin’ through a hole in th’ roof to show Bill up as a hideous affair in them red mackinaw undertogs o’ his. “‘Goin’ to shoot the brute?’ says I. “‘An’ cough up fifty dollars fer th’ carcass? Not for Bill. I’ll jest ingratiate myself into th’ critter’s society an’ crack a few ribs—you watch me!’

“Th’ moon slid behind a cloud then an’ Bill slid outside. For a minute everything was as quiet as a burglar swarmin’ up th’ front porch. Then kaplunk—Bill landed with his boot!

“The dog never yelped—didn’t even ki-yi—but the growl he unbuckled sounded like droppin’ dumbbells into a rain-barrel. Then I heard a woosh like a walrus comin’ up for fresh air an’ somethin’ come into th’ front o’ th’ tent an’ went out th’ back at a clip bafflin’ to th’ naked eye. Its color was red, though, an’ I took it to be Bill. Clost behind come somethin’ else—somethin’ that was all teeth an’ hair an’ toe nails, an’ judgin’ by th’ flavor I calculated it was bear.

“Th’ idee of Bill runnin’ away from bear when he wanted bear so powerful bad was too ludercrous fer me an’ I jest lay back an’ cackled like a Plymouth Rock.

“I was layin’ there, all doubled up an’ out o’ wind when—woosh—Bill went through agin. Right behind him was the bear, follerin’ pace like a perfessional. I took a look out an’ see Bill runnin’ with ’is chin up, elbows in an’ th’ bear a-reachin’ for ’im at every jump. “‘Third heat, Bill,’ I yells.

“Bill put on a pint more steam an’ circled for th’ tent agin. “‘He’s got a lovely pelt,’ says I, when Bill went through the next time. Bill gurgled.

“You can distance ’im with your boots off, Bill,’ says I, an’ I noticed Bill grindin’ ’is teeth.

“Next time Bill come by he thought he’d shove th’ bear off onto me an’ he made a dive under my bunk. But that bear was a regular Sherlock Holmes fer stickin’ to a clue an’ he dived under, too. Then me an’ th’ bunk went up to th’ top of th’ tent an’ got all disarranged afore we come down. Bill tore out with th’ bear in th’ same ol’ place right back of ’is shoulder blades.

“On th’ next trip was where Bill played his heavy trump. As he went through he knocked out both tent poles an’ th’ tent come down, envelopin’ th’ bear real clost an’ affectionate. If ye’ve ever seen a cat that has stepped onto a sheet o’ flypaper ye can imagine how mad that bear was. I was layin’ there huggin’ th’ stove in my arms an’ my head an’ shoulders was rammed into th’ flour chest.

“After th’ bear had scattered things to his entire satisfaction I blowed th’ dust out o’ one eye an’ see Bill up a high tree lookin’ like a big red turkey September 2020 · 61

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buzzard waitin’ fer me to die. Th’ bear was goin’ off acrost the country with his head through a blanket an’ howlin’ every time he hit th’ ground.

“Bill was that agitated he wouldn’t come down till I threatened to saw off th’ limb he was settin’ on.

Next mornin’, after fixin’ up camp, me’n Bill took our guns an’ went carryboo huntin’.

“I neglected to mention that when Bill knocked th’ tent down he broke a jug containin’ two gallons o’ th’ best stuff that— eh? What? Sure thing— about four fingers an’ a toe for me, Jim—thanks!”

Uncle Ezra then pointed his chin straight up at the ceiling. “The bear was a regular Sherlock Holmes fer stickin’ to a clue.” n

tell these stories so that they feel Midwestern right, if not Midwestern nice. (For the record, Bill does seem to be holding his tongue with the guide.) Uncle Ezra’s creation owes to Chicago humorist Peter Finley Dunn and his Irish bartender Martin Dooley, who also dispensed wisdom (“A lie with a purpose is one of the worst kind, and the most profitable.”) to those gathered in warm places in the Midwest on cold winter afternoons.

Uncle Ezra basically applies to the outdoors the maxim of William Hazlitt, the English social critic who, more than a century earlier, observed that humor arises from the gap between the expected and the actual event. That is, we have grand plans for our hunting trip, only to get there and realize things are not at all what we thought they would be. Humorists get their laughs by exaggerating that gap. An apparent storekeeper, not unlike Uncle Perk from Corey Ford’s “Lower Forty” a half century in the future, Uncle Ezra has heard and experienced it all before. He knows that the actual big game hunt has a good many headwinds, and he likes nothing better than to talk about just how bad things can go, and just how big that gap can get.

The “expected” side of the gap had plenty of true believers in the years of the new century, particularly when it came to big game hunting trips. The West was never more popular in the American imagination, what with the celebrated “close” of the frontier, the touring Wild West Shows of Buffalo Bill Cody, and in particular, the stories of the energetic, wait-till-you-hear-this occupant of the White House. Theodore Roosevelt had written books about the outdoors, how going big game hunting in the West had changed his life, how the sporting life beckoned one and all. Visits to Yellowstone Park doubled between 1904 and 1905, topping 25,000, a response in part to the well-publicized Yellowstone camping trip of President Roosevelt and naturalist John Burroughs.

Americans couldn’t wait to get outside.

At the time of these articles, President Roosevelt was prepping for his post-presidential big game hunt in Africa. Given the decline of white-tailed deer in the East, interest in exotic big game reached new heights, as it were. And, with TR’s clarion call ringing in their ears, readers of Outing Magazine doubtless sat back in their armchairs, opened their new issues, and imagined what big game hunting might be like—whether for goats in the West or for caribou in Canada. Hazlitt’s “expected” Continued on page 84

k A

t first glance, both Uncle Ezra’s yarns play with distance: If the joke with white goats is “How far is far?”, then the joke with the bear is “How close is close?” To the latter, Bill would probably say “inside the tent,” though Ezra just might correct him with “under the bed.” But stories like these, about bears in tents and goats on the next mountain range might really just be more about figuring out who we are as hunters. In that sense, Norman Crowell is the real Sherlock Holmes.

Born in 1873 Minnesota, Crowell was a merchant and banker, also an oilman, farmer, writer, and editor. By all accounts, he was inclined to see the humor in daily life, “an incurable funster,” according to his obituary, no less. Crowell began writing outdoor stories in the early part of the century, but it turned out there was another bear in the tent, so to speak.

Crowell’s wife, Grace, also took up writing, beginning with bits of poetry during an extended illness that followed the birth of the couple’s first child in 1906.

Crowell teased her about it. But Grace was soon outselling him and in time gained serious recognition, ultimately publishing 36 books of verse and more than 5,000 poems. The volume of reader correspondence became such that Grace simply couldn’t keep up with it.

So Crowell did the only thing a husband could: He quit his day job and began managing her writing. Grace Crowell became the poet laureate of Texas, in fact, and Mr. Crowell became the treasurer then vice president of the Texas Poetry Society—precisely the sort of irony that Uncle Ezra would have appreciated.

The deadpan ironic voice of Uncle Ezra, in the long tradition of the American cracker-barrel sage, lets Crowell

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WONDROUS WILDLIFE

Gray’s Sporting Journal The Big Game Edition VOLUME FORTY-FIVE

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ISSUE 4

SEPTEMBER 2020

LYNX: A BOOM & BUST CYCLE

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GRAY’S GEAR & LIFESTYLE

G

etting off the grid doesn’t mean you can’t be prepared for the unexpected. The Sportsman Series of backcountry emergency first aid kits ($29 to $125) from ADVENTURE MEDICAL can handle a variety of predicaments and is available in a range of sizes according to how many are in your party and how long you’ll be away from civilization. The 100 and 200 series kits are perfect for a deer camp or a day offshore, while the more elaborate 300 and 400 versions are a must for any guide who takes clients into the wilderness for days at a time. Each kit includes the Easy Care Organization System, which features pockets labeled for specific injuries and an external map designed to help you quickly find what you need. Whether you require vital trauma supplies to stop bleeding, close wounds, and stabilize fractures or bandages and medication for minor abrasions, it’s all within easy reach. Most valuable, perhaps, is the peace of mind borne of knowing that an unlucky encounter with a fishhook or mishandled knife doesn’t have to bring an end to your expedition. www.adventuremedicalkits.com

W

hether your hunting knife needs a bit of honing in the field or a full makeover at the skinning shed, WORK SHARP has a sterling reputation for providing an edge when you need it most. Now it has collaborated with a legendary custom-knife maker to create the Ken Onion Edition Knife and Tool Sharpener ($150), which uses flexible abrasive belts to achieve maximum precision and control during the sharpening process. Speeds are variable, as are the angles, making the sharpener ideal for everything from kitchen knives to axes, scissors, and shears. The flexible belts also create a convex edge, which proves stronger and retains its sharpness longer than flat and concave edges—all while greatly reducing friction-related heat that can potentially damage steel tempering. It also comes with belts of differing grit, suitable for repairing a broken tip and finishing an edge with a mirror polish. www.worksharptools.com

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he new Stratus Jacket ($349) from SITKA GEAR is ideal for long, chilly days sitting in a deer stand. A removable hood with specialized hearing ports improves your ability to audibly track game and hear their movements from greater distances, while a double layer of Polartec guarantees heat retention when things get especially frosty. Most noteworthy is Sitka’s Constant-Connect safety harness pass-through port, which uses a secure slide-to-lock snap and magnetic closure to eliminate the need to disconnect from your harness, making for a safer and quieter transition when adding or removing gear. Sitka is long renowned for prioritizing silence in everything it does, and the Stratus is no exception, thanks to a Windstopper membrane sandwiched between layers of micro-grid fleece. The Stratus is also available in a vest ($229), with all the same features minus the hood and sleeves. www.sitkagear.com

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D

eciding whether to pursue that bull elk on a distant hillside is a pivotal moment for any backcountry hunter. Choose wisely, and your hard work may be rewarded with the trophy of a lifetime. But chase the wrong bull, and you’ve lost valuable time and distance that may not be recovered. The S.2 1227 ×56 spotting scope ($950) from MAVEN OPTICS is perfect for any hunter who understands the importance of lightweight mobility without compromising magnification, clarity, and performance. Housed in a compact 11-inch, 34-ounce package, the S.2 is easy to carry and offers bright, crisp images with no aberration or distortion, even at maximum magnification. Since its inception in 2014, Wyoming-based Maven has prioritized creating custom optics to meet your demands and specifications, and the S Series represents its most elite line of optics to date. Choose a stock optic or configure your own custom-built unit to fit your specific needs. www.mavenbuilt.com

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obody puts gear to the test like a high-altitude, backcountry hunter. So when DANNER set out to create a boot that keeps you safe and stable while carrying heavy packs along steep terrain, there were a lot of factors it needed to get right. After extensive collaboration and research, the 10-inch-tall Thorofare ($500) is the most supportive and rugged boot that Danner has ever constructed, with leather lining that molds to your foot and a unique ball bearing lace system that promises an easy, even pull of the laces with no resistance—giving you a quiet and consistent fit.

A polyurethane footbed offers cushioning that won’t compress over time, while the vamp is composed of a large, single piece of leather to minimize seams in leak-prone areas. The outer boot is wrapped in a Vibram rubber rand, giving you extra protection against the inevitable sharp rocks and debris that come with going off the grid. American-made and 100 percent waterproof, with a Gore-Tex liner that allows sweat and moisture to escape, the Thorofare is well worth a look. www.danner.com

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risten Mustad, owner of Miami-based NAUTILUS FLY REELS, is in the business of putting the brakes on fish. His array of premium fresh- and saltwater options already has a proven history of punching well above its weight class, so when he set out to add a serious big game reel to the product line, you had to know it would be something special. The GTX ($1,300) comes equipped to hold 12-weight line and 500 yards of 60-pound braided backing, yet its 5-inchdiameter frame remains lightweight (8.7 ounces) thanks to a vented spool that also allows the line to dry quickly to fight corrosion. The butter-smooth Pentadrag braking system is designed to put even pressure along all points of the drag surface with more than 25 pounds of torque, while the one-of-a-kind GripTorq drag knob, which measures 1.9 inches in diameter, offers additional strength and an improved grip that enables you to go from zero to max in only 1.5 turns—just the type of easy adjustment you’ll need when fighting a triple-digit tarpon in the Florida Keys, reef gangster giant trevallies in the Seychelles, or monster bluewater tuna. www.nautilusreels.com September 2020 · 65

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SHOOTING

write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit.

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In fact, and of the mind.

by Terry Wieland

W

e’re all getting older, except the unlucky ones who aren’t.

And with advancing age come myriad ailments we never thought we’d face back when we were in our 20s, drank like fish, and came home at dawn.

Debilitating ailments and big game hunting—at least, what I call big game hunting—don’t go together. By that, I mean the kind of hunting where you’re up at three, leave camp on foot, and don’t get back until long after dark. The kind of hunting where you worry about hauling a deer out by yourself. The kind where you have matches and tinder with you, just in case, and know how to build a lean-to. The kind where you always carry a compass. Always.

September 2020 · 67

LOST TIMES, BY BRETT JAMES SMITH

Tiny Gleaming Campfires

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A few weeks ago, with the country shut down due to the virus and everyone keeping their distance, I was at a range with a friend of mine. He’s a little older, his lungs in dreadful shape from a lifetime of smoking, but otherwise okay. I’m the opposite: too many mountains and marathons left me with a badly arthritic hip that makes walking 50 yards an exercise in self-abuse. If we could marry his legs to my cardiovascular system, we’d be in great shape. As it is, we’re in good enough shape to sit (at a distance) and reminisce, and that’s about it.

You know, I told him, the thing I miss most is being able to pick up a rifle and go off and prowl the creek bottoms. That’s what I always loved about any kind of hunting: just being out, wandering the woods to see what you can see.

On the one hand, modern ways make it easier to hunt as you get older. You book yourself into a lodge, they drive you out to your stand, pick you up later, and you go back out after lunch. If you shoot something over that food plot, the guide comes, loads it up, and dresses it out while you’re eating dinner. In the evening, you all gather round and watch endless hunting videos or the latest loudmouth on Fox News.

That may be your idea of a good time, but it ain’t mine.

The old way of hunting whitetails and black bears—in Ontario and New Brunswick and upstate New York, from Maine to the Upper Peninsula— was from camps in the deep woods, owned by a group who got together every year and packed in for a week or a month—however long the season lasted.

These cabins had home-built bunk beds and woodstoves and tables covered in oilcloth. Running water was a pipe dream: you either hung a perforated bucket from a tree or you jumped in the nearest lake. They all had outhouses or, as some called them, privies.

The notable thing about these camps was that there were hunters of all ages, and they all knew one another. It was a tight-knit group, joined only by invitation, but fathers brought sons and everyone taught them the ropes. It was usually “group” hunting. Every hunter had his own tag, but the group could collect an animal for every tag they had, so

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until you had six deer for six tags, say, everyone kept right on hunting. This was important because it created an “all for one and one for all” atmosphere.

The meat was divided up at the end, with every hunter getting a share whether he shot anything or not. If you shot a buck, however, you kept the rack.

Most times, the racks got nailed up over the door.

These groups seemed to last forever, like a religious order. There were camps up in our lake country that had been there since the 1890s, and the hunters were descendants of the originals—

The notable thing about these camps was that there were hunters of all ages, and they all knew each other. It was a tightknit group, joined only by invitation, but fathers brought sons and everyone taught them the ropes. great-grandsons, some of them. You went first as a teenager, in awe of the old guys and proud to be included. You hunted every year as you got older, and brought your kids in when they got old enough.

Some members died along the way, of course, and others dropped out for various reasons, but there was always a nucleus to keep it going. And there were always one or two old guys who couldn’t hunt anymore, but came to camp anyway and handled the job of chief cook and bottle washer.

Most of these camps were pretty remote. They had to be. Supplies and equipment were hauled in by horse and sled in the winter; in the summer, you could get in only by canoe or backpacking. None of this driving up to the door and having someone carry your bags. For an old man with bad knees, just getting to camp was tough, never mind going

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out to hunt. But they did it.

As a kid, working on a farm, I saw the same thing at haying time in June and threshing in August. Ancient uncles would arrive in beat-up trucks, wearing overalls, doing what they could to help, where they could. Meals were a big event, with everyone ravenous. The older people did most of the talking—the rest of us were too busy eating to talk—but when they spoke, we listened.

The deer hunt was much the same, and one is tempted to wax philosophical about how it gave their lives meaning. Sure, they were still contributing, even if it was mostly symbolic; but they didn’t do anything others could not have done equally well had they cared to volunteer. The thing was, nobody did. Having a good cook in camp was really important, and having someone willing to do it— all day every day, hauling water, washing dishes, and keeping the fire going—meant that everyone else could think about hunting instead of whose turn it was to do what.

Why did they do it? They did it just so they could be there.

The cook was up long before everyone else, and we woke up to the smell of frying bacon and the fire crackling away in the kitchen. Good cooks baked bread in the woodstove and biscuits. The extralarge, economy-size box of Bisquick was a staple.

I’ve eaten more Bisquick biscuits than I can count.

For that matter, I could do with one right now.

When everyone was out hunting and the cabin was cleaned up, the cook poured himself a wee dram and sat out in the sun (if it was warm) or inside by the stove (if it was snowing) and took a nap before he got dinner started. At dark, as the hunters drifted in, there was the smell of a turkey in the oven or a stew on the stove.

Hunting on my own, early on, I always came back to a cabin that was cold and dark and lonely, with the fire dead. Later on, hunting with friends, I came back to camps that were warm and well lit and smelled of all manner of good things, and believe me, the latter is better.

The memory that still makes my heart jump is that first glimpse, through the gloom and falling

snow, of the distant light in the window that means you’ve made it. Even on a trail you’ve walked a thousand times, that glimmering light through the trees is a sight like no other.

(Years later, in Botswana, driving back into camp late at night, with the stars gleaming and frost forming—the Kalahari gets damned chilly—the first sight of Robert Ruark’s “tiny gleaming campfire” through the trees always gave that same lift, that same elation.)

A thousand Field & Stream covers and a million apocryphal stories have made these camp scenes into a cliché, with too much cards and whiskey and not enough soap and water, and even attempting to tell someone about it gets you a chorus of rolled eyes. “What, no Wi-Fi? What is there to do?”

There’s no answer to such questions.

Ernest Hemingway touched upon our deerhunting culture in “Up in Michigan,” an early story that Gertrude Stein dismissed as “inaccrochable.”

Roughly translated, it means it could not be published, although of course later it was. More famous examples are William Faulkner’s “Race at Morning,” and “The Bear,” both of which have been imbued with profound and deeper meaning by generations of indoor academics who, if I may say, have no idea what’s important and what’s not.

When The Old Man and the Sea was published in the early 1950s, and Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize, and critics were falling over one another to assign symbolism and various other literary “-isms,” Hemingway somewhat ingenuously insisted “The old man is an old man, and the fish is a fish, and that’s all there is to it.” Of course, there was much more to it.

But the same is true of a hunting cabin, and a pair of antlers nailed up over the door, and an old man sitting by the fire, waiting for the hunters to come home. n Robert Ruark, having written The Old Man and the Boy as “the boy,” was surprised, later in life, to find that he was now the Old Man. Our shooting editor finds the same thing. Still, sitting by the fire, he can remember wandering the woods with a rifle, and if advancing age has its drawbacks, it still beats the alternative.

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ANGLING

70 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

ROCK CREEK, BY STANLEY MILLER

Bunch of Bull Bull trout tell us the origin story—what is indigenous, what is wild, what is real.

by Scott Sadil

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e’re deep into the canyon but still well above the glint of the stream when I catch myself beginning to fret about change. It’s been several years now since Joe Kelly and I backpacked into this particular wilderness drainage, and during our absence, at least two different wildfires have ravaged these arid old-growth forests. The damage is oppressive, another case of destructive conflagrations in the wake of a century of bureaucratic fire suppression, a practice that turned our western forests into fuel-laden tinderboxes after they’d been successfully managed by aboriginal peoples for 10,000 years. The steep canyon walls rise, crusty with blackened trees. Along the trail, tangles of snags and trees standing dead creak and moan with each faint breath of morning breeze.

And what about our pretty stream down there?

Fires are just part of my worry. Maybe it’s an old-person thing, but I grew up in California, for Chrissake, so I’ve seen wholesale transformations of landscapes and watersheds, beaches and estuaries, the ocean and the color of the sky itself so profound they make Alice’s descent into Wonderland seem no more startling than a visit to Costco. Even in Baja, which as a youngster I foolishly felt would remain immune to change, I recall coming out of the desert and seeing the latest rung of the Escalera Nautica, a new jetty bisecting a longtime favorite surf break and fishing beach, a slender piddle of boulders that now looked, from my vantage, like an errant dog turd.

And to claim such changes can happen overnight or in the blink of an eye, blurring the line between reality and hallucination, should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to the cascading effects of our changing climate, which promises to give new meaning to the adage, You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

The immediate worry, of course, is straightforward enough: Can the fishing possibly be anywhere near as good as the last time we were here?

By the time we reach the canyon floor and slip off our packs, I’m keenly aware of a couple of gnawing changes in my body, as well. We find a campsite in an open cluster of heavy, bark-blackened pines that somehow escaped the worst of the fires; while we set up tents, my creaky joints remind me of a recent message from a famous writer friend: Backpacking a 72 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

few miles, he wrote (even “short” miles), may be beyond me at my age and with my knees. And was there ever any sadder news, I recall, than when my father announced, decades before in Baja, that he had lost feeling in the soles of his feet—and he no longer felt safe edging out onto rocks to cast into the good holding water alongside the line of breaking surf?

We put up rods and pull on neoprene socks and wading boots. The fires have opened the forest canopy; the approach to the stream is choked with head-high vegetation, weedy annuals enjoying their newfound spate of summer sun. Hoppers abound, a rarity in our experience and in this neck of the woods. Joe pushes free of a wall of streamside brush and knots on some sort of chubby rubber bug and sets off upstream. By the time I select a generic white-winged pattern out of my box of small-stream attractors, something that floats well and I can easily see, Joe’s got a dainty bend in his rod, what looks to be a feisty rainbow bouncing on the end of his line atop the surface of the sparkling stream.

We rejoin alongside a pretty pool with a deep hole under the tangled root ball of a fallen, fire-blackened tree. After following Joe upstream, watching him pluck small rainbows from likely lies, I decide to tie on a hopper of my own.

Joe stands on the exposed cobbly bank, watching over my shoulder as I direct my cast toward the obvious sweet spot.

“Looks too big,” I say, watching the fly slide downstream just shy of the target.

“Or not big enough,” offers Joe. A couple more casts until I get the oversized hopper to land as tight to the far bank as I dare. It rides the current, headed well back under the overhanging root ball. I lean forward, watching the fly intently, certain at least a small rainbow will smack it—even if the fish can’t get its mouth around those silly legs and glider-length wings.

Then the surface of the stream opens and there’s as much orange and pink flesh, twisting in the light, as an audaciously exposed thigh.

It’s as though I’ve stepped into a punch. The rod tip rises, the line slack, no tension to keep me from staggering backwards. “Did you see that!”

I continue to stumble, tipping backwards, unable

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to regain balance. “Did you see that!”

Finally, I flop on my butt, splashing into the stream. “Did you see that?”

“I saw it,” says Joe, looking down on me from far above. “Yes, I saw it.”

I regain my feet, if not my composure. The hopper’s gone. I never felt the fish. “They’re here,” I say, gazing into the dark water beneath the root ball.

“Apparently,” says Joe.

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hat is it about bull trout? Of all the things we’ve done to damage our coldwater fisheries, none seems more egregious than attempts to improve upon the Pacific Northwest’s native char, the acme predator that speaks to the health of our watersheds as directly as Cascadian wolves. Now extirpated from at least 60 percent of its historical range, bull trout fell prey last century to the usual culprits: habitat loss, environmental degradation, blockages to migration. But there was more to it—the native char’s inability to withstand the onslaught of introduced species, those efforts of regional fish and wildlife managers to enhance or refine their fisheries with the spread of two exotic chars, brook trout and lake trout, and our favorite colonial imperialist, the globe-trotting brown.

Today, wherever you can find a still thriving population, bull trout tell the origin story—before the dams, before the tailwaters, before the introduction of non-native fish that changed our notions of what is indigenous, what is wild, what is real.

Don’t get me wrong. Of course I like catching brown trout, even brook trout, as much as the next guy. Just as I enjoy, out here near the Pacific, the fruits of other eastern expats such as American shad, smallmouth bass, and at least the notion of striped bass, which friends of mine catch but I seem unable to find. And though I flinch at the sight of dams throughout the West, aware that virtually every one of them restricts or eliminates the migration of salmonids, including trout, many of them headed to and from the sea, like most modern fly fishers, I’ll happily stand in a tailwater side channel on, say, the Bighorn below Yellowtail Dam, and whale away on heavy trout rising to those little black caddises from now until the cows come home.

On purely angling terms, what I like most about bull trout is that they’re not steelhead. Piscivores that they are, bull trout rarely seem fussy or merely curious about a swinging fly. No doubt, this preference for swimming baits is what got bull trout in trouble in the first place, a bad rep with early fly fishers disposed to the notion that proper sport was the purview of hatching insects, rising fish, and delicate flies. I take that when I can get it too. But there’s nothing I like more, thank you, than big fish that seem unable to resist a big, animated fly.

Happy to have found at least one of the gang alive and well, down from the high country to feed on small trout and juvenile salmon and steelhead, Joe and I start stalking the stream’s deeper pools, where bull trout gather, ready to ambush whatever swims their way. My Vanilla Bugger, swung on a floating line, gets bit repeatedly. Once we’re on to them, back into the feel of the game, I notice Joe flicking his rod tip this way and that, sometimes with his fly still upstream, provoking strikes as if teasing a cat with a skittering length of yarn. I settle, instead, into casts that land just short of the far bank, mending as necessary to let the fly sink, then waiting for it to swing toward holding water. At what seems a fairly obvious moment, I start to strip—and often as not, the fly stops, as if snagged, dead in its tracks, until a startled fish begins taking line.

In one pool, down in the tailout, I get a grab from an eight-inch trout. Or a size thereabouts, as it’s kind of hard to tell while it’s jumping in three different directions, fleeing for its life. Things must seem pretty grim for the little rainbow when it ends up sideways in a bull trout’s mouth, a tableau both Joe and I study closely until the big fish at our feet looks up at us and finally lets go.

I suspect this was the real rap against bull trout: they eat fish that we felt, for whatever reasons, were superior to them. That’s a heavy call. Now we know that bull trout are yet another canary in the coal mine, an indicator species that reports to us on the health and integrity of our rivers and streams. Bull trout require our cleanest water, our coldest water, our best water—an element in greater and greater jeopardy everywhere you look.

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ART TOUCHIN’ THE SUN

T. D. Kelsey

m True grit.

by Brooke Chilvers

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ver the last 35 years, the ramshackle fishing village of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, has been transformed beyond recognition, but its Brookgreen Gardens is still a too-well-kept secret mix of prestigious American sculpture, Low Country landscapes, and wetlands wildlife. Looking into the piney woods past Saint-Gaudens’s Diana or James Earle Fraser’s forever heartbreaking End of the Trail, you need only envision a flock of wild turkeys for them to appear. So it was no surprise that T. D. Kelsey’s monumental Touchin’ the Sun (2005), a 12-foot-tall bronze of a bucking bronc trying to dump its high-flying cowboy, was framed against the sky by a sudden vivid rainbow.

TD—not T. D. and certainly not Terry Dean— has been on the western art lovers’ trail since the work that first made him famous, Texas Gold, was installed in Fort Worth’s Stockyard District in 1984.

At the time, at nearly 30 feet long, it was America’s largest bronze. Cast in 900 sections, then welded, the seams chased with tools to disappear, it depicts a lone wrangler driving seven full-headed longhorn steers 1½ times life size. The Buffalo Bill Historical Center is home to his equally admired Buffalo Jump as well as Royal Challenge of battling elk that also greets visitors to Cabela’s home store in Sidney, Nebraska. Discussing sculpture gardens and outdoor settings, Kelsey says, “Funny how Mother Nature has a habit of swallowing up even very large sculptures.”

Yet the same artist also created a life-size sculpture of the world’s smallest antelope, West Africa’s elusive and nocturnal royal antelope, which weighs in at about five pounds and stands a mere

10 inches at the shoulder. Nevertheless, he regrets not sculpting to size the three-inch newborn royal he’d held in his hands on yet another arduous safari to the equatorial forest; instead, he made it three times as tall.

Unlike many western artists, rather than sticking to the wild stallions, sturdy draft horses, and bighearted cutting horses that have surrounded him his entire life, Kelsey has crisscrossed the earth to relish wildlife’s last authentic places, following Marco Polo sheep in the Pamirs, mountain nyalas in Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains, and western bongo in the remotest corners of the Central African Republic, finally collecting one by tracking on foot on the 19th day of his fifth safari for that species. Why does this cowboy roam? Because of his insatiable curiosity and thirst for using his fingers to portray animals in clay: “I’ve got to feel it and touch it. They all give off their own aura.”

Professional hunter Simon Evans, who has guided TD on so many Tanzanian safaris that they’ve both lost track, says, “He’s one of the most dedicated, ethical hunters I’ve known in thirtyeight years,” adding that Kelsey equally appreciates shooting guinea fowl for the pot and then preparing them alongside the Maasai trackers for a midday ugali. In Mongolia, he spent a month living in the portable tent or gers of his Kazakh-blooded guide, Suhtaan, and his family along the country’s northwest border. “It was one of the best experiences in my entire life.”

But none of this was destined to be. TD was born hardscrabble in 1946, the eldest of four brothers and a sister, in Shelley, Idaho, situated on the

LATE FOR LUNCH

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eastern side of the Snake River facing the Blackfoot Mountains. His father was a WWII fighter pilot flying a P-51 Mustang turned pioneering crop duster who built his own airfield; his mother was a tireless fly-boy and rancher’s wife. When TD was four years old, the family moved 18 miles north of Bozeman, Montana, to a small cow-calf operation with a dirt-floored log cabin and an outhouse. By junior high school, he was laboring alongside his family, digging postholes and starting colts, “whenever I could talk someone into letting me,” he says with an inherent humbleness that masks his bona fide true grit and pure-spirited effort in everything he does.

When TD was 16 years old, his father died in an electrical accident while helping a neighbor. From then on, Kelsey simply taught himself everything he learned in life, while taking cues from his exemplary mentors who, he acknowledges, have made all the difference.

And there was Sidni. Sidni Johnson whom he started dating in high school, picking her up in his old Piper Cub, landing on the football field, because he had no car. Registering their T Lazy S brand even before graduation, they married at 18.

Sid was TD’s biggest fan “and best critic” during a wonderful marriage that included a 25-year run of herding longhorns and lasted until her unexpected death from cancer in 2000.

Between classes at the University of Montana and crop dusting, starting colts, and shoeing horses for a living, TD somehow still managed to sketch— mostly in a manner reminiscent of Charlie Russell and his favorite childhood artist, Will James (1892– 1942), author of Smoky the Cowhorse, who’d started drawing while in prison for cattle rustling, and between stints as a buckaroo and stunt man.

When Kelsey learned through Sidni’s sister, who was a flight attendant, that because of the Vietnam War, United Airlines was short of pilots, he applied.

United required he first be tested for spatial ability (which probably also says something about his art) and attend an actual flight school. Over his 14-year career as a commercial pilot, starting in 1967, he flew DC-6s and later 727s.

In 1969, TD cast his first works in Loveland, Colorado, at an industrial foundry that mostly produced wrenches. Meanwhile, the Kelseys bought a ranch near Kiowa, Colorado, where they raised and trained futurity colts and showed open and non-pro cutting horses. In 1998, they moved 30 miles east of Billings, Montana, outside Pompeys Pillar.

Grit had hard-wired TD to lean into life the way he leaned into a good horse while chasing and roping wild mustang yearlings for 25 years for Uncle Sam, riding the rough land along the Colorado–Utah border to control their numbers,

SWAMP GHOST

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periodically trading out studs to prevent inbreeding. Today, Kelsey admits he is as obsessed with Thoroughbreds as he once was with wild horses.

Every horse is different, every kind of horse is different, said Kelsey, explaining how—compared with the ranch horses of his youth—fierce selective breeding of attributes “for the job” has produced gains in some aspects while causing losses in others.

He describes cutting horses as “focused, hot, and fragile” and draft horses as “cooler minded, happy, fun, and like to do stuff.” He then translates these adjectives into art.

Cowboy and artist George Phippen (1915–1955), cofounder and first president of Cowboy Artists of America, said he’d learned his craft through friends and fellow artists. So TD paid attention when Phippen’s widow, Louise, whom he’d met through a colleague who was nephew to the artist, encouraged his talent. She even suggested her son, Ernie, who had a foundry in Prescott, Arizona, cast his early sculptures that included a wrangler snubbing his horse and a cowboy throwing a classic Johnny Blocker, catching the horse’s front legs from behind.

Kelsey’s own list includes sculptors Kent Ullberg, George Carlson, and Fritz White, and landscape artists Michael Lynch and Clyde Aspevig. “There were—and are—so many artists that have given me a leg up, it’s a crime to mention so few,” says Kelsey.

Ken Bunn (b. 1932) set the example of rubbing noses with the wildlife and tribesmen of Africa.

Bunn, who worked for years with the famously exacting Denver taxidermist Coloman Jonas, didn’t think anatomical exactness was absolutely necessary to express an animal’s essence. If early on TD felt compelled to show every detail, experience taught him that “less” is more conducive to his increasingly loose and impressionistic style. Rather than ticking off a mental checklist of specifics, the viewer instead feels the artist’s touch on bone and flesh, the gesture of his pocketknife or a serrated edge to achieve a surface that plays the light. Kelsey appreciates accuracy, but will intentionally exaggerate a horse’s legs and taper its hooves to give the impression of speed. “I don’t want to break the truth, but I know I stretch it.”

Lessons from Bernini (1598–1680) and Rembrandt Bugatti (1884–1916) came later, the former demonstrating how monumental fountains, like Kelsey’s Fly Fishin’, are “fun if you can figure out a logical reason for the water to be there, making noise.” Bugatti’s reach is recalled in the tentative, fragile body language and poetic shapes of the tender harnessed bushbuck in Bush Baby, and in Spooked Colt, or the tightly hobbled horse in Out of Bounds.

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EATING

OLD MAN WITH A BASKET OF FRUITS AND VEGETABLES, BY JACQUES ANDRE PORTAIL (1715–1759).

COURTESY OF THE ART INSTITUE OF CHICAGO, DAVID ALDER FUND.

78 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

Indigenous Cooking A new, old voice.

by Martin Mallet

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everal of the world’s most important foods are indigenous to the Americas. Some, such as corn, potatoes, and tomatoes are staples grown throughout the world, and amaranth and quinoa are touted as the next superfoods. In North America, we greatly value native ingredients such as squash, maple syrup, wild rice, and pecans. In addition, hunters and foragers enjoy dozens of plant and animal species that will never see widespread consumption.

While we value these ingredients, where does the knowledge of what is edible, what isn’t, and how to prepare it come from? Unfortunately, Indigenous food knowledge hasn’t been so widely appreciated as the ingredients themselves. The hundreds of tribes across the Indigenous landscape of North America had been subsisting off the land for thousands of years, and we can only imagine the variety of ingredients and preparations that has been lost as a result of their displacement. A wave of Indigenous chefs, however, is rediscovering their culinary history, preserving it while also modernizing it.

BRAISED VENISON SHANKS WITH CROWBERRY BLACK GARLIC GLAZE AND HERBED WHEAT BERRIES Shane Chartrand is the executive chef at SC restaurant in the River Cree Resort and Casino in Enoch, Alberta. His cookbook, Tawâw, is a personal look at how Indigenous traditions can inform a contemporary menu.

Serves 4 BRAISED DEER SHANKS 3 cups all-purpose flour 3 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon black pepper 4 (1-pound) deer shanks 3 tablespoons olive oil 1 tablespoon butter 4 to 6 cups game stock 1 carrot, roughly chopped 1 celery rib, roughly chopped 1 white onion, roughly chopped 1 head garlic, separated into cloves and peeled 2 tablespoons whole peppercorns 2 bay leaves 8 wild leeks (or green onions) 1 tablespoon minced garlic 1 medium zucchini, diced WHEAT BERRIES 1 cup wheat berries 3 cups water 6 to 8 sprigs fresh thyme 2 sprigs fresh rosemary 1 shallot, sliced ½ teaspoon salt CROWBERRY GLAZE ½ cup crowberries 1 /3 cup black garlic cloves 5 tablespoons canola oil September 2020 · 79

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¼ cup honey Juice from ½ lemon Cover the wheat berries with 1 inch cold water and soak overnight. To prepare the shanks, combine the flour, salt, and black pepper in a shallow dish. Pat the shanks dry with a paper towel and dredge them in the flour mixture. Combine the olive oil and butter in a heavy-bottomed pan over medium-high heat. Sear the shanks until browned on all sides, transfer them to a plate, and set aside.

Deglaze the pan with 4 cups of the stock and cook, scraping up the fond, for 5 minutes. Stir in the chopped carrot, celery, white onion, garlic, peppercorns, and bay leaves. Return the shanks to the pan, and add more stock if necessary so that the liquid reaches halfway to three-quarters of the way up the shank. Simmer covered, for at least 1½ hours, until the meat is very tender and pulls away from the bone. (The timing of this can vary quite a bit, depending on the animal.) Check on the shanks every half hour or so, topping with more stock, or water, as required.

Meanwhile, prepare the wheat berries. Drain them, discarding the soaking liquid. Transfer the wheat berries to a pot, and add the water along with the thyme, rosemary, shallot, and salt. Bring to a boil over medium heat. Cover, partially reducing the heat, and simmer until the wheat berries start to split their skins, about 1 hour. (They should be tender but still chewy.) Drain, discarding the herbs and shallot pieces, and set aside.

To make the glaze, combine the crowberries, black garlic, 2 tablespoons of the canola oil, honey, and lemon juice in a food processor or blender and process until smooth. Set the glaze aside.

Start the grill or preheat a broiler to high. Brush the wild leeks with 1 tablespoon of the canola oil.

Cook the leeks until they are bright green and wilted with some charring, 30 seconds to 1 minute. Set the leeks aside.

Remove the shanks from the braising liquid and brush them with the crowberry glaze. Broil the shanks for 2 to 3 minutes per side, until the sauce caramelizes but doesn’t burn. Keep the broiled shanks warm.

Heat the remaining 2 tablespoons canola oil in a skillet over medium-high heat until it shimmers.

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Add the minced garlic and cook for 2 minutes, until fragrant. Add the zucchini and cook until just tender, 5 minutes. Add the prepared wheat berries and cook, stirring occasionally, for about 5 minutes, until warmed through.

To serve, arrange one shank per serving plate, and divide the wheat berries. Garnish with the grilled leeks and serve.

CORN CAKES WITH VARIOUS TOPPINGS Sean Sherman is an Oglala Lakota chef from South Dakota. His cookbook, The Sioux Chef ’s Indigenous Kitchen, won the James Beard Award and is part of his larger project to rethink Indigenous food systems, that are free from as many Western ingredients as possible. This preparation is his take on “Indian tacos.” which occupies a beloved if controversial place at many tables. The toppings can be varied to suit the season.

Serves 4 MAPLE-SAGE ROASTED VEGETABLES 1 small winter squash ½ pound sunchokes, cut into ½-inch chunks 1 medium sweet potato, cut into ½-inch chunks ½ pound turnips, cut into ½-inch chunks 2 tablespoons sunflower oil 1 pinch coarse salt 2 teaspoons chopped sage 2 tablespoons maple syrup 2 tablespoons maple vinegar 1 teaspoon whole-grain mustard Preheat the oven to 425ºF. Toss the squash, sunchokes, sweet potato, and turnips with the sunflower oil to generously coat. Spread them out on a baking sheet in a single layer, and sprinkle with the coarse salt and sage. Roast, shaking often, until the vegetables are tender and begin to brown, 30 to 40 minutes.

Mix together the maple syrup, maple vinegar, and mustard in a small bowl. Brush the mixture over the vegetables and return the pan to the oven for 7 to 10 minutes to glaze the vegetables. Remove from the oven and set aside.

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PUFFED WILD RICE 1 cup wild rice, rinsed 1 tablespoon sunflower oil Salt Pat the wild rice with a paper towels to dry it thoroughly. Heat a heavy-bottomed saucepan over high heat. When the pan is hot, add the oil and rice. Cover the pan and shake vigorously to coat the rice. Reduce the heat to medium and continue cooking, shaking often, until you hear the rice popping. Keep cooking, shaking constantly, until most of the rice is popped. Sprinkle with salt before serving, to taste.

WOJAPE 2 cups wild berries 1 /3 to ½ cup water Honey or maple syrup Bring the berries and water to a simmer over low heat. Cook and stir until the mixture is thick. Season with honey or maple syrup, to taste.

CORN CAKES 3 cups water Pinch of salt 1 cup polenta or coarse cornmeal 1 to 2 tablespoons sunflower or nut oil In a large pot over high heat, bring the water and salt to a boil. Whisk in the polenta in a slow, steady stream and stir, making sure there are no lumps. Reduce the heat and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the mixture thickens, about 30 minutes. Set aside the polenta until it is cool enough to handle.

Shape the cooked polenta into patties about 4 inches wide by 1 inch thick. Add the sunflower oil to a skillet and set it over medium-high heat. Sear the patties until they are browned on one side, 5 to 10 minutes; then flip and brown the other side.

Place the cooked patties on a baking sheet and keep them warm until you are ready to serve.

To assemble the dish, warm the roasted vegetables. Smear a few tablespoons of the wojape on a plate. Arrange the corn cakes, wild rice, and roasted vegetables around the sauce and serve.

AMARANTH BIRCH PUDDING David Wolfman has been called the godfather of Indigenous cooking in Canada; certainly he was my first exposure to Indigenous fusion. His show, Cooking with the Wolfman, first aired on APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network) in 1999.

1 cup whole amaranth 4 cups water 1 cinnamon stick ½ teaspoon salt 2 egg yolks ½ cup whipping cream 1¾ cups coconut milk ½ cup maple sugar (or brown sugar) 2 tablespoons butter ¼ cup raisins 1 teaspoon vanilla 3 tablespoon birch syrup (or molasses) Preheat the oven to 350ºF. In a large saucepan, combine the amaranth, water, cinnamon stick, and salt and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for an hour, covered, stirring frequently. Discard the cinnamon stick. Remove the amaranth from the heat and set aside, uncovered.

Place the egg yolks in a large bowl and beat lightly. In a small saucepan, heat the cream, coconut milk, and maple sugar almost to the boiling point and whisk to remove lumps. Once the mixture starts to bubble, remove it from the heat.

Whisking the egg yolks constantly, slowly pour in half the cream mixture. Pour the rest of the cream mixture into the bowl; then add the butter and whisk to combine. Pour the egg mixture into the amaranth, add the raisins and vanilla, and stir to combine thoroughly.

Divide the mixture into 6 individual ramekins, and place them in a baking pan. Pour hot water around the ramekins to come halfway up the sides, and bake for 1 hour. The pudding should be light brown and thickened. Drizzle birch syrup around the outer edge of each ramekin. Chill the pudding overnight before serving. n Martin Mallet hopes that a more widespread appreciation for wild foods will come with a stronger drive to preserve them.

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Avarice Continued from page 30 “Well, right now,” I answer, “I’ve made matters pretty bad.”

I mumble a prayer that a fisherman will happen by, which is unlikely. I haven’t heard any boats in the two days I’ve been camped. My second prayer cancels out the first. After considering my predicament, I don’t want anyone seeing me like this, mounted as I am by a swollen-necked buck from behind.

Anybody arriving on the scene will have a smartphone. They’ll take pictures before they rescue me and broadcast it all over the internet. I’ll be humiliated for the rest of my life. Even if I die, somebody might laugh. Of course, I carry no telephone. I left it at home as a symbol of my independence—O vanity! My sister and Melissa won’t even expect me for another day. I’ve lied to them, adding an extra day to my planned sojourn to keep them from worrying.

They won’t think of sending someone after me until tomorrow or the next day. I can get mighty uncomfortable by then. I reckon I have to get out from under this deer before the power dam 10 miles upriver releases water through the turbines for the evening demand.

As a matter of fact, in all probability, the water has been let go already. All it has to do is get down here.

A couple of anatomical events can occur when a dead buck is on top of you with both of you facing downhill: One, the inverted deer may exsanguinate from the bullet hole you shot into it, which in this case is .44 inch in diameter. Two, the slain deer’s urinary bladder may shift so as to release its contents. Lukewarm blood drips between my shoulder blades and runs down to the back of my neck.

Then I feel tepid water wetting the seat of my pants. Indignity of indignities, a trophy deer has mounted me, bled down my back, and pissed up my leg. However alluring the scent of buck urine may be to a doe in estrus, to a Homo sapiens, I can assure you, it is abominable.

Southeastern Indians had a taboo against what I’d done. Deer were to be apologized to after the kill. The spirit of Little Deer sent crippling rheumatism

to hunters who failed to properly respect the deer and to thank it for sacrificing its life. The hunter then makes an offering of golden pine pollen over the slain deer before he moves it. Sometimes he cuts the hamstrings of the slain deer to keep its spirit from following him home.

Sometimes he lights a fire in his path.

My behavior lacked reverence. I’d climbed that bay tree to harvest venison with no more respect in my heart than if I’d gone to a meat market. The slide down the hill had rattled my bones.

Already I can feel the little flames of arthritis igniting in my spine, shoulders, and hips. Maybe I’ll die out here, deserving to. After that I’ll be confined facedown and paralyzed in the fifth terrace of Dante’s Purgatory, reserved for the greedy and avaricious. I’ve broken pagan and Christian laws. The 10-point wears an insolent garland of smilax vines.

As a matter of fact, my death upside down on the riverbank where I’d spent so much of my life is somehow fitting.

It has a roundness to it. Surely no one could find a more beautiful place to cash in their chips. Maybe dying isn’t such a bad idea, a satisfactory closure, and it will absolve me of all the labor ahead of me before I can go to sleep in a warm bed at home. I think of Tillie, the saint who raised my sister and me, two white brats, between a highway and a riverbank. Tillie was afraid of four things: the Devil, snakes, the Flint River, and Studebakers—cars so aerodynamic you couldn’t tell if they were coming or going. Every morning of my childhood, she warned us of all four. As soon as she got busy in the kitchen, I headed down to the riverbank, hunting snakes.

A lacy sycamore leaf falls into the tannin-stained water. Caught in a little whirlpool, it spins around and around, slinging kaleidoscopic tendrils of prismatic light across the sandy bottom.

The network of capillary roots at the waterline suggests some grand and intricate order that surges its design throughout the cosmos. Minnows tug at a stringy blood clot. Everywhere we pause, the glory of creation asserts itself.

I can’t tell if this is a revelation, a stroke, a senior moment, or all of the above.

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Suddenly it dawns on me how very, very tired I am. My thighs are still burning from dragging three dead deer the 50 yards from my climber to the lip of the riverbank. I’m almost too tired to twitch.

My trapped foot has gone to sleep, pinpricks all the way to my calf. I can barely wiggle my toes. An exhausted voice inside me says, “It’s time to rest. All creatures must have sleep.” I close my eyes and have already dozed off when the ghost spirit of Tillie, the tyrant of my childhood, speaks up: “Vic, what you doing down there?” she snaps. “I told you ever day of your life, ‘Don’t you go near that river,’ and here you is stuck in the mud and catclaws with the river fixing to rise.”

“Oh, Tillie, I’m old and slap give out.

Just let me rest my eyes for a minute.”

“Do, and when that river come up, you drown.”

I blink myself awake. I writhe and wallow until I can turn over on my back.

Supine, I lift the rack out of the mud and push the buck’s head aside. Bright heart blood, cooler now, drips on my flannel shirt over my own heart. I’m still bound by briars. Each wand I remove is replaced by two more that bite through my shirt into my hide. I swear I’ll never again shoot more than one deer at a time, and to that deer I’ll offer sincere thanks and heartfelt apologies.

Bending sideways, I manage to reach my Swiss Army knife. I use the little scissors to snip through the blackberry wands, saw through the barbed smilax vines with the blade. Some of the thorns are still snagged in my clothing. Some are still snagged into various and sundry parts of my person. All of them are sharp and vengeful. I’m wet, muddy, and shivering cold.

It takes me until dusk to cut myself out of the basket of briars that have me entwined, but my foot remains wedged beneath the deer’s haunches. Doubling over sideways, I find I can reach the top of my boot. Slowly and painfully I unlace it, and after much tugging, I pull my foot free. My sock comes off inside my boot. The top of my narrow foot is cold and blue as ivory, an old man’s foot.

Finally, inch by inch, I low-crawl from beneath the 10-point, crabbing through

the mud, cutting briars as I go. Finally, I’m free. Now all I have left to do is load up my three deer into the johnboat and head upriver for home. I’m comprehensively anointed with mud, blood, and deer piss. I begin to wish wholeheartedly I’d shot three squirrels instead of three deer. Then I begin to wish I’d missed the deer I shot at. Then I wish I’d never left home.

T

he boat is low in the water and the going upstream is slow. I ferry through the Vs of rapids where rushing water plaits silver moonlight over the rocks. Orion, the hunter, is visible overhead, as is Canis Major, his dog. It’s late by the time I return to the boat ramp. I back my trailer down and pull out, too exhausted to notice the port side of the boat isn’t snug on the trailer’s runners. The imbalance of cargo tilts the johnboat to one side. I hit a pothole that slides the left side of the boat off the trailer, dumping the last deer I’d piled in—the 10-point—at the intersection of the public boat ramp

and Radium Springs Road. By now I’m very close to crying. If I’d brought my telephone, I could call Melissa, who’d come to help me get the buck back into the johnboat. Vain pride has stumbled its way into hubris. I’m cold and alone in the dark. Bad karma has coiled back around to bite me on the ass.

I muster all the strength I have left, which is more than I expected. I heave and grunt the deer back into the johnboat. Only with great effort can I rock the boat back on its runners. These combined efforts rupture a lumbar disc, and a sawtooth stab of pain from the small of my back runs down my right leg. The spirit of Little Deer has overcome me with a vengeance, marking me for life. From this point until my death, I’ll walk bent over at the waist like a broke-open shotgun, dragging a leg and rocking from side to side—a shuffling gait to remind me of thanklessness and the cardinal sins of pride and avarice.

At home I pull the boat into the backyard and wake up Melissa. We

hang a gambrel hook over the crosspiece of the swing set and start butchering deer. I nurse my back and offer instructions as she does nearly all the work. It’s after midnight by the time we get started on the last of the deer. I know for the next couple of days getting out of bed will be a challenge, but I don’t yet know I’ll limp for life.

Melissa, too much of a lady to mention my residual odor, holds a bloody knife. Brushing a blond strand of hair out of her eyes with the back of her hand, she sighs. “So, how’d you manage to kill three deer at one time?” she says.

“Nothing to it,” I reply.

“Well, how’d you get so scratched up and bloody?”

“Penance,” I say, “but that’s another story.” n Retired college professor O. Victor Miller, after a six-year sailing adventure that ended in shipwreck and jail in the Caribbean, returned to his family home on the Flint River in Albany, Georgia, to reflect on the misadventures of his quixotic life.

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Hunting

and knew from long years of experience what it meant. As my own grandfather used to say, One shot good shot, / Two shots, maybe, / Three shots bullshit.

We didn’t dink around. It was below us now, and headed for our deer. Its deer. The deer.

We turned around and trotted down the ridge, talking, to let it know we were coming.

We got to the deer before it did. I don’t know by how much; we didn’t wait around. We loaded up our bounty, left it the gut pile, skeleton, and head, and trotted on down off the mountain— happy for it, happy for us, and happy to be in a time and a place (in Montana) where such things still happened. n

Continued from page 16 defend ourselves? It stopped before goring us, but there was still fire in its eyes.

That was a gift, one I took gratefully with a single shot.

We cleaned it in the deep snow beneath the blue sky—there’s such satisfaction in securing meat on the last day of the season—wiped our hands on the snow, then continued up the mountain to look for the elk. We’d load the buck into our packs later, on the way back down.

Up and up we went. When we were almost to the top, Lowry, ahead of me, said “Look!” There were big tracks in the snow ahead of us, contemporaneous—simultaneous, it seemed—with our own. At first I thought, Ah crap, another hunter, equally intrepid but unconcerned with the wind, has come in from the other side. A barefoot hunter with long claws.

Old Slewfoot, the Old Man of the Mountain, Grandfather.

The grizzly had heard our rifle shot

Rick Bass is the author of 32 books of fiction and nonfiction, including For a Little While: New & Selected Stories and The Traveling Feast, a literaryculinary memoir. He lives in northwest Montana’s Yaak Valley, where he is a board member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council (yaakvalley.org).

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Traditions Continued from page 62 side of the gap was alive and well.

Outdoor authors made the big game experiences seem nothing less than transformative. Stewart Edward White, for example, venerated the heavenly vistas that awaited the white-goat hunter, as if they represented religious visitations.

While White acknowledged the endurance necessary for goat hunting, he also had a way of implying you—yes, you sitting right there in that easy chair—can do this, and moreover, you should. That was basically the voice of his 1903 book, The Forest, which probably did more than any single publication to send Americans camping.

White’s high peaks story, “Climbing for White Goats,” begins with a description of the climb, with the guide saying, ““Let’s go to the top and look for goats. . . . There are some goat cliffs on the other side of here. It isn’t very far.” Such an observation basically serves as the “straight” line in Uncle Ezra’s tale.

Other articles, as if leveraging the high peaks’ place in the heavens, framed the experience as a liturgy for what sports hunting could mean. George Bird Grinnell, conservationist, editor, writer, and, along with TR, founder of the Boone & Crockett club, also wrote a story about his goat friends in high places. (Interestingly enough, Grinnell’s article has the same title as White’s: “Climbing for White Goats.”)

Grinnell observes that “the thrill of the hunt lay in [how] the mountains uplift the soul. . . [The goat hunter’s] companions are the changeless peaks, the far-reaching snow fields, and the blue ice rivers. In fact, the killing of the game is a mere incident of this climbing for goats.” Or, as Uncle Ezra would say, That’s exactly what I am trying to tell ye!

As with most humor, both Crowell’s stories rested on deeper conflicts and tension— most notably, a growing rub between guides and clients. In sport hunting’s beginnings in the mid-19th century, guides had the reputation for being Daniel Boone, Leatherstocking sorts who alerted uninitiated city hunters to the beauty and tempo of the natural world. But as sport hunting became more organized, with a literature and a culture, say nothing of a studied

practice, hunters took to fashioning themselves as the devoted and skillful ones— and the guides as the camp helpers with inside info on locating the game. This shift did not always lead to friction, of course.

It really came down to personalities. President Roosevelt, for example, treated guides as equals and became lifelong friends with a number of them. But often as not, the new century brought a change in the role of the guide so that the interactions became more contractual, less personal and relational.

Magazines of the day published articles about the controversies that arose as a result. Outdoor Life ran a continuing series that debated whether sportsmen should be served by guides or should be co-participants. And, given the singular influence of print journalism at the time— there were magazine articles on upcoming magazine articles—readers of Crowell’s humor were certainly aware of this controversy. The idea of the know-it-all, brave-around-the-campfire sport became a caricature and subject of cartoons. One such pair of images pictured the returning

sport hero, hands on hips, saying, “Got the biggest moose ever taken in the district. . . . I had an awful time humping the beastly thing out to camp.” The next frame shows him following the guide, who is stumbling along with half a moose on his back.

In essence, this is the story of Bill and his bear. The big talker—why, skinning bears is a cinch—who, this time, gets his comeuppance. The actual narrative of “bear bragging” has been a staple in our national imagination from the beginning of our country—and was going strong in the early years of the century.

President Roosevelt himself had several highly publicized experiences with bears, and they did not particularly advance sport hunting in general.

(Even Uncle Ezra claims to have shot a couple of hundred, but he may have been egging Bill on—and it worked!)

As early-19th-century white settlement pushed west into the Ohio Valley and to the Mississippi River, the black bear was the animal in the news. Davy Crockett, for example,

claimed to have shot 105 bears in one year.

Somebody was impressed because he built his reputation for political office on his life as a bear hunter, was elected to Congress, and some say was on his way to becoming a possible candidate for the White House— but he ran afoul of some folks with bigger rifles than he, beginning with President Jackson.

If Bill could talk today, he might say— “And right there’s the thing that can get a fella in trouble.” That is, an excess of hubris, a lack of respect for what hunting really involves, or should involve, and a general bragging on how good a hunter you are. There’s always talk in camp, but the game is out in the woods, the fish in the stream. And there are no guarantees.

Or, as Bill might put it after a night in a tree, “Before you plan on showing off your skinning skills, you might want to make sure the bear is dead first.”

Will Ryan teaches expository writing at Hampshire College. He has a poor reputation for bear skinning, and he would be the first to admit it.

September 2020 · 85

Silent Continued from page 45 bag for summer sailing. As soon as we started hunting, Joe asked me to stay behind him a little farther. My pants sounded like a luffing mainsail.

We had driven Joe’s truck into the creek basin and dropped off Rob and Miles so they could start in where they had found elk the morning before. We eventually parked in a clearing at the edge of a shallow ravine, a spot you could see was site of a traditional camp, with trenching for big wall tents, several fire rings, and a ridgepole lashed and nailed between trees for hanging dead animals—much higher, Joe pointed out, than one for deer. He and I would follow the rise north of the creek, he said, then descend into the creek bottom on a long traverse as we headed east.

East? North? Joe sprayed me with scent cover; I watched my breath rise toward the trees. On the drive in, I’d somehow gotten turned around. Asked where the sun would eventually rise over the misty ridgelines all around us, I would

have confidently pointed west.

Still, luffing pants and all, I felt sure we’d see animals. Fresh sign crisscrossed the edges of wide benches of open oak woodlands, where the elk, Joe said, came to feed on fallen acorns. We moved carefully; talc from Joe’s squeeze bottle showed the wind right on our noses. The basin remained silent—no shots, trucks, not even the ravens disturbed the drizzly morning.

They’re in here someplace, I thought.

Hours later, as we climbed out of the shade of the creek bottom, Joe stopped and pointed out details of what he had seen yesterday from this very spot— where the elk came out of the pines, where Rob and Miles were walking, the distance of his own shot he had calculated and immediately rejected. We worked our way up a steep slope studded with scruffy oak, the warmth of the sun raising tendrils of steam off the wet dead grass. Below the road back to the truck, Joe stopped again, this time to pull off a layer of fleece. He stuffed the shirt in his pack while I held his gun, surprised by how heavy it was.

“That’s where this comes in handy,” said Joe, slipping the rifle into a scabbard built into his pack.

Up on the road, we fell into thoughtless chatter. Sweaty from climbing, the sun bright against the gravel road underfoot, we might as well have been trying to scare away animals for all the noise we made as we approached the last bend before reaching the truck.

Rounding the curve, I choked back a mouthful of words.

“Joe,” I said finally. “Elk. Crossing the road.”

Before Joe could pull his gun free, elk were skidding on the gravel, some of them trying to back up and change direction at the same time, others pivoting left or right as they took off running. A cow’s loud call went up from somewhere in the woods above the road. Gun in hand, Joe ran ahead, stopped and crouched alongside a bush, raised his rifle and peered through the scope.

Nothing.

I caught up with him, dragging his half-opened pack. “Classic,” I said.

Joe turned to me, shook his head.

“First time I’ve looked through the scope and seen animals and my truck.”

Neither of us had anything to say that made us feel better about ourselves by the time we set our gear onto the truck’s tailgate.

I pointed a boot toe at a deep print a yard off the end of the bumper. “This one had to dodge the truck.”

Joe worked a couple of Clif Bars out of a pocket of his pack.

“I’m gonna change pants,” I added.

W

e drove back after lunch to where we had dropped off Rob and Miles. An hour passed before they finished the climb out of the creek bottom and came slowly through the trees. According to the map, they’d hiked twice as many miles as Joe and I had hunted; Rob’s strategy, apparently, was to cover as much ground as possible, hoping that increased their odds of running into animals. We reported the details of our fiasco. Miles frowned. The irony of traipsing about the woods all morning, only to find elk practically inside the bed of the pickup, didn’t escape anybody, especially

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a 12-year-old who had just done twice the traipsing as the guys—one of them as old as his grandpa—who ended up stumbling onto the all but obliging herd.

But when Joe and I suggested we return to the same parking spot and climb into the steep woods where we had seen the elk run, Rob didn’t want any part of it. Spurred by the previous day’s near success, he and Miles had spent themselves down in the creek bottom.

“And I’ve been up in there once before,” added Rob. “It’s a bitch.”

That got my attention; Rob didn’t seem the kind of father who talked that way in front of his kid. After our own morning hunt, Rob’s tone and my knees told me I wouldn’t have an easy time of it up in the roughest part of the drainage.

Even in my quiet pants.

The sun had dropped below the ridgeline—west, I reminded myself— by the time Joe and I started away from the truck. Rob said he and Miles would cross the ravine and hang out there, just in case. The entire campsite spread like a small park through open space between

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thick-trunked Ponderosa pines; near the top end we passed the debris of an abandoned camper or trailer. As we reached the edge of the understory and started into a dark tangle of blowdown, I wondered how many elk had been shot here by old guys hanging back at camp, waiting for other hunters to push animals right into their laps.

Then Joe signaled with a hand for me to stop.

Beyond the mess of skewed and fallen saplings, I saw tails, twitching ears, nervous flanks beginning to move. But directly in line with us, as though we were looking down a long hallway or some kind of Burning Man bowling alley, the dark neck of a cow elk hovered, perfectly framed by trees. It was looking our way.

He’s got a shot, I finished thinking after the blast of Joe’s rifle filled the forest and the legs of the elk buckled and it sank to the ground.

Joe and I looked at each other, both of us a little startled by the pretty shot.

“Let’s go make sure she doesn’t get up,” said Joe, starting through the tangled trees.

W

e broke camp the next day. Joe and I had gone back to town for showers and our own beds after hanging and skinning the animal in a friend’s shop along the way; come morning we drove into the creek basin again to discard the hide and hike up into the part of the drainage we hadn’t reached the day before. We were also making ourselves available should Rob and Miles, hunting one more morning, fill their tag. Working our way uphill through the dewy chill, the way getting steeper the higher we climbed, I wanted to find elk again so that yesterday’s success didn’t feel like a case of just getting lucky—and a hell of a shot by Joe. But—what do I know?—maybe that’s how it always feels, I thought after we found nothing but mushrooms, woodpeckers, and the sign of elk moving silently through the trees.

Back at camp, we gathered up our gear. n Scott is the angling editor for Gray’s.

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Deer of My Fathers Continued on page 35 be walking slowly; and you sat across the draw, elbows on drawn-up knees, tracking it in the crosshairs in its forward progress, waiting, waiting.

If the buck moves gradually enough without halting, you let off the safety and follow smoothly with the deer, holding a pace and a half ahead of the place above the elbow, and press the trigger with the whorl of your fingerprint, firing the softpointed bullet. You hear the muzzle blast, but you don’t, and feel the recoil, but not. You try to keep the buck in the scope; but even if the sight picture goes off the deer, as it does you see the deer falling like a structure with its supports knocked out from under it. Wrap your left hand around the ejection port and work the bolt, taking the empty case for your pocket, glancing reflexively at the primer to judge the pressure, and chamber another round. Move your eyes quickly back to the place where the buck was. When you don’t see it stand-

”Heavy Cover”

ing or walking or running, get up and cross to it.

It is a long-legged gray bulk in the sage, Roman nosed, opened eyes still clear, antler beams forked, the forks forked too. The way it lies with its head arched back, the hide gathers in pleats between the neck and shoulder.

You unload the rifle, pushing the unfired cartridge down into the magazine and sliding the bolt over it, rotating it closed, leaning it into a bush. You take off your coat or vest, hanging it visible over the rifle, and push your sleeves far back. You drag the dead weight of the buck around so it is on its back, hindquarters downhill, and pull it up the few feet you are able to so the antlers hook in the sage and anchor the carcass, the pelage deep enough to bury your fingers into. Your lockback knife when you open it is sharp from when you honed it at home, thinking about the hunt ahead. With it, you notch the harvest tag; and you put the knife down, to sign the tag, then fold the polyethylene paper and place it

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into your shirt pocket. For a moment you cannot see where you dropped the knife. You find it and begin.

A blaze of white hide lies over the lower abdomen. I start by freeing the penis, scrotum, and urethra, slicing down through the burgundy-colored, muscle-twitching meat to the pelvic bone. With the two fingers of my free hand, I spread the incision in the hide while I slide the blade edge-up away from me, up the deer’s belly, smelling the hepatic odor of the body cavity and seeing and feeling the releasing steam.

Having detached the diaphragm, I can reach my arm far up on the rubbery windpipe to sever it. After putting the knife down again, memorizing its position on the ground, I use both hands to pull and slide everything free, separating the fresh heart and liver for the plastic bag. On the ground is now the most emblematic part of hunting: a warm gut pile.

I finished the splitting and dressing, lifting the carcass to drain the blood; and not having brought any water, as I should have and almost never did, I wiped the knife blade on the hide of the buck and folded it closed, then broke off branches of sage and rubbed the blood from my hands. This time the deer was taken when it was early enough to hike and walk back to camp, silent, alone, thinking of what had been done, even if there were no conclusions to be drawn.

In camp after washing the knife and my arms and hands in a basin, splashing the pink soapy water onto the dry ground, I’d find someone to help me get the buck, its eyes now clouded green, down to one of the ranch roads where it could be loaded into a pickup bed and brought into camp to hang suspended in the shed to cool and form a pellicle over the meat while it was too cold for the bottlebees to lay eggs; and in the collapsing ranch house by lantern light in the night, with the men who were not my father, I ate the liver and heart I brought in. In a few days, we wrapped the carcasses in tarps and sleeping bags to hold the chill in, loaded all that we had brought, and drove those miles back to where home was.

It was like that for a dozen years or more, near to ceremony. Even on the new ranch, they were still the men of Skinner Ridge, until time began singling them out. By then, my father, who never saw the ridge or gulch, was already gone, mourning him problematic. Colorado ended for me soon after.

But it is still what I carry most deeply of deer and the hunting of them.

A

lmost 50 years from when I began, I still hunt mule deer, if not so much. More and more it is with other, younger hunters, one sometimes a son whom I always tell I love, when often I don’t even carry my rifle. If I do carry it, I am normally alone, as you always really are with mule deer, which is far from a team sport.

Faulkner. Hemingway. Forested hardwoods. Single junipers. Whitetails.

Mule deer.

“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer,” another author, D. H. Lawrence, wrote. The big Odocoilean deer of the Mountain West is all that except killer, unless by misadventure in fighting other bucks over mates. It’s the deer I’ve known longest and best. The one I love deepest.

Whatever some have done to the mule deer’s name, I’ll always think of it as the deer of the men of Skinner Ridge, the deer of my fathers—if never quite of my father. I wish, more than not, even now, that it could have been that for him, with me. That he could have, somehow, found his way to the ridge. n

Tailwalking A new acrylic, framed 26 x 39, image size 21 x 35 Visit chetreneson.com to view new paintings Prices and information on lithographs and commissioned watercolors on request. renesonpen@att.net • 860.434.2806 Chet Reneson 42 Tantumorantum Road, Lyme, CT 06371

Thomas McIntyre is the author most recently of Augusts in Africa. His next book, Thunder Without Rain: A Memoir with Dangerous Game, the Story of God’s Cattle, the African Buffalo, comes out in 2021.

September 2020 · 89

People, GSJ Places & Equipment Down Under Red Stag (Page 18) Dušan Smetana hunted red stag on the North Island of New Zealand with Wanganui Safaris (www. wsafaris.com), which lies in the remote Whanganui River Valley. In addition to red deer, the lodge offers hunts for sika and fallow deer, a variety of sheep and goats, and wild boar. See more of Dušan’s fine work at dusan. photoshelter.com.

Where There’s Smoke There’s Fire (Page 36) Nick Trehearne and a friend hunted mountain goat in the mountains of northwestern British Columbia in an area that was suffering wildfires caused by lightning strikes. They didn’t want to hunt in those circumstances, but his friend’s permit was valid only for that area. See more of Nick’s gritty work at nicktrehearne.com.

Red, White, & True (Page 52) Mark Johnson photographed Denver Bryan hunting white-tailed deer in southwestern Montana. Denver said this was classic bowhunting in “valley-and-stream-bottom territory.”

See more of Mark’s good work at imagesonthewildside.com.

Gordon Allen An artist from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Gordon has been contributing to Gray’s for years. His line art is scattered throughout this issue. You can see more of Gordon’s work at www. gordonallenart.com

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Angling

Art

Continued from page 73 No wonder we now find bull trout in need of protection—yet another sign of the precarious state of watersheds throughout the West.

In the face of it all, bull trout, when we encounter them, return us to a better time. Recall, again, that I’m from California, where the early Jesuit missions were all built on or near trout streams that you’d have a hard time locating today with even the most sophisticated divining rod—the same state that McGuane described, more than 40 years ago, as “helping our republic to really pour on the coals.” Ignoring and possibly advocating for the decline of bull trout in favor of more desirable trout seems exactly how we find ourselves with so much out of whack today. Should we unleash attacks on, say, pelicans and terns when they’re pounding bait, just because less bait in the ocean means fewer game fish?

Sunlight leaves the canyon well before dark; cool air traps the lingering scent of smoke clinging to the blackened forest.

While Joe keeps track of the minutes to finish steeping our just-add-water Stroganoff, I carry my ration of single malt streamside. Anything moving? I’m still hung up on these bull trout, how anybody could have seen fit to replace or eradicate such a badass fish, when I notice small trout rising to what looks like a hatch of tiny mayflies. Aren’t there any mayfly lovers, I wonder, who would like to do away with trout? Watching the fish feed, I suddenly recall a PMD hatch on the Owyhee River, in the deserts of eastern Oregon, and seeing the duns, every one of them, getting eaten by swarming dragonflies, which waited for the mayflies to lift off the water before zeroing in and grabbing them—a cautionary technique employed by the darting and diving predators to avoid getting eaten themselves by the big browns moving about in the quiet pool.

But that’s a different story, I decide, heading back to see about dinner. n

Continued from page 77 From his pen-and-pencil field sketches (photos serving only to confirm a reference), for his large pieces, Kelsey makes a maquette, using it as a guide to fashion a giant welded armature of steel pipe or channel iron. He covers it with cardboard, wire, foam—“whatever it takes”—to determine its horizontal or vertical composition and overall size. Using oil-based clay warmed to 118ºF to make it more malleable and applied ½ to 12 inches thick, he uses up to 7,400 pounds for a single sculpture 1½ times life size.

His generous textures bounce light and cast shadows, creating the illusion of movement. Kelsey’s kudus are on the verge of vanishing with a leap; the ibex and urials are poised for less than an instant; the sitatunga lays its spiraled horns along its back before slipping into forested waters. TD is fearless of the bison’s fuzzy topknot and beard, or of the beefed-up neck and showy dewlap of a Lord Derby eland in rut.

At present, Kelsey spends half the year near Cody, Wyoming, and half on 10,000 acres of seriously rugged country near Guthrie, Texas, where he still keeps all kinds of horses, cows, and longhorns, as well as several species of exotics for reference. There are no high seats, so any activity—even art—means tough going. And “too many aircraft,” he confesses, including a Robinson R44 helicopter and a Soviet WWII Yakovlev Yak. Still, at this stage in life, TD is considering giving up his aerobic Pitts Special competition biplane because of the serious time investment required to stay sharp.

Kelsey worries that his passion for different callings may prevent him from being his best at any one. Whether cowboy, rancher, pilot, hunter, or artist, each one reaps the benefit of his true grit. n

Gray’s angling editor Scott Sadil enjoys few things more in the Pacific Northwest than exploring healthy watersheds where it’s still legal to catch and release protected bull trout.

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Brooke Chilvers describes her first meeting with T. D. Kelsey at the Haut Chinko Safari camp in northeastern CAR: “A cowboy hat topped a slim figure wrapped in a plaster cast to protect his three newly fused vertebrae, his arm rigidly set to shoot a .375 on a challenging hunt for eland.”

GSJ

EXPEDITIONS ////The Gray’s Guide to Sporting Travel Stuck in the middle of the Congo basin, a guy sinking hard with malaria, and only one way out.

by Peter Ryan

FEVER Pitch

SCOTLAND’S PHOTOGRAPHY BY RAYNO EGNER

September 2020 · 91

Y

ou come in by light plane on landing strips that the logging companies have dozed through red dirt. In the morning, a breath of mist hangs over the forest. Where there are gaps in the canopy, brilliant shafts of light pierce through to its floor, but by noon there is nothing but harsh sun and the wall of green.

This is the corner where Cameroon meets the Central African Republic and the Congo. The camp is pleasant, surrounded by clean red earth, but just beyond a tiny human footprint, the green wall begins. This is nothing like the pine woods of gentle climates. It’s a riot of shining leaves fighting for light, twisted lichen-splotched lianas, towering hardwoods. There are insects everywhere—in the air, under everything, and across everything.

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September 2020 · 93

It rains often here. The sun and heat and water between them power life at its most frenetic—it seethes at precisely the same rate that decay consumes it. Everything from the giant forest trees to the smallest parasol fungus is either swelling with growth or being torn apart.

It pulses, swarms, perishes, and rots as you watch.

The animals that live here are mostly sly and secretive to a fault. They know in their bones how to slip through the trees, how to use the shadows, how to drift to nothing before your eyes.

You can, if you’re so inclined, try to buy your way through with some big game. A good scout might locate a great specimen of some species and stake out its location and habits. That won’t work with bongo. You can’t buy success. There are no shortcuts. You do it or you don’t.

T

he trackers are Baka. The men average about five feet tall. They are hunter-gatherers, often alternating between village life and jungle camps of

small domed huts. They worship a forest spirit and sing songs to him after a successful hunt.

Their forest is being rapidly cut down by the powerful one-two punch of logging followed by palm oil plantations. Half of Baka children don’t make it to five. Life for them is to be a small force against a much greater one, every single day. It has never been any other way.

A bongo hunt needs them, not just because of their tracking skills but also because of their attitude. They light everything up—half of such a hunt is the experience with them and the dogs. It is otherwise a bleak exercise.

You don’t see animals in the jungle, just the green wall and the bugs. It’s dark in there, so dark the Baka must sometimes feel the tracks with their fingers. The jungle is not Eden.

HIV is rampant. Rabies can surface anywhere. Filarial worm is common enough. There’s loa loa from fly bites. Moving around the body, the adult worm can sometimes traverse

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Eden or hell on earth? The trick with rainforest is not to look for a single simple answer.

The jungle is both.

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across the victim’s eye, making for a very interesting 10 minutes or so.

Over the border to the east is the Ebola River, which gave its name to one of the most lethal viruses known to man.

Some victims die in hemorrhagic convulsions. There’s also bilharzia, tick-bite fever, sleeping sickness from tsetse fly bites, river blindness. This basin of the great Congo is a cradle of human disease, but it seems that the Baka have a degree of resistance to some of the infections and parasites of the jungle.

Their hunting packs look like the usual pariah dogs. Putzi flies are a plague on them. They turn into jelly bean–sized maggots under the skin, then eventually bore out and drop to the ground to begin the cycle again. An infected dog can carry plenty and is still expected to hunt.

The village dogs have a thousand generations of resistance on their side.

The dogs and the Baka are echoes of each other.

R

ayno Egner lives in a beautiful

home. It overlooks a valley of farmland in the highlands of South Africa.

I have stood there and looked across that valley to the towering Drakensberg capped with snow. It’s a fine place to come home to a wife and two lovely kids. But life is also to be lived.

Rayno will forgive me when I say that he is at the forefront of what he does— filming conservation projects, hunting projects, wild places, and how we may keep them.

He and two hunters, Chance and Justin, arrived in Cameroon ready for anything. By the time evening settled over Douala, they were shooting the breeze over a few cold beers.

The next morning, they were in a light plane heading for the farthest corner of Cameroon.

Here it rains every second day or so. Not the showers of the temperate world but the flat, heavy downpours of the tropics, hard and loud. That’s the defining feature of this kind of hunting.

You’re wet all the time—sometimes from sweat, sometimes a downpour,

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A mature bongo bull, thick necked, ivory tipped, and colored the same rich red as the rainforest soil. One of the great sporting prizes of the world.

write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit. write to fit.

often both. You drink and drink to rehydrate, hoping that the water is safe.

The hunting began in great optimism, though the Baka get the party lost on the first day. On the fifth day, Chance and his team follow a bongo track into the jungle, but after a short distance, the Baka stop abruptly. Forest elephant.

The Baka don’t like it, too close. The animal is agitated, plenty of scope for something to go wrong. The party backs out in a hurry to circle and pick up the bongo track more safely. They hit an old forestry track just as the gunfire erupts— the unmistakable stamped steel, shortbarreled stutter of AKs. Twenty rounds or so. Within a few seconds, two angry, frightened elephants are on the road in front of them, another behind.

The hunters are shaken. This isn’t what they signed up for. Then it emerges that the Baka were not lost at all on the first day. The trackers felt that the group was being followed and were trying to shake whoever was dogging their steps.

Justin gets lucky and takes a bull, but nothing has come together for Chance.

Finally the tide begins to turn—they follow a track and there is a glimpse of red through the leaves. There are excited yaps, the throb of the jungle. The barking goes up a notch as the bull bails, spinning fast to lower its horns at the dogs. The team has to struggle through tangles to reach them, and suddenly the air is full of shouted instructions in French and Baka. A hunter from 10,000 years ago would recognize this scene in an instant. As the dogs clear the bull, a shot rings out. They are still barking, but the bull has gone, vanished, swallowed up instantly by the forest.

After a pause, the Baka move quietly to the trail. Soon there are claps and singing from the trackers—Chance has his bongo. There are no tape measure moments. These are the kind of guys who just want a good old bull past his days, the sort who don’t care about inches. The hunt is the trophy.

They use pangas—bush knives like machetes—to clear a path to the bull.

Hours later as they come back into camp, there is celebration singing, waving hands

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The Baka team on a roll. Expert trackers in a tough and unforgiving environment, it is their character that makes a modern bongo hunt a true adventure.

high in the air, and waving leaves. It’s another scene from a remote past.

H

ippos, they say, kill more people than any other creature in Africa. Others will confidently tell you crocodiles do. The whole thing is nonsense—African countries don’t do accurate statistics of what happens out in the bundu, but for sure the mosquito wins this game hands down.

Parasites take the body through cold, hot, and sweating stages. Organs might start to shut down, and when they do, you will die. Last year there were 230 million cases of malaria.

Sometime during that first night out on the veranda, a mosquito that had already taken blood from a malaria victim landed on Rayno and stuck him. Parasites entered his blood and found their way to his liver. He had no symptoms for 10 days, but during that time the parasites were multiplying. Then they burst out into his bloodstream. At one o’clock on the morning of the 12th day,

Rayno woke cold and shivering in the remote jungle camp to find that he had malaria in spades.

The team drove to the airstrip for the light plane out, but at the tiny airfield there is a phone call to say that the plane is not coming. It needs a part before it can fly, and that might take a week or more.

Rayno is deteriorating fast. Frantically they check around for any other companies, anyone. As a last resort, they try an unknown guy in Chad who wants big money. With a lot of wrangling, the money is sent, and they arrange with the pilot to rendezvous again at 7:30 next morning to see if he has made it into Yaoundé and cleared customs.

It is a hopeful group that assembles that morning. There is, of course, no phone call. They call around looking for the pilot and eventually find him.

Though he repays them months later, he’s not coming, a mechanical problem.

That’s the moment it hit. Stuck in the middle of the Congo basin, a guy sinking hard with malaria, and no way out.

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What is claiming Africa’s wildlife? Ignorant people blame hunters. In truth, wire snares, poachers with AK-47s, overgrazing by goats and cattle, and in the rainforests, chainsaws clearing trees for palm-oil plantations and roads for logging trucks are a far bigger culprit.

That was the year William James Lindskov purchased his first quarter of land. Eighty-three years later, things are a little different—or at least the scope of them is. You see, Bill’s son, Les, had a vision: to share with the world the beauty and splendor of the immense Lindskov Family Ranch through a lodge called Firesteel Creek.

In 1999, the world was supposed to end, but Les, his wife, Marcia, and their four sons, Monte, Bryce, Mark, and Todd, had other plans.

While the world worried about Y2K, the Lindskov Family lodge rose on the banks of Firesteel Creek, in Isabel, South Dakota. A decade later, they added Timber Lake Lodge, with its herds of American bison, Rocky Mountain elk, and whitetail deer. A legacy was born.

Today, the birds fly wild and strong. Pheasants, sharptails and Huns bursting from cover. The deer and antelope really do look through the kitchen window, yet it never ceases to amaze how well they can hide when they want to.

As I gaze off into the vastness that is western South Dakota, I sometimes wonder what draws hunters to Firesteel Creek and Timber Lake from all over the world. Surely there are a host of destinations to choose from, yet we have been fortunate that so many have returned to our lodges time and again. Is it the scope of infinite acres spotted with grainfields or one of Dad’s famous cocktails—“a glass of pop with a stick in it”—personally delivered in the lounge?

‘Life is worth enjoying; come visit us.’

Perhaps it is our talented hunting guides and their canine companions—each tuned so flawlessly it’s like watching an orchestra play. To them it’s not a job as much as a passion—the ability to come home each evening and say “That was a great day.”

But the biggest reason people return must be Mom. Perhaps it’s her chicken-fried steak or fried chicken, or maybe it’s her buttermilk pheasant or famous roast beef. Then again, it could be her moon pies, chocolate cakes, or fantastic apple crisps—made from apples picked in her front yard. I may be biased, of course, but I think many would agree: Mom’s cooking is where it’s at. Mom is also a true role model— one who can fry three dozen eggs, make biscuit gravy, greet a stream of guests and not miss a chance to see what her grandchildren are up to that day.

So there may be many reasons sportsmen keep returning to our ranches. And we hope that one of them is because they love it here— just like we do. We love that there are no roads or people. We love that we can walk out on the porch and hear nothing apart from nature.

We love it this way, because life is simpler and moral out here. We hope you, too, can experience the way we are blessed to live every day.

Life is worth enjoying; come visit us. —Mark L. Like his brothers, Monte, Bryce and Todd, Mark Lindskov is a thirdgeneration guardian who manages the Lindskov Family’s Lodges.

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That’s the moment when the adventure wears thin. There’s nobody to help, just the green wall staring at you.

Driving from the border right up through Cameroon then east to west across its length is described by authorities as “theoretically possible.” It’s a 26-to-30-hour drive with no communications on some of the most dangerous roads in Africa. There are corrupt army, police, forestry officials, bandits. Bad guys everywhere. There are no other options, and the drive begins. All cameras must be kept out of sight because of the deforestation and other happenings.

The government is paranoid about journalists, and they watch hard for camera equipment. Forestry companies don’t like the idea of anybody getting footage of what they do.

The first 16 hours are on dirt. There are no stones in the road base, nothing solid, just bright red mud, washouts, collapsed bridges. Deep potholes everywhere from logging trucks chewing their way out. The road is littered in poverty.

At midnight, they roll into a vil-

lage near Bertoua. There is nowhere to stay but a filthy little jungle hotel, and we sleep on the floor rather than risk putting skin on the beds. There is a fourhour window for rest before pushing on.

Rayno is the only one who passes out, shivering and fevered. Four hours later, they start to move again, this time in low spirits from lack of sleep. Back on the road, there is the endless convoy of timber trucks. It is about then that they start to see the bodies.

Just on the side of the road, like garbage. Were these people hit by trucks?

Have they simply died and been thrown to the edge? Were they refugees?

The guys are quiet. They know that some kind of line has been crossed here. More driving, hour after hour.

They are weary and fading but also on edge from all the roadblocks—forestry, police, army, local chiefs. Young jocks, each waving the obligatory AK, looking for a handout at every turn. Ease into the blockade with a hand full of cash out the window and a blur of French.

Nobody gets out of the car. Don’t let

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Handsome is as handsome does. These might be a mixed bag to look at, but Baka dogs survive heat, disease, parasites, and bongo bulls—and still they hunt.

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anyone in the car. Don’t stare at the guns.

Driving on, we pass another body thrown to the side of the road. They begin to wonder how many are under the mud, unseen. They are at the edge of an abyss and they know it.

The drivers are fading, so Justin gives them a dose of Adderall. Soon the driving reaches a new level. The four-wheel drive is drifting into corners in a slew of mud, fishtailing as the engine roars.

They’re clocking 100 miles an hour on roads not fit for horses. Eventually sense prevails because around every blind corner is some kind of hazard—a blockade, people, animals. From start to finish, they pass through 21 roadblocks, each with its own mix of open piracy and sinister possibility.

They pull into Yaoundé, rest briefly once more, then on and on. And on.

Twenty-eight hours in, they hit Douala.

They deliver Rayno to medical help and stop on the bank of a river to buy prawns and a beer.

Only then do they understand what they have done.

T

he Baka have been hunting bongo since forever. The forest could always make more bongo. The same goes for the handful taken by the tiny number of outsiders prepared to front the risk and cost involved. But now the forest is disappearing fast. No forest means no Baka, no dogs. No bongo.

What is claiming the world’s wildlife? By reflex we look to put a face on the problem. The handful of hunters old and new are a lazy choice. It is vast faceless forces that are truly eating the old places up—wire snares, chain saws, the poacher’s AK-47, poisoned carcasses, overgrazing by goats and cattle. The instruments of naked greed.

Perhaps that is why we peer at the wall of green and see a vengeful, brooding thing. For once we see our own savage desires reflected back to us in equal measure. n Peter Ryan has hunted across four contents and didn’t get lost on some of them. He lives, writes, and hunts on New Zealand’s South Island. More at www.faraway.co.

If You Go

Like most travelers to Cameroon, the team flew into Douala to start their safari, though some carriers land in Yaoundé. From there, charter flights move hunters out to the various hunting blocks, usually followed by a road trip to camp.

There are reputable outfitters of long standing operating in Cameroon. Anyone planning a hunt should check references and the current situation carefully.

As in many countries at the time of writing, there is uncertainty around flight schedules and border control for Cameroon due to COVID-19.

Jungle hunts in Central Africa carry inherent uncertainty and some risks.

Comprehensive evacuation and medical insurance should be considered.

Jungle environments are tough on guns. Daily maintenance is critical to prevent rust and water damage. As much as exhibition walnut and fancy engraving might appeal, this is one place to consider robust actions, stainless steel, synthetic stocks, and protective coatings.

104 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

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green banks of the Belize Olde River, only 3.5 miles from the mouth of the river—the entrance into the Caribbean Sea and classic Flats fishing, where anglers will pursue bonefish, tarpon, permit, and snook. This beautiful historic mahogany lodge is situated amidst an abundant tropical setting.

Balmy breezes rich with the sound of bird song drift among the private cottages creating a naturalist’s paradise. Relax and delight in our Belizean hospitality and our delicious combination of fine Belizean-Creole cuisine. www.belizeriverlodge.com

B r i t i sh Co l u m b i a Legacy Lodge (877)347-4534 E-mail: info@legacylodge.com Wonderfully remote yet easily accessible, Legacy Lodge offers a premier sport fishing experience found nowhere else in the world.

In harmony with the natural environment and in a world all its own, here on the protected waters of Rivers Inlet, surrounded by the panoramic beauty of British Columbia, all the elements converge for epic battles with world class salmon and halibut. For couples and families, parties of friends to corporate groups, Legacy Lodge was made for those who yearn for the perfect fishing vacation. www.legacylodge.com

C alifornia Wing & Barrel Ranch (707)721-8845 E-mail: info@wingandbarrelranch.com.

Escape to Sonoma, CA and enjoy a private hunting club just minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge. Wing & Barrel Ranch brings together the best of the shooting, food, wine, and wine country lifestyle in an elegant setting. Here, legendary memories are made with menus inspired by the surrounding countryside, world-class wines, exceptional shooting opportunities, and incomparable hospitality. www.wingandbarrelranch.com.

C olorado GR Bar Ranch (800)523-6832 E-mail: info@grbarranch.com Nestled along the Grand Mesas, just nine miles outside the town of Paonia, CO, this working cattle ranch has thousands of backcountry acres, trout lakes, miles of trails, and endless fishing and hunting opportunities on our private paradise. A vacation at our ranch is the trip of a lifetime. www.grbarranch.com Kessler Canyon 4410 CR 209, De Beque, CO 81630

(970)283-1145 Combine 23,000 acres of pristine wilderness located on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies with one of the most magnificent hunting lodges in the country. Team that with the most elite hunting guides and dogs in the state pushing up pheasants, chukars, and Gambel’s quail in perfectly maintained bird cover—you could only find yourself at Kessler Canyon. Arguably the finest sportsman’s lodge and resort in Colorado, Kessler Canyon awaits the discerning sportsman who wants to experience the best of the best. www.kesslercanyon.com

Ge orgia Pine Hill Plantation 2537 Spring Creek Road Donalsonville, GA 39845 (229)758-2464 E-mail: dougcoe@pinehillplantation.com An Orvis-endorsed wingshooting lodge, we provide private plantation amenities and hunt quality to discriminating upland bird hunters who appreciate finer traditions of plantation-style quail hunting. Experience the best Georgia has to offer from horseback and mule-drawn wagon. Pine Hill’s lodges are arguably as nice as any private quail hunting plantation…you can trust Orvis on that! www.pinehillplantation.com

“Your Gateway to the North Maine Woods”

www.libbycamps.com / 207-435-8274 matt@libbycamps.com

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Spring Bank Plantation at Barnsley Resort 597 Barnsley Gardens Road, Adairsville, GA 30103 (770)773-7480 Spring Bank Plantation keeps alive a long Southern tradition of managing and preserving our game and lands. We offer upland game hunting and one of the Southeast’s most extensive shooting clays facilities— over water, in open field and in the woods.

Shooting guides ensure that all hunters— beginners and experts—fully enjoy their outing. Ladies and teens are particularly invited to experience our Southern shoot tradition at our luxury North Georgia quail hunting plantation, just an hour north of Atlanta. www.springbankplantation.com Wynfield Plantation 5030 Leary Road, Albany, GA, 31721 (229)889-0193 E-Mail: Annick@wynfieldplantation.com Orvis Wing Shooting Lodge of the Year in 2005 and has also been named among Garden & Gun magazine’s “Top Fifty People, Places, and Things in the South.”

With private cabins, southern cuisine, and a sporting clays course, Wynfield’s accommodations have a unique charm. Located in the heart of quail country, Wynfield represents bobwhite hunting at its finest.

Few things in life are more exciting than your dog locked down on a covey that flushes high and fast when the time is right!

Book your quail hunting experience of a lifetime at Wynfield Plantation. www.wynfieldplantation.com.

Idaho Flying B Ranch 2900 Lawyer Creek Road, Kamiah, ID 83536 (800)472-1945 E-mail: info@flyingbranch.com Located in beautiful north-central Idaho, we are an Orvis-endorsed wing shooting and fly fishing destination with a complete big-game program. Flying B Ranch offers adventures that bring back guests again and again. Open year-round with a full-time staff, the Flying B Ranch delivers consistent quality. Enjoy no-limit wingshooting from our spacious western log lodge, pack into the backcountry for a big-game hunt, or fish for everything from wild westslope cutthroat trout to giant B-run steelhead. It’s all here for you, your family, and friends. www.flyingbranch.com

Kansas Ravenwood Lodge (800)656-2454 E-mail: ravenhpsc@aol.com Contact Kenneth Corbet for reservations.

Ravenwood is a place where hunters can

have it all. Located on the eastern edge of Kansas Flint Hills, Ravenwood offers great hunting grounds and a spectacular mix of hard-flying European driven pheasants, private guided field hunts, or plantation hunts for wily bobwhites, big cock roosters, prairie chicken, turkey, deer, or sporting clays. Open year-round, reservations required, established 1985. www.ravenwoodlodge.com

M aine Libby Camps PO Box 810, Ashland, ME 04732 (207)435-8274 E-mail: matt@libbycamps.com Orvis-endorsed wing shooting and fishing lodge. Lakeside log cabins, home cooked meals, master guides, and sea planes to access the four million acre private timberlands of the North Maine Woods. Daily fly-outs for trophy native brook trout and land-locked salmon (May-Sept) and for wingshooting in October. Hunting for grouse, woodcock, moose, deer, and bear in the “big woods.”

Fifth-generation owners, since 1890. Orvis Fishing Lodge of the Year 2006-07. www.libbycamps.com

M ontana Al Gadoury’s 6X Outfitters Bozeman and Lewiston, MT (406)600-1835 E-Mail: al@6xoutfitters.com Since 1979, guided walk trips on private spring creeks, Yellowstone River floats, and private lakes. Upland bird hunts are based in Lewiston. All wild birds—sage and sharptail grouse, Hungarian partridge, pheasant, and turkey. www.6xoutfitters.com Gallatin River Lodge 9105 Thorpe Rd, Bozeman, MT 59718 (406)388-0148 Our resort is located on a quiet ranch on the Gallatin River west of Bozeman. We offer fly fishing guide service on the Madison, Yellowstone, and Missouri Rivers, plus many famous spring creeks nearby. Superb accommodations, exceptional dining, and conference facilities are available year-round. www.grlodge.com

N e w M e xic o Land of Enchantment Guides (505)629-5688 or (505)927-5356 E-mail: trout@loeflyfishing.com Offering single-day guided fly fishing trips and all inclusive, multi-day packages on the best rivers, streams, lakes, and private ranches in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Excellent year-round fishing.

Experienced guides welcome beginners and experts alike. Orvis-endorsed. www.loeflyfishing.com

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Ne w Z e aland High Peak (643)318-6575 E-Mail: Simon@highpeak.co.nz Where great hunting stories begin. Exclusive New Zealand hunting experiences for discerning clientele seeking that rare combination of fine trophy, authentic stalk, and a personal approach. Set among the central South Island’s Southern Alps, the Guild family takes pride in hosting their clients individually on their private station in pursuit of famous Red Stag, Thar, Chamois, and Fallow Buck. www.highpeak.co.nz

North Dakota Dakota Hills Hunting Lodge HC56, Box 90, Oral, SD 57766 (605)424-2500 or (800)622-3603 E-mail: dakhills@gwtc.net Contact Tom Lauing. We offer some of the finest world-class wingshooting available, with an abundance of pheasant, Hungarian partridge, chukar partridge, sharptail grouse, snipe, dove, and bobwhite quail. Allinclusive package includes first-class lodging along the Cheyenne River, all beverages, three Western-cuisine meals per day, open bar, ammunition, clays, license, 21-bird limit, processing, and airport pickup. www.dakhills.gwtc.net

S pain Hunt Trip Spain 011-34-931162001 E-mail: contact@hunttripspain.com A professional hunting company established

by Francisco Rosich in 1986. Its exclusive purpose is hunting game trophies throughout Spain. Hunt Trip Spain has hunting concessions all over the country for the broad range of magnificent game animals available in Spain: 4 subspecies of Spanish Ibex (Beceite, Gredos, Southeastern & Ronda), Spanish Red Stag, Mouflon Sheep, Fallow Deer, Pyrenean and Cantabrian Chamois, Feral Goat, Wild Boar, Roe Deer and Barbary Sheep. Outstanding hunts for RedLegged Partridges, driven or upland hunts are also available. HUNT TRIP SPAIN has served International hunters for more than 20 years. Come, let us transform your visit to Spain into an unforgettable adventure. www.hunttripspain.com

Utah Falcon’s Ledge (435)454-3737 E-mail: info@falconsledge.com One of the great western fly-fishing and wingshooting lodges. Cast to trophy trout on clear tail-waters, mountain freestone

streams, private stillwaters, and enjoy a day floating the famous Green or Provo Rivers.

Secure, pristine, and unpressured. Non-fishing spouses stay free! Honored as the 2012 Orvis Endorsed Fly Fishing Lodge of the Year! www.falconsledge.com

Vi r g in i a Chincoteague Hunting & Fishing Center (888)231-4868 Virginia’s Eastern Shore has one of the largest, most diverse populations of waterfowl in North America. Hunt puddlers, divers, sea ducks, mergansers, Atlantic brant, Canada, and snow geese all in the same day with over a 30-bird limit. We also offer rail hunting in September and October. www.duckguide.com Murray’s Fly Shop PO Box 156, 121 Main Streeet Edinburg, VA 22824 (540)984-4212 E-mail: info@murrayflyship.com Located in the Shenandoah Valley, 90 miles west of Washington, DC. Over 300 rods by Scott, Winston, Orvis, and St. Croix. More than 50,000 flies in stock. Harry Murray conducts 20 fly fishing schools for trout and bass. Complete guide services. Free mailorder catalog. www.murraysflyshop.com

Harry Murray’s Fly Fishing Schools

1 - the Daystream Smallmouth Schools from June “On schools”Bass for smallmouth bass on the to August ($196 per person).

1/2 - Day Fly Fishing Shenandoah River (2 days-$295) Lessons from June to September ($98 per person).

Mountain Trout Schools in the Shenandoah National Park Mountain(2Trout Schools in the days-$295) Shenandoah National Park (1 day @ $196).

All tackle provided free • Twenty separate schools All tackle provided free. Twenty separate schools.

Free catalog for schools and fly shop

More information at www.murraysflyshop.com.

P.O. Box 156 • 121 Main St. P.O. Box 156 • 121 Main St. Edinburg, VA 22824 Edinburg, VA 22824 Phone: phone:540-984-4212 540-984-4212 • e-mail: info@murraysflyshop.com e-mail: info@murraysflyshop.com www.murraysflyshop.com www.murraysflyshop.com

Primland 2000 Busted Rock Road Meadows of Dan, VA 24120 (866)960-7746 Join us for a rare opportunity to visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and experience driven pheasant shoots comparable to the best in the U.K. From pegs in a deep valley you’ll aim your double gun at the wild flurry of game birds as they appear from the towering ridges above. Upland birds is also a signature activity with spacious grounds and hard-flushing birds. Primland is the ultimate retreat for world-class golf, refined dining and outdoor activities in an environment of rare natural beauty. www.primland.com

Y ukon T e rritory Tincup Wilderness Lodge (604)484- 4418 or +41 43 455 0101 E-Mail: info@tincup-lodge.com Situated on the shores of Tincup Lake close to the Kluane National Park in Canada’s Yukon Territory, surrounded by mile up upon mile of unspoiled natural landscape, Tincup Wilderness Lodge enjoys a truly unique location. The surrounding Ruby Range provides views of breathtaking beauty from dawn to dusk. The Lodge can be reached only by floatplane. In order

to ensure our undisturbed privacy in a family environment, we limit bookings to a maximum of 8-10 guests per week. This level of occupancy also enables us to welcome groups, giving all members plenty of scope to pursue their various interests and activities. www.tincup-lodge.com

NOTICE The outfitters, guides, lodges and plantations listed here are advertisers in Gray’s. The copy is provided by the advertiser, and Gray’s makes no claim as to the value of the services provided by any advertiser. When hiring an outfitter or guide, shop with care, and check references before making a financial commitment.

COLORADO ROCKIES

TROPHY ELK-DEER-BEAR Archery, Rifle, Muzzleloader Hunt thousands of acres from secluded cabins on our private hi-country ranch, directly bordering the Grand Mesa National Forest. Summer vacation: explore ranch & wilderness by horse and 4 wheel. Fish 7 trout-stocked lakes. Breathtaking scenery.

GR BAR RANCH, Paonia, CO www.grbarranch.com 800-523-6832

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BOOKS

Boddington & Buffs Again

by Christopher Camuto

N

o one writes about Africa with the confiLuangwa and Kafue valleys of Zambia and in Botdence and clarity that Craig Boddington brings to swana. That led to four decades of intense pursuit the subject, not to mention with the quiet passion of all varieties of buffalo that Africa has to offer, in that has underwritten his tireless pursuit of African varied habitat, under all sorts of circumstances. game, dangerous and otherwise. Tempered by 40 This new edition retains all the deep background, years of physically and mentally challenging safahistory, and narrative color about buffalo hunting ris, during which he learned as much from failure as the first but will also bring any prospective bufas success, he has nothing to prove and much to falo hunter up to date on Africa’s always-changing share about his love of hunting Africa in our postconditions and regulations during the 15 years since Hemingway, post-Ruark times. You cannot hunt, or the original was published. Boddington has been even just appreciate Africa from busy taking advantage of new an armchair, if your knowledge opportunities in Mozambique, is not up to date.

Uganda (“the place for Nile Boddington’s Buffalo II!: Buffalo”), and South Africa and More Lessons Learned notes that Tanzania, Zambia, (Safari Press, hardbound, and Zimbabwe “remain im308 pages, $39.95) is a revised portant buffalo countries.” “For and augmented edition of his the western subspecies, Benin, Craig Boddington, Buffalo II! 2005 Buffalo! We learned in Burkina Faso, and Cameroon that book that “without quesare solid.” The Central African tion the buffalo is [Boddington’s] favorite African Republic is good but unstable; Namibia is problemanimal and . . . favorite African hunt,” the African atic. There is similar frank advice throughout about species that has had “the most—and most lastpursuing large southern Cape buffs, Nile, Central ing—appeal.” Buffalo II! takes the reader through African, West African, and the dwarf forest buffalo. the evolution of the author’s love of buffalo hunting All this updated information is blended into fresh out of his lion, elephant-, rhino-, and leopardhunting narratives that bring the tactics, demands, hunting days in the 1970s and ’80s. “Africa,” he and unpredictable turns of buffalo hunting to life in notes, “would not be Africa without her dangerous open country and swamps, and mopane and miombo game,” and most hunters are eventually drawn toforest. For Boddington, quality of experience is paraward one species whose character and habits lock mount, and he well knows all the variables of a sucin the ideal of hunting, creating a search image that cessful, satisfying safari. Most of all, he loves the sullen works every time, triggering the full joy of hunting, temperament of buffalo, the sweep of their horns, the the hunting that one dreams about. In the midbulk of their bosses, and every tracking and shoot1980s, Boddington discovered “the kind of buffalo ing challenge of the African bush. Boddington has hunting that made [him] a lifelong addict” in the the narrative gifts to bring all of that to life in vivid,

We all get our dreams from somewhere.

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memorable ways. His expertise on rifles and ammunition is firm and reliable, well beyond mere opinion.

His self-depreciating wisdom is a tonic that will leave you wishing you knew Africa as well as he does.

I

n Somewhere Down That Famous River: A Babine Memoir (Wild River Press, hardbound, 120 pages, $29.95), Pierre Glegg reminisces with warmth and humor about four decades of guiding steelhead and trout anglers on British Columbia’s fabled Babine River. The Babine provided Glegg with an education and a livelihood starting when he was a green 25-year-old who walked away from the banking industry to try his hand with steelhead and grizzlies, leaky roofs and balky camp plumbing.

“Storytelling is what happens to anyone living in wild places. Wild ecosystems grow on people and so do the stories that come from that lifestyle of living in the wild.” We get glimpses of the river and its steelhead when the river was truly wild—“the legend of Babine is to get close to the fish, cast short and watch with your naked eye all the details of the attack.”

But Glegg seems most to want to record the personalities of his anglers, often several generations from families who got attached to the rustic Norlakes steelhead and trout camps. Fish camp life, at least what it was in its early days, was a place where anglers could be their foolish fish-camp selves.

Most poignant perhaps are the World War II vets who came year after year to fish with Glegg and his guides, telling stories of “growing up” in B-17s and B-24s, until their ashes were part of the river.

Like every other wilderness river, the Babine is not what it was. Development of one kind or another comes to all of angling’s sacred places, and Glegg has seen his share of changes. He worked to protect the fishery, the ecology of the old-growth forest that wild trout and steelhead depend on, and its noble population of wild grizzlies. In the end, there is well-earned anger and a sense of loss: “It’s an absolute joke and mockery that we think we can desecrate the environment yet expect the wilderness values to remain intact. The predator prey relationships and game trails are completely changed with the rate of logging that the Babine watershed has suffered. Real wilderness is no more.” But mostly this is a fine memoir of good days and seasons on the Babine, one that elegantly

remembers passionate anglers who got to know the pools, runs, and steelhead lies on the Babine and enjoyed, in evenings bright before a fire, the hospitality of Pierre Glegg and his wife, Anita. Cheers to their lifetime on the river.

T

omorrow’s memories, of course, are made in the present. Rob Russell and Jay Nicholas’s Modern Steelhead Flies (Stackpole, hardbound, 312 pages, $39.95) will get you into the reality of contemporary steelheading. They offer the best recent compendium of “the complex and ever-evolving world of the steelhead fly” you will find. Their goal was “to document and demystify one of the greatest collections of modern steelhead flies ever assembled.” The documentation of fly tiers, tying techniques, material selection, patterns, and presentation strategies lives up to their joyful boast. They might not have completely demystified the relentlessly innovative world of steelhead flies, but they are rigorous in their discussion of the elements of fly design that matter.

Russell and Nicholas have produced “a ‘dream box’ of 400 flies—mostly tied by their original designers—along with stories, photos, recipes, and more than a few detailed specifications. Featured here are many of today’s most inspired and successful steelhead patterns.” Along with these invaluable patterns is a postdoctoral discussion of what makes steelhead flies work on stream. Despite the aesthetic appeal of flies that are as ornate as Victorian salmon patterns, “profile and functionality,” essentially size and weight, are the core standards in play. This is the fulcrum of their demystification. “While the universe of the steelhead flies may appear to be expanding, there are forces at work that may eventually narrow our focus down to the things that really matter.” So while they resist the “any fly will do if the presentation is good” school of thought, they are not into anything goes and offer rigorous ideas about design, presentation, hooks, material, and anything that might appeal to the “curiosity” or appetite of steelhead. The dream box of 400 patterns offered in this beautifully produced book has a world of thought and thousands of hours of angling behind it. n Holed up in central Pennsylvania, Chris doesn’t have a prayer to bag a buffalo or hook a steelhead anytime soon.

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POEM

Maine Deer Hunt

by Ken Craft

That Maine November wouldn’t wait for winter.

Each morning I sat in a deer stand—simple slats hammered between tree trunks—observing secret silences: me, rifle, journal, pencil, thermos of coffee, and white breaths rising to the dark loneliness of ravens wheeling overhead.

There was the moon’s company, at least, snagged and sagging pale against sharp black branches scraping sky.

A red squirrel visited, too, perching its pluck at a safe distance, chattering so his tail shook in sharp squirrel syllables.

I heard ghost deer stepping through sticks and leaves before the coffee lost its warmth. Then the toes, despite boots and double socks. I took off my gloves, opening to the blue lines of my coil notebook, scratching 12-point hopes until my fingers grew thick and red over cold words and sentences leaning first Thoreau, then Hemingway.

On the third night, a nor’easter blew in. Before dawn, outside the bedroom window, I heard wind and horizontal snow while the others slept in. I got up to feed the Franklin stove new wood and old Bangor Daily News: the smell and smoke of paper and kindling, the crackle of fire building in confidence,

the airy rush of flue humming with heat. The orange glow between stove cracks around the iron door, the way it coursed new life into room and man. Such simplicity made me happy.

I brewed coffee to the broom-sweepy sounds of snow swiping clapboards and sat on the brick foundation skirting the stove, the back of my flannel shirt absorbing its radiance.

Then I opened a black Penguin Classics paperback: Turgenev’s Sketches from a Hunter’s Album. It had a story, “Kasyan from the Beautiful Lands,” starting with the lines, “I was returning from a hunting trip in a shaky little cart and, under the oppressive effects of an overcast summer day’s stifling heat . . . , I was dozing as I rocked to and fro.”

Before long, words and fire lulled me like the hunter’s coach.

Maybe it was the soft cast of the stove’s hood lamp, the windows whitening under a new day’s antler-velvet winds, or the wood burning in the Franklin’s iron belly, but briefly, I felt like nothing could touch me, like I might be foolish enough to live forever while, outside, bedded in snow under heavy-limbed pine and hemlock, ghost deer dreamed of Russian fields, of forests and brooks, of plentiful berries and endlessly beautiful lands.

Ken Craft is the author of two collections of poetry: Lost Sherpa of Happiness (Kelsay Books) and The Indifferent World (FutureCycle Press).

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In Their Prime, an original acrylic, 14 1/2 x 18 1/2 inches, by Bob Kuhn (1920-2007).

Courtesy of The Coeur d’ Alene Art Auction, Hayden, Idaho.

Back Cover: Deer (Detail), an original watercolor, 8 3/4 x 7 3/4 inches, by Charles M. Russell (1864-1926).

Courtesy of The Coeur d’ Alene Art Auction, Hayden, Idaho.