Sporting Classics Magazine JanFeb21 by Eric Taylor

1981 2021 PAGES! ONLY$6.95! 176 SWEEPSTAKES MONTHLY GIVEAWAYS: GUNS, KNIVES & MORE! FEBRUARY 2021 THEDUCKTHEAUTUMNFABARMSIDE-BY-SIDEGREATCLASSICGUNSLEOPARD A Grenade with a Grudge CLASSICSCLASSIC THE BEST OF THE BEST introducing JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 ALLTERRACARBON CUTTINGGUARANTEEDEDGEACCURACY ROOSEVELTNEWBERRYGADDIS See Inside for Details!newriflesbooks detailsinside! All hail the king of Canvasbacksducks! HAUNTING MOOSE IN A SURREAL SETTING SHADOW REFLECTION REVEALS BIG BUCK RUARK HARRY SELBY AND BOB KUHN New!

2 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 The Hunt. The Experience. The Memories. Camelot Ridge Resort is an exclusive hunting preserve located in Northeast Indiana. Unlike any hunting experience you have ever had, Camelot Ridge offers some of the finest preserve hunting in the Midwest. Your hunt is not only about monster bucks, but every moment spent at Camelot Ridge Resort will be talked about for years to come. www.CamelotRidgeResort.com (260) 239-0930 | Camelotridgeresort@gmail.com | Avilla, Indiana

Being at Camelot Ridge Resort is truly a unique and unforgettable trip. At the center of our incredible preserve, sets our lodge, which is unlike anything you have ever seen. We offer four private bedrooms, three eating areas, three lounging areas, and so much more! We have over 290 acres, with 20+ miles of trails for your enjoyment and pleasure. The Lodge. You can be as involved as you would like, whether that is tracking and field dressing your own deer or letting us do the work. Each hunt includes: The Hunt. · Meals / LicensesLodging· Guided Specialist · Field Dressing / Capping · Elevated Wooden Boxes (Handicap Accessible)

4 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 CLASSICSSPORTING PUBLISHER DUNCAN GRANT EDITORIAL DIRECTOR SCOTT E. MAYER CHIEF FINANCIAL OFFICER WAYNE NANNEY ASSISTANT EDITOR—DIGITAL E mma m c C ra C k E n BOOK EDITOR & GIFT SUBSCRIPTIONS CHUC k WECHSLE r SENIOR EDITORS m i CH a EL a Ltiz E r L arry C HES n E y t om D avi S m ik E G a DD i S t om k EE r r ob E rt m att HEWS L L oy D n EW b E rry r o GE r P in C kn E y J o H n r o SS r on S P om E r t o DD t ann E r D W i GH t v an b r U nt to DD W i L kin S on ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER - ADVERTISING BRIAN RALEY (800) 849-1004 (803) 736-2424 NATIONAL ADVERTISING BERNARD & ASSOCIATES 767 m i LL S t ., r E no , nv 89502 (775) 323-6828 J E ff t H r US ton Jeff@bernardandassociates.com m EG an W a LSH Megan@bernardandassociates.com BYERS MEDIA P o b ox 148, L U z E rn E , mi 48636 (989) 928-6925 k E n b y E r S Ken@byersmediaonline.com t oby S H a W Toby@byersmediaonline.com OMSWA r i C k r o S n E r o ffi CE (253) 514-6457 C ELL (206) 359-2666 E mai L rgr@omswa.com CREATIVE DIRECTOR E ri C t ay L or ADVERTISING ART DIRECTOR m i CH a EL r . C o LE man EDITOR-AT-LARGE J am ES C a S a D a EDITORIAL ADVISORS m ik E G a DD i S D o UG P aint E r ADVERTISING COORDINATOR D E bbi E S. m oak CUSTOMER RELATIONS b i LL J a C k S on r on S t EPP WEBSTORE/SHIPPING L a U ra W i LHEL m ACCOUNTING P a UL a C L aa S CUSTOMER SERVICE/SUBSCRIPTIONS S tark S E rvi CES (877) 724-6423 ALL OTHER PRODUCTS (800) 849-1004 PO Box 23707, Columbia, SC 29224 (800) 849-1004 (803) 736-2424 WWW.SPORTINGCLASSICS.COMExclusive impor ter of Negrini Cases 100% Made in Italy

SPORTING CLASSICS • 5JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 Idaho's HuntingUplandParadise Our 2200-acre property provides luxury accommodations with the feel of the old west & all the finest ranch amenities www.lazytriplecreek.com Book917.821.7210a3night, 2 day Upland Bird Hunt and European Style Driven Shoot by May 1st and Receive a Complimentary 1/2 Day on the Sporting Clays Course with a NSCA Certified Instructor *Subject to Availability Call now or visit our website to reserve your dates!

OKAVANGO DELTA DAWN On the trail of the buffalo of Eden. chris dorsey SPEED WITH SPOTS On a perch, a leopard is just a cat. In long grass, think a grenade with a grudge. wayne van zwoll ARGENTINA BIG GAME The big, the bad, the beautiful and the weird. nick muckerman DECOY CARVING Preserving tradition, one block at a time. tom keer

SPORTING CLASSICS • 7JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 SPORTINGVOLUME 40 • ISSUE 1 • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 FEATURES THE LONGCANVASBACK:LIVETHEKING! by dave books74 CLASSIC SPORTING LITERATURE A Shot at a Shadow. paul pastnor CLASSIC CLASSICS L.C. Smith: The Yankee Sidelock. dave petzal THE GREAT DUCK GUNS Making the grade: A.H. Fox, L.C. Smith, Parker, Browning & Winchester. john m. taylor SERMON FROM THE MOUNT Was it any wonder the mounts were talking — and making perfect sense? robert ellis HAUNTED HILLS, MOOSE & NOISY AIRPLANES Now, what do they say about old pilots and bold pilots? tony kinton THE ARM THAT SEES A Story of the Gourmantché. thomas mcintyre

64 68 80 86 90 96 102 110 118 127

8 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 SPORTINGCOLUMNSCLASSICSDEPARTMENTS Three Kings Joshua Spies COVER IMAGE • THIS ’N THAT 11 • AUCTIONS & EXHIBITIONS 146 • SHOW / NO SHOW 151 • TOP SHELF 174 • QUOTES 176 19 25 29 37 45 51 55 61 137 143 171 VOLUME 40 • ISSUE 1 • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 40 SHOTGUNS Fabarm Autumn: An imminently satisfying (and affordable) double. by robert matthews AUCTIONSHERITAGEARTWORK: FIRST LIGHT Islands in the stream. mike gaddis HORIZONS Ten Mile Hill: Coming and going. roger pinckney ART & ETC Bob Kuhn: Animal aficionado and artist extraordinaire. joe coogan DESTINATIONS Eastern Shore Triple Play. john ross RIFLES AllTerra Carbon Rifle in 6.5 PRC. ron spomer GUNDOGS The Irish setter: A victim of its own beauty. tom davis PROFILES George Bird Grinnell: America’s voice for wildlife. doug painter FISHING Subimago Homesick Blues. jack gagnon RAMBLINGS A Winter Trout: The last fish they ever caught there together. michael altizer FLY FISHING Wind: Fighting the invisible enemy. todd tanner BOOKS Nick Lyons: Giant of modern sporting letters. jim casada

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10 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 SPORTING CLASSICS 40TH ANNIVERSARY GIVEAWAY WIN GUNS, KNIVES AND MORE IN THE

our valuable prizes, you still win each time you receive your free editions of Sporting Classics Daily, where every weekday you’ll enjoy the best stories about hunting and fishing, sporting art, artists and authors, adventures, firearms, handmade knives and much more. You’ll also be helping us preserve The Heritage, The Romance, The Art of Hunting & Fishing. And yes! Subscribing to Sporting Classics Daily is free! help celebrate years of publishing the finest and Sporting Classics is giving away 12 great prizes—one per month during 2021 to 12 lucky Sporting Classics Daily subscribers. No purchase is necessary, but you do have to subscribe to win. Complete rules and a description of each month’s prize can be found on the website. WIN!TO

It’s easy! It’s quick! It’s FREE! Go to: SPORTINGCLASSICSDAILY. COM and click Subscribe. howenter:to

t is hard to believe, but 2020 represented the end of our third decade of publishing Sporting Classics. It was a decade of challenge that became even more challenging as it sputtered into history. But Sporting Classics has done better than survive, done better than most small publishers. And as the giant hands of the universe’s timepiece TikTok us into 2021, it is with great pride that we celebrate our 40th anniversary and look forward to the next 40.

Lordy, Lordy, Looks Who’s 40! T his year marks the 40th anniversary of the best hunting and fishing magazine in the world— Sporting Classics—and we have a lot planned for you. This year we’ll have monthly giveaways of one-ofa-kind guns, knives, calls and more. To enter to win, simply subscribe to Sporting Classics Daily e-newsletter at sportingclassicsdaily.com

As we’re arguably a “classic” now, too, we’ll be reaching back into our very first issues to rerun some of our past articles as “Classic Classics.” Look for articles from our past beginning this issue with “L.C. Smith—The Yankee Sidelock,” by Dave Petzal originally published in the Sept/Oct 1981 edition of Sporting Classics. Petzal was then Associate Shooting Editor for Field & Stream magazine and has since become a modern icon in shooting literature. We think you’ll recognize many of the early writers for Sporting Classics who likewise have become notable and influential in the shooting sports. ■

It’s free, and as long as you stay subscribed, you will be automatically entered into each monthly drawing. Full rules are available at sportingclassicsdaily.com.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 11JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 THIS ’N THAT

■ — Duncan Grant, Publisher

Yes, over our 40 years we’ve had to teach ourselves a lot. We’ve had to change with the times. But one thing has not changed at all—our mission to preserve The Heritage, The Romance, The Art of Hunting & Fishing. While we do our best to keep alive the excellent work of the outdoor authors, artists and craftsmen of the past, we’ll continue discovering new ones who will entertain, intrigue and outfit us far into the future. No matter what it brings. Science tells us that we’ve hunted and fished for two million years. Google it. It is how we survived. It must be ingrained in our DNA. Politics can’t change that. Fleeting fashions can’t change that. Buzzwords certainly won’t change that. And no one understands that better, or realizes the importance of why we pay homage to this lifestyle, and why we choose to pass our hunting and fishing legacies on from generation to generation, decade into decade, than you. We share a bond. Thank you for being patrons and customers.

Over the past 10 years, the magazine has grown with more pages than most competing outdoor magazines, and with a larger, more impressive format. Our company has grown as well. Today, we reach far beyond our humble print magazine beginnings with a digital version of Sporting Classics that includes audio and video, a content-rich free daily digital newsletter: Sporting Classics Daily, “Sporting Classics TV with Chris Dorsey” which appears on Outdoor Channel and now streams on Everest.com, and informative affinitytype web sites: Sporting Classics Art and Sporting Classics Adventures. In addition, we have an online store where you can buy—among other things—the five impressive books we published this past year. We also produce print and digital catalogs and use our comprehensive e-blast program to promote all of the above. We have tens of thousands of Instagram and Facebook followers following what we say and do. It is a formidable vehicle powered by strong compelling content. Why do we believe so strongly in our media platforms? Because we used them to nearly double what our own online store did just last year! So, no matter which medium you prefer, no matter which medium advertisers want to employ in order to reach you, today we provide the content, the pages, the paths, the click-throughs, the analytics to get you what you want.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The original materials will include the production and development of feature films, documentaries, docu-series, reality shows, animated films and short films. Genres will include historical, war, outdoors, adventure, action, thriller and more.

Sporting Classics Now Streaming on Everest Everest.com, the world’s first outdoor lifestyle-focused multimerchant marketplace, becomes one of only two online marketplaces to offer streaming entertainment to its Caliber Member customers. CaliberVideo is the streaming component of Everest with more than 3,000 titles in addition to “Sporting Classics with Chris Dorsey,” including movies, documentaries, reality shows and television series. CaliberVideo content will include streaming content focused on the outdoors, team sports, travel, cooking and adventure. In addition, CaliberVideo is in the process of deal making related to Everest Originals.

The first Everest Originals production will premiere in January 2021. CaliberVideo is included free in every Everest Caliber level membership. Caliber Members can watch thousands of hours on CaliberVideo at no additional cost via their web browser and a cutting-edge mobile app. Caliber members will also be able to purchase and download new premieres and exclusive titles not included with the membership. ■

SPORTING CLASSICS • 13JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 THIS ’N THAT

14 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 Co. .470 (Nitro Express) double barrel 1879 THIS ’N THAT New Mike Gaddis Book Features 59 Stories and Essays

Life can be likened to ascending a mountain. The higher you climb, the more years you have beneath you, the farther you can see, the more unobstructed the view, the more you understand. From A Higher Hill finds author Mike Gaddis atop the enlightening vantage of almost eight decades from which he looks back over the vast and enthralling sporting landscape of a life well lived. Upon this lofty precipice, one of the most celebrated and insightful sporting authors of our time again reaches beyond himself, this time retrieving 59 stories and essays dealing with hunting and fishing, from the towering mountains of the American West to the vast plains of southern Africa. This remarkable 530-page book showcases two pinnacle novellas. Light to the Darkness, Death with the Sun dawns chillingly as a life-and-death saga set deep within the spell-binding magic and mystique of the African Bushman culture, while Black Widow rises with bloodcurdling reality to an equally riveting climax as an accompanying tale of Africa and an American hunter who obsessively loves her, but from whom she will extract the ultimate price. All in all, this book stands as a colossal landmark, overlooking and broadening the expanse of sporting literature. Published by Sporting Classics, From a Higher Hill is the sixth book by Gaddis, who has served as the magazine’s First Light columnist for more than 20 years. Heralding a lifetime of outdoor experiences, his other books include the highly celebrated novel Jenny Willow, an acclaimed memoir Zip Zap, the novella Duel on Tabernacle Mountain, and two distinguished collections, Legend’s Legacy and Turning for Home From a Higher Hill is available in two editions: a hardcover Collector’s book for $40, and a leather-bound Deluxe book, limited to 400 individually numbered copies, which sell for $75. Both books have been signed by the author. ■

Eukanuba is introducing Premium Performance, an all-new line of performance products tailored to duration and intensity of activity.

New Food to Fuel Sporting and Working Dogs

The Premium Performance line was created on a chassis principal backed by more than a half-century of scientific research. The foundation of the chassis is the utilization of common ingredient and nutrient sources of high quality. Animal protein, beet pulp, vitamin E, selenium, chicken fat, fish oil, fiber, DHA, glucosamine and chondroitin, among others, are ingredients in each. “There is a misconception that performance nutrition is all about protein and fat. It’s much more than that,” explains David Everson, Chief Marketing Officer of Eukanuba and RoyalSportingCanin.and working dogs have varying energy needs. Some work in short bursts while others run all day. Eukanuba’s new Premium Performance line offers four activity-based diets formulated with a tailored blend of carbohydrates, protein and fat to fuel energy that matches a dog’s workload whether it’s a sprint, exercise, sport or Thework.new line also has antioxidant cocktails to support post-exercise recovery, an enhanced blend of fibers and prebiotics to promote healthy digestion and key nutrients to help protect against the effects of regular and intense activity. ■

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Of the 11 main categories ranging from newspaper stories to outdoor books and photographs, the category of “Electronic Publishing” is one of the most competitive as it tends to draw the majority of entries. However, one piece in particular stood out to the judges—Casada’s article “Sweet Soul of the Smokies,” originally published by Sporting Classics Daily—won first place in the Electronic Publishing category.

The “Prayers For Preslie” .22 Short, Long, Long Rifle lever-action rifle features an engraved and hand-painted genuine American walnut buttstock with a bright orange leukemia awareness ribbon in a butterfly motif.

Esteemed Sporting Classics

Fifty members submitted 263 entries that were judged by more than 40 experts.

to go through when they get a diagnosis as serious as leukemia. We get so personally invested into each of our Guns For Great Causes benefits as soon as we see the first photo of the kid’s smile, and we hope this goes a long way to helping the Mantsch family in these most challenging of times.”

■

SPORTING CLASSICS • 17JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 THIS ’N THAT

Presliethinksays,owner,keeptakingbecauseimmunocompromisedofherchemo.We’reeveryprecautiontohersafe,butit’shard.”HenryPresidentandAnthonyImperato,“Itisheart-wrenchingtoofwhatchildrenlikeandtheirfamilieshave

SPORTING CLASSICS EDITOR-AT-LARGE, JIM CASADA, WINS “EXCELLENCE IN CRAFT” AWARD FOR SPORTING CLASSICS DAILY ARTICLE

Under Henry Repeating Arms’ charitable “Guns For Great Causes” banner, company President and owner Anthony Imperato donated a series of 65 custom “Prayers For Preslie” edition rifles to raise funds for the family of a 3-year-old Michigan girl battling leukemia. The first and last in the series were auctioned on gunbroker.com and the remaining guns quickly sold out on Henry Repeating Arms’ website. In April 2020, Preslie Mantsch was diagnosed with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). The news was delivered over the phone to her father, Thomas Mantsch, who was waiting in the Milwaukee Children’s Hospital parking lot, unable to be in the same room as his daughter and Preslie’s mother due to COVID-19 restrictions. Thomas is a frontline healthcare worker and first responder in his town’s ambulance and fire department. Preslie is currently undergoing treatment in Milwaukee, four and a half hours away from home, four to five days a week, and she still has two years of treatment left. Thomas says of his daughter, “Preslie is a magical, kind-hearted, wonderful, smart and caring little girl. She has a fighting spirit, and I am praying that she beats this.” He continues, “It is nerve-wracking to be working so close to the Coronavirus frontlines with a daughter who is

Editor-At-Large and author, Jim Casada, recently won the Excellence in Craft award for his Sporting Classics Daily piece, “Sweet Soul of the Smokies.” The Southeastern Outdoor Press Association (SEOPA) announced the winners of its annual Excellence in Craft Awards competition, which honors “outstanding communicators who work in a wide variety of media platforms.” The EIC awards, sponsored by Realtree, the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Alabama Black Belt Adventures Association, celebrate the best among SEOPA members’ works of the past year.

Henry Donates 65 Custom Rifles to Assist a 3-Year-Old Michigan Girl’s Leukemia Battle

All of the proceeds collected from the “Prayers For Preslie” rifles were presented to the Mantsch family of Iron River, Michigan.

In this heartfelt story, Casada shares the remembrances of his dear “Aunt Mag,” the impoverished black woman and family friend from his youth, whose divine cooking and fishing skills stay with him to this day. With great admiration for this special character, Casada writes, “Aunt Mag was a sterling example of an admirable work ethic, giving spirit and deeprooted integrity. Her life and lifestyle, while never ones of treasures and pearls, remain exemplars of all that is good and gracious, enduring and endearing, in the high country ways I knew as a lad.” This award-winning read is rooted in love, respect and appreciation in a time when that is exactly what we need most. You can read the full story at sportingclassicsdaily.com. ■

withofPreslieThree-year-oldMantschIronRiver,MI,wasdiagnosedB-cellacutelymphoblasticleukemiainApril2020.

For over two decades, our fleet of aircraft, all Owned and Operated by NICHOLAS AIR, has delivered you back to these special places time and time again. Be it back home, or to the far reaches of the map, we have been there for your endless pursuit of that perfect day afield. With a variety of aircraft types, your possibilities of where to go, and who to bring along for the journey, are limitless, while around the clock, our team works diligently to make sure that your transition from home, to office, to meetings, and to the field, is flawless.

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18 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 nicholasair.com866.935.7771@

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SPORTING CLASSICS • 19JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 FIRST LIGHT

“Will we catch one, Gran’pa?” “Rabbits ain’t much diff’rent from people, Boy. If you’ve set your trap well, they’ll catch themselves.” “There’s snow, Gran’pa! Maybe we’ll catch two, even three!”

ays lapse January meager now, and this one is dying. In the twilight of its snowwake,isborn.

Death to one, life to another. Waylaid at my threshold by the magic, rescued from the zephyr of melancholy evening-tide brings...still, after all the miles...I am brightened by its nativity. As the first few flakes wander hopefully down through the freshening north breeze, to alight virgin white and in kaleidoscopic wonder upon the green wool loft of my jacket.

A little smile about yesteryear, as still it tumblesMidnight,down....deposited to bed but sleepless, the night even more mystical beneath the satin shimmer of a building moon, I am lost beyond frosted windowpanes to its faithful but restless swirl.

I am held the longer, while arises the ageless little flutter of excitement deep at my chest, as in quickening presence they are followed by the thickening flutter of others. That swell to flurries, that whisper, whirl and glisten against the glimmer of the porch light. In promise at least, to abide the night. All the times, all the places, all the years...they have been ever welcome. Though the logs in my arms grow heavier, until I must step inside, delivering them at last to the woodbox. Glancing through the side window to assure myself again, that indeed, snow is falling.

A comforting and pensive while by the fire, a needful, searching hand reaching for solace in setter feathers, the first line of The Old Man and the Boy again to perfect a mood. What once was. As once I knew most the Boy, now I know the more, the Old Man. A lingering doze in the cradling warmth of the ancient, puppy bitten leather chair. A last heartening look outside before retiring.

Seven years old again, with my nose under the quilts of that cold but happy back room in Gran’pa and Granny’s old clapboard farmhouse, praying it won’t leave. ’Cause I got five rabbit gums set about the meadows, that me and Gran’pa made back in the summer from hollow black gum stumps. He had shown me how to get the trigger sticks perfec’ly right so they’d go off jus’ so, and mostly like Ruark said “he wasn’t painful about it.” And what with shelter and a slice of apple inside, it’uz just the finest kind o’ night to be boxin’ cottontails.

And I hear again the faint, windriven rush of the flakes against an old blue, bubbled-glass windowpane, just as then, and in the darkness the tireless march of the pendulum clock on the livin’ room mantle, measuring off the forever hours to first light. When I could throw back the covers, grab my pants and boots midst a barefooted dash across an icy linoleum floor to a warming kitchen stove. With Granny’s old-time, scratchbiscuit ‘n’ ‘lasses-soppin’ breakfast

waitin’, so soon after Gran’pa and me could go see. But time won’t tarry there. Drawn away again into the swirl of the snow, remembrance spins on, through the 10 years more ’fore I was 17. The 10 years that held the people and places that made up home then. The neighborly little farms all around I prospected over, haunting the woods and creeks, fishin’, huntin’ and trappin’. The folks who took me patiently under wing, unlocking the by-ways, showing me the deeper beauty and rightfulness of it all, and setting my sails to uncover a landscape more.

The dogs, the birds, the squirrels, the robin redbreasts, the green snakes in scuppernong vines, the critters all...that were part of it...the blue balls on cedar trees and muscadines cold and sweet under the leaf mold of late October, the awesome fortitude of ages-ago forest pines and the mountain men you could imagine in the wizened knots of centuryold barnwood. The discoveries and adventures that came every new morning, every star-lit night, firing my growing outdoor lust to an unquenchable blaze and launching the sporting life I have lived, loved and hungered for more than all else.

Islands in the Stream

BY MIKE GADDIS Winter Marsh by Chet Reneson

Wide Open Spaces Texas Hill Country.in the PREMIERGOURMETAWARD-WINNINGWINGSHOOTINGDININGCONFERENCE&EVENTFACILITIES TWO SCENIC SPORTING CLAYS COURSES LUXURY LODGING & AMENITIES YEAR-ROUND FLY-FISHING TROPHY AXIS DEER HUNTING Celebrating 30 years Joshua Creek Ranch 132 Cravey Road , Boerne, TX 78006 | (830) 537-5090 | joshuacreek.com Extraordinary outdoor experiences year-round at Joshua Creek Ranch. Renowned for its wingshooting since 1990, Joshua Creek Ranch is located 45 minutes northwest of San Antonio along the pristine banks of the Guadalupe River and easily accessible yearround from anywhere. With plenty of sunshine and pleasant temperatures during wingshooting season, hunters enjoy spending most of their time outdoors when visiting this Texas Hill Country paradise. JCR offers custom itineraries and exceptional outdoor sporting experiences complemented by luxury resort amenities and warm Texas hospitality. Enjoy... 250 Days of Sunshine and • Upland Bird Hunting for Quail, Pheasant and Chukar • European-Style Driven Pheasant Shoots • Decoyed Mallard Duck Hunting • Trophy Axis Deer Hunting • Fly-Fishing for Rainbow Trout, Bluegill and Bass • Whitetail Deer & Turkey Hunting • Sporting Clays (20 Stations) • Simulated Driven Pheasant & Grouse Clays Shooting • Handgun & Long Range Rifle Shooting

Left behind with cooling passion, or blazing on in smaller eras within a collective larger. For the sum of his days. All as distinctive and diverse as the man who has elected them. All, once he has passed their borders, to which he can never in same return again. Defining, the ones he has chosen. Poignant, their genesis and passing. Sadness when they have fled, joyful their time and blessings. For in echoes of regret, none can remain or ever be held again with an affection as enchanting as at their“Asblossoming.neither,”I was reminded by a knowing friend recently, “can they ever be forgotten or stricken from what a man hasMileswon.”and moments, minutes and years. Spent from the shelves of a limited supply. Parceled out in seasons against the things that have captivated us the most.Until there comes the day we find the years have thinned, and time is depleting in suddening clarity the shelves of the marketplace. There is no longer the much we can afford, or as boldly muster with limitations of age and flesh, as in the final few eras we are brought to choose the more of circumstance, and less of desire. It seems, before hardly we could know, we have made the dash across the years rather than a cold linoleum floor. Through eras great and small. Until, finally, we will arrive at our last. To push past the hurt of the loss, I believe, to find not a season solely of sadness, but another of gladness.Atimeof gifting back, in any way we can, all that we have earned. Then our journey will be replete. Then the river can flow on home to the sea.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 21JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

Before all too soon, life decreed I must become a man grown and leave it all behind, be about college, forging a living and making the way outdoors on my own. Knowing even then, even before I met Thomas Wolfe, it could never be there in the same way again. While, behind the blue windowpanes, the silvery flurries swirled restlessly on. As across the remaining hours of the night, one by one, spilled back the many eras that have followed, that have bracketed the years in turn, given to my lifelong quest for the finest of the sporting life, the trappings and traditions that have rendered it incomparable. As across the ephemeral epochs of time, with passion banked brightest, each of us so afflicted has sought to invest our years as ardently and broadly as we could before time would close the marketplace: in the lifespan of a first, old hand-medown hunting truck, in a first duck boat and a maiden waterfowling affair, in the 54 years-and-counting of a gunning partnership with a first Parker shotgun, in 5-weights for a time on nursery-waters snook and tarpon, in a search for Norman Maclean’s Montana and the rivers that run through it, in 12-weights and billfish over Pacific blue waters, in the devoted and thrilling, too-short years of a one, most beloved dog, in the soul-felt company, in a wondrous season, of a departed, dearest friend. In a hundred things more, in a thousand different places. A few years, a decade, scores or half-centuries spent toward the panting yearning for wildness, beasts, fish and fowl, and their romance amid far, beautiful destinations. When no horizon was too distant, nor any mountain too tall. Africa, Patagonia, Panama, Chile and Brazil, Scotland and Spain, English estates and Irish moors, fabled places more. Eons, large and small, wagered in collecting sagas for Nash Buckingham Derrydales, old bass lures, shorebird decoys, one-inthe-world smoothbores, or crumbling sketches of times-when. Seasons exhausted against the world’s finest of all kindred things, of every type and description, that enshrine the craft and value of yesteryear. Or pledged in awe to the finest art of masters, who layer so exquisitely timeless memories upon canvas, and shape clay into dreams that melt to bronze.

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Islands in the stream...eras in the flow of a man’s lifetime. One singular life-long enthrallment, or for most perhaps, many of divided emotions. The places he has chosen to pull ashore and apportion a driven measure of his years. Eras burning, then cooling. Of tempered ardor before the next, or from the death of abandonment. Lifetime long, or birthday brief. Perhaps the average of a decade.

22 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

SPORTING CLASSICS • 23JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

Ten Mile Hill: Coming and going

“There’s“Yessir.”a VW dealer in Lacrosse. Jump in, I’ll take you there.” Free ride in a cop car? First time I could say no? I Fortydidn’t.minutes later, back at the scene of the catastrophe, the trooper patiently watched as I pried off the hub of the lately departed pulley, bolted up the new one, fitted the fan belt. I reached in the front window, hit the ignition. Bang! The new pulley shattered. What the hell? “Slick, you got a broke crankshaft like I said. Can I call a tow truck now?” Jouncing down the Lacrosse side of Ten Mile Hill, “Six Fat Dutchmen” on the tow truck eight-track, I asked the driver why the trooper called me Slick? “Yah, he calls everybody Slick.” “Well, how come he knows so much about“HisVolkswagens?”daddydiedflying a VW ultralight. It was a broke crankshaft, yah.” That would have sent many a man to his knees, but I could not fall to my knees there in that crowded tow truck cab rocking down Ten Mile Hill, full up with flares and reflectors and rope and chains and last winter’s jackets, marinating in motor oil. No cell phones in those days, I fed change to payphone instead, called a buddy in St Paul. “You got a log chain?” He “Well,did.come and get me, then.” And brothers and sisters, that’s how I got to Minnesota. It got better. It got better right quick. He found me a garage in an alley a few blocks down from the governor’s mansion, a few more from the hotel bar where F. Scott Fitzgerald fell off many a stool. We pushed the Microbus inside. “Look here, Rog,” he said, “I got a party tonight. Shower up and come on with me. We’ll fool with this thing in the morning.” Nordic damsel, this green-eyed, red-headed thing, thang, we say where I come from. “Hey Honey, are you Norwegian?”

“I lost my crankshaft pulley.” “You got a broke crankshaft,” he said. “I’ll call you a tow truck.” “Officer, I got a long way to go and not much money to get there. I think I can fix it myself.”“Yougot tools?”

HORIZONS

The crank pully drives the generator which drives the fan which cools the engine. Twenty seconds before things start to melt. An air-cooled VW has a magnesium block. Magnesium, once ignited, cannot be readily extinguished. Every last thing I owned was aboard— boots, britches and a sweet and slick old Winchester pump gun. I put the peddle to the metal and counted to fifteen. The wheel wells were cut out, big Chevy rims and tires. The back seat pulled out to make a double bed, right handy sometimes, and the front seats were upholstered with worn-out Levi’s, the pockets right where you needed them, for roadmaps and such. There was a military surplus helicopter clock mounted in the dash. The numbers glowed in the dark, but it never kept the right time. But none of that mattered when you’re stuck on the roadside on a chilly afternoon, Alaska bound, not even halfway there on Ten Mile Hill, winter on the breeze. Wisconsin highway cop pulled over to render assistance. “What’s wrong, Slick?”

“Well, which half is Norwegian?” She looked me square in the eye, wiggled and winked. “The best half,” sheInsaid.her arms, Alaska seemed so far, far away. First there was a house on a dead-end street at the foot of the old High Bridge across the Mississippi, then a farmhouse made of defunct Soo Line boxcars in the Anoka County sand barrens. Anoka County got its name from the county seat, which is Lakota for “on both sides of,” as the town straddles the Mississippi. The Lakota were perplexed. Why would the Pale Faces build a town on both sides of a river, when you could pick one side or the other and it would not necessitate a canoe to go courting or fetch a jug of Old Tanglefoot Fire-Water back to the Rentteepee?was$100 a month, gas .36 cents a gallon, a lap-over-your-plate T-bone was $10 at the local roadhouse and long neck returnable local beer was $2.50 a case, three cases for $7 if you picked them up at the brewery loading docks. And if a man took to hankering, the world-class Minneapolis redlight district was only a half hour away, lost in the recent riots, alas.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 25JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

BY ROGER PINCKNEY

“I’m half Norwegian and half German.”

he engine blew halfway up Ten Mile Hill, that long grade a little east of Lacrosse, Wisconsin, where the ancient timbered hills rose one final time before plunging into the Upper Mississippi, beautiful and braided like the hair of a Nordic damsel when she comes up out of the water. But that’s just poetry when you’re running and down on your luck halfway up Ten Mile Hill and the crankshaft pulley on your 1965 souped-up Microbus blows up like a hand grenade.

I forgot all about Fairbanks, good thing. Then another move to my own place, 200 miles to the north northwest.

26 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

I knew damn better than to chance another Microbus. This time it was good old Detroit iron, a vintage tricked-out Suburban, camo green, meaty tires, brush guard, overload springs. Once again, everything I owned was aboard. I retraced my original route, in reverse this time. Angling down U.S. 10 to St. Paul, U.S. 61 to Lacrosse, then across the Mississippi. Halfway up Ten Mile Hill, I took a quick glance in the rearview, the last time I saw Minnesota. It all seems a dream to me now, the bucks and the blizzards and the frostbite, the crack of the deer woods rifles, the heave and groan of the lakes making ice. But every Father’s Day, I am reminded it was more than just a final flash in the rear-view.Andevery day when I take my morning coffee and peruse the magnificent Minnesota whitetail racks nailed upon my office walls, I am reminded it was very real. Very real, indeed. ■

Ah, but those barrens, soil so light there were sandstorms in the rain, rows upon rows of prehistoric sand dunes, overgrown with great snarls of pin oak and prickly ash with cattail sloughs in between. Big bucks picked their way along the ridges and some of the sloughs held water which held mallards, teal and giant Canada geese, Brantis canadensis maxima, once thought extinct but back to the point of aggravation. I tried to whittle them down as best I could.

Eighty acres, a Norman Rockwell perfect barn, a Sears and Roebuck chicken coop, a pioneer cabin where you could throw a cat between the cracks in the logs, where a man did not philosophize long in the outhouse when the aurora crackled and popped at 40 below. Fishing was fine, summer or winter, walleye, panfish, toothy pike and in July, the water was still so cold, even the bucket-mouth bass tasted good. Hunting was better, cottontails, grouse, geese, ducks, bear and bucks so fat they jiggled when they walked, jiggled like a pretty fat-assed girl. I learned to make maple syrup, to drive a team of sled dogs, to break horses to harness or saddle, I mastered the subtle art of dynamiting stumps and stones. I delivered my last son, at home by the light of a Coleman lantern, as the beaver had gnawed yet another aspen onto the powerline, third time that month. All because of a broken crankshaft on a ’65 Microbus? No time to think about that then, barely time to think about it now. But alas, Minnesota was a young man’s game. Twenty-five years, two wives, four kids later, me writing for a living, there was change on that howling last winter’s wind when the snow lay 11 feet deep on the flat. I sold my snowshoes, sold my canoe, gave away my parka and my farm, burned my long johns, headed back to where I’d come from.

HORIZONS BY ROGER PINCKNEY

ART & ETC BY TODD

Turning the Tables

Bob Kuhn was fascinated with Africa’s big game, especially the Cape buffalo. His paintings of “black death” radiate his admiration and respect for the big bovines. He once wrote, “Buffalo have a hard time not looking menacing. They usually run from the intruder, but not always, and that’s what you have to bear in mind during any confrontation. For anyone on foot, the possibility of getting hurt is Robertreal.” Frederick Kuhn was born in 1920 and grew up in Buffalo, New York. As a youngster, he began to observe and draw animals at the nearby Buffalo Zoo. He was an artist in love with animals and his fascination with them inspired his habit of close observation and drawing for the rest of his life. In 1937, Kuhn attended the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, where he studied design, anatomy and life-drawing. He served in the Merchant Marines WILKINSON Kuhn: Animal Aficionado & Artist Extraordinaire

Bob

BY JOE COOGAN Interrupted Dinner

We hung that Remington calendar on a wall near the dining room where it could be seen and admired and, with each month, my imagination was stoked by a new Bob Kuhn illustration showcasing one of the world’s “great” game animals. Kuhn’s distinctive painting style detailed not only the animal’s individual features and traits, but also portrayed the drama of hunting scenes where the animal was often the aggressor, if not an artful dodger.

For the month featuring Kuhn’s African lion, called “Interrupted Dinner,” a pride of lions on a zebra kill watch billowing dust across a vast plain as a large-maned male lion stands and looks. The dust trail is from that of an approach ing vehicle. You can just imagine this big male lion is about to head for cover without waiting to find out what the intentions of the vehicle’s occupants might be. Other months featured a pair of Alaskan bull moose loping “Across the Tundra;” a leopard on a bait is “Out on a Limb;” a “Chancy Encounter” features a grizzly bear confronting a hunter; an African elephant stands over a downed bull and looks as if he’s “About to Charge;” a Marco Polo “Sheep of Shangri La;” a pair of bull sable antelope spar in “Courting Challenge;” and a Cape buffalo is “Turning the Tables” as a tracker dodges a buff’s hooked horns. “Turning the Tables” is still my favorite, clearly demonstrating the drama and danger of hunting Cape buffalo. The painting depicts a hunter and his gunbearer loading and aiming their rifles to stop the buff attack with bullets. The painting conveys an intensity that clearly warns “watch out!” and illustrates so well how quickly things can go wrong. Studying the scene gave me a real case of the chills. I would come to personally experience Kuhn’s depiction of a dangerous situation more than a few times during the course of my 30 years as a professional hunter in Botswana and Tanzania. “Turning the Tables” captures the essence of a dangerous game encounter, where often it’s only a knife’s edge worth of difference that separates thrill from danger. Kuhn leaves the outcome of the scenario to your imagination. Today a framed print of “Turning the Tables” hangs in my office—still impressing me with the magic of Bob Kuhn’s brush strokes.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 29JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

t was Christmas 1969 when I first saw the 1970 Remington Arms calendar featuring “Great Game of the World.” My father and I shared a love of the outdoors and we spent many days hunting and fishing together. At the time, my family lived in Kenya, East Africa, where my father and I took advantage of the opportunity to hunt African big game on our own.

JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

from left: Harry Selby, Frank Lyon, Joe Coogan and native trackers with Frank’s Botswana elephant taken in 1995. The tusks weighed 80 pounds each.

In 1975, Bob Kuhn traveled to Botswana with Harry Tennyson and a group from San Antonio-based Game Conservation International (Game Coin). Bob’s main objective was to shoot big game with film and camera to provide reality references for his artwork.

At the time, Hunter’s Africa roster of professional hunters included several respected Kenya hunters including John Lawrence, Fred Bartlett, John Dugmore and John Northcott, as well as Botswana’s Bert Milne and Peter’s father, Pat Hepburn.

ART & ETC BY JOE COOGANOriginal

Peter and Bob camped in the forest on the banks of the Linyanti River, a prime big game hunting area in Northern Botswana. The forest was thick back then, not yet destroyed by the overpopulation of elephants that has occurred during the past 20 years. Hunting tracks twisted and turned through the forest, often blocked by broken trees and strewn with brush

Peter Hepburn, a fellow professional hunter with Kasane-based outfitter, Hunter’s Africa and a friend of mine, guided Bob in his efforts to capture on film Botswana’s big game in action.

30 • SPORTING CLASSICS during World War II and, while on board ship, began illustrating for sporting publications. By the time he was 25, he had sold several covers to Outdoor Life and Sports Afield magazines. He was also a regular contributor to Field & Stream magazine through the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Over the next 30 years, Kuhn became one of the most successful wildlife illustrators in America, his work appearing in dozens of popular publications. Kuhn did extensive research in creating his works of art. He would spend days at the American Museum of Natural History in New York studying the animal mounts. Despite the success of his early years, Kuhn always claimed he was not a very good illustrator. In fact, he believed his creativity was constrained by the demands of business “to get the facts straight.” Worse, deadlines often required that he submit a piece regardless of his own dissatisfaction with it. In the early 1960s, Kuhn was invited to work on a project with Jack Mitchell, Remington Arms’ director of advertising. For many reasons, Kuhn was considered to be one of the best-known outdoor illustrators, highly sought after by not only the magazine world, but also among New York City-based advertising agencies. His bold, assured style had made him one of America’s finest animal painters and clearly he was the natural, logical choice for this assignment. This project would entail yearly calendars to be illustrated with original artwork that would be distributed to Remington dealers and personalized with the dealer’s name. The Remington Calendar was launched in 1966, celebrating 150 years of Remington history and its success was attributed largely to the talents of Bob Kuhn, whose illustrations had both mass appeal and frame-worthiness. Throughout his artwork, you can sense Kuhn’s love of nature, excitement of the hunt and passion for the outdoor life. If anything, the 1966 calendar proved even more popular than expected and limited-edition prints of Kuhn’s calendar art were issued. Over a fiveyear period, Kuhn produced more than 70 original works for the calendars. Kuhn’s artwork eventually evolved into the fine art of painting animals in their natural habitat in a style that was unique, sensitive and truthful. In 1970, Kuhn turned exclusively to easel painting, often painting simple backgrounds with horizontal bands of color and light to capture particular movements and personalities of wild animals. He worked primarily in acrylic and was well known for his ability to paint the particular movements and personalities of wild animals. Kuhn was not only the pre-eminent animal painter of his time, but he was also a skilled outdoorsman, handling a fly rod, shotgun and rifle as deftly as he handled a paintbrush. Long recognized for his skill at capturing the essence of an animal’s movements and for his detailed compositions, Kuhn traveled from Alaska to Africa to study his subjects in their native surroundings. He and Libby, his wife of 66 years, traveled around the world to obtain inspiration, with many of their wildlife expeditions lasting several weeks.

Bob Kuhn sketch done in appreciation for the efforts of Peter Hepburn while on safari in Botswana.

■ BY JOE COOGAN Buffalo Bulls by Bob Kuhn

“Bob wanted as many photos as possible of animals on the move,” Peter remembers. “And I’m sure he got some great action shots of elephants with those exciting encounters in the thick riverine forest, although possibly not all in focus. We also had to contend with the ‘dreaded tsetse fly.’ That was years before the Botswana government carried out an extended eradication program.” In spite of charging elephants and biting tsetses, Bob was able to get the action shots he wanted of loping giraffe, zebra and other running game. Peter remembers feeling quite anxious as Bob would lean half-way out the door of the bouncing Land Rover while the vehicle careened down rough bush roads as they tried to keep up with galloping game. “Fortunately, the door remained closed and Bob got some excellent close-up action shots,” Peter recalls.

“He was a very easy man to please, and very appreciative of my efforts and those of Hunter’s Africa in helping him get material for his art. It was a wonderful privilege for me to introduce Bob to Botswana’s spectacular big game. As a thank you, he sketched a lion for me with a personalized message, which I treasure.”

I was also privileged and honored to have met Bob Kuhn in the mid-1980s when Jim Codding, a mutual friend who also collected Kuhn’s work, introduced me to him. I was especially pleased to be able to tell Mr. Kuhn how much I admired his work and how big an impact his 1970 Remington Calendar had on me and my impressions of Africa.

32 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 pushed there by elephants. Frequent stops were necessary to clear the road and confronting angry cows was of constant concern. On several occasions, they had to make rapid, nerve-racking escapes from charging cow elephants without knowing whether the road ahead was clear.

Sadly, on October 1, 2007, legendary illustrator and gallery artist Bob Kuhn died in his home in Tucson, Arizona, at the age of 87, after a long battle with heart problems. Someone described it best when they said, “The passing of Bob Kuhn leaves a huge hole in the world of art that I doubt will ever be filled, and an even bigger hole in the hearts of those of us who were lucky enough to know him.”

ART & ETC

SPORTING CLASSICS • 33JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

In the 1950s, Bob Kuhn was a young illustrator doing mostly assignment work for the “Big Three” outdoor magazines— Outdoor Life, Field & Stream and Sports Afield. Kuhn had illustrated several of Robert Ruark’s articles about his safaris in East Africa with Harry Selby. In one particular story Ruark wrote for Field & Stream, he described how he and Selby found themselves surrounded by a herd of buffalo in thick bush and how one cow with a young calf was very close and very threatening. Kuhn’s painting depicts the scene with Selby and Ruark, both recognizable in the painting and showing Selby holding his .416 Rigby rifle at the ready.

SelbyKuhnRuark,&

sidebar: bob kuhn

34 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

Some time after the story was published, Selby was visiting Ruark in New York. While there, they went up to the Field & Stream offices where Ruark introduced Selby to the editor, Hugh Grey. At some point during the meeting, Grey reached into a drawer in his desk and pulled out a rolled-up piece of canvas. He said it was the original oil painting that was used to illustrate Ruark’s article with a two-page color spread. He then handed the canvas to Ruark, who turned and handed it to Selby who packed it in his suitcase and carried it back to Kenya. Harry then placed the rolled up canvas tied with a red ribbon in a trunk where it was stored for the next 20 or so years. Fast-forward to the late 1970s when the Selbys moved to another house in Maun, Botswana. They took the opportunity to revisit what they had kept stored in trunks when Selby spotted the red-ribbon-tied, rolled-up canvas. He received the surprise of his life when he unrolled the canvas and discovered that the artist was none other than Bob Kuhn. By then, Kuhn was not only a recognized artist, but had become famous for his outstanding work with wildlife and African wildlife in particular. Selby had the painting framed and sent to Houston where he loaned it to a group of former safari clients who had invested in a downtown restaurant called “Harry’s Kenya.” There, the painting was displayed until the restaurant closed in the late ’90s.

At about the same time, Harry contacted me to say that he was letting go of his 416 Rigby rifle and that he would include the Kuhn painting in the deal. I mentioned it to safari veteran and longtime friend, Frank Lyon of Little Rock, Arkansas, and he immediately said, “Don’t mention this to anyone! Just tell me how much!”

SPORTING CLASSICS • 35JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

“If only I’d had the forethought to have Bob Ruark sign the back of the painting,” Selby reflected. “Can you imagine what that would have done for posterity’s sake—and the value?”

The other part of the deal was that as soon as Botswana reopened elephant hunting, Frank wanted to take the rifle back to Africa and hunt an elephant with Harry and me. That hunt took place in 1995 and, after looking over more than 100 bull elephants, Frank collected a tremendous old bull with the Selby 416 Rigby rifle. Today, the painting, rifle and the pair of 80-pound tusks are all displayed together. ■

rouched in the A-frame blind set in a swath of corn left standing after harvest and snug in your camo poly-fil parka, you scan the horizon at sunup for Canada geese. From the pond hidden beyond the tree line to your right, you hear ducks debating whether to come feed. Out in front are spread three dozen full-body goose decoys.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 37JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

BY JOHN ROSS

20 gauge and beat it outside to meet your He’s waiting for you in his crew-cab pickup. From the dog box in the back, you can hear his English setter whining, eager to stretch her legs. Odds are you’ll nail two or three cock ringnecks and maybe a chukar or two before lunch. If you’d prefer, instead of setters, you can choose to hunt over Labs or Brittanys.

Eastern Shore Triple Play

Opening of waterfowl season in November brings the opportunity to combine hunts for deer, ducks, geese and pheasants.

DESTINATIONS

Try as you will, it’s hard to keep your mind on geese ’cause, soon as you fill your tag, you’ll pack up, return to the lodge, stow your parka, don your field coat and blaze orange hunting vest, swap your Benelli autoloader for that little Franchi

Nothing’s so welcome as that bowl of crab soup, hearty with potatoes and corn and limas and at least a half-pound of backfin and claw meat, mounded in rich tomato broth the waiter sets before you at lunch. Steaming, scents of Old Bay seasoning tickle your nose. There are seconds, of course, but then there’s that platter of beaten biscuits and country ham. Your nap is ever so welcome, but snoozing is hard because soon as you arise, your guide ferrys you to your deer stand overlooking the corner of a meadow where it meets the swamp. At dusk last night, a trailcam picked up a good-looking

Mile after square mile of swamp bordered by thousands of acres of grain crops provide ideal habitat for whitetails on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Maryland’s Eastern Shore is one of the very few locales where one can hunt waterfowl, upland birds and whitetails all in one day, let alone at the tail end of the season in the first few days of January. Over the past 40 years, Ken Schrader has pulled together one of the most comprehensive hunting, fishing and shooting destinations in the country. Along with waterfowl, whitetails, upland birds, small game and fresh and saltwater fishing, Schrader’s incorporates a 16-station sporting clays course. Each station has four traps, meeting the needs from utter novices just learning to shoot to NSSANSCA champions.

It gave my 8-weight everything it could handle before the boat’s captain caught up with it. It’d be a shame to travel to the Eastern Shore and not take advantage of fishing with one of Schrader’s guides for Maryland’s state fish.

Schrader leases rights to hunt around 12,000 to 15,000 acres in Cecil, Kent, Queen Anne and Carolina counties. On those farms, he leaves strips of 16 rows of standing corn cover for A-frame blinds. His guides scout daily and shift blinds as needed. Typically, three or four hunters will shoot from one blind accompanied by a guide and Pheasants,retriever.chukar and quail are raised in flight pens and released well before hunters take to the field. Flighted mallard are also available. In addition, turkey hunts are offered in season. Among classic Southern traditions at Schrader’s is dove hunting on opening day. Here, the morning begins with warming up on the sporting clays course followed by a buffet lunch. Then everyone is ferried to a field of cut corn or, perhaps, sunflowers or millet where these little grey-brown speedsters confound the savviest of gunners with jinks impossible to predict. And for a real taste of farmboy shotgunning, there’s rabbits chased by beagles and squirrel hunting. When was the last time you did any of that? Grey and red foxes are populous on the Eastern Shore. Hunt ’em with nightvision scoped varmint rifles. Bring your own or use one of Schrader’s. You’ll begin by sighting in on the 150-yard rifle range. Then toward dusk, you and your guide will set up overlooking the edge of thick cover and he’ll unlimber his electronic predator call.

38 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 buck working the edge. If his 8-points or better span beyond his ears, he’ll be yours with one shot, assuming you nail him.

The Eastern Shore is within three hours drive of at least a quarter of the country’s population. You can’t get there without crossing saltwater, and I can’t cross Chesapeake or Delaware Bays without remembering that 17-pound rockfish that nailed my trolled green and white Clouser.

Schrader’s headquarters is in Henderson, Maryland, hard by the Delaware border about 25 miles northeast of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on state route 312, Oakland Road. You can’t miss it. At the end of a short, wide drive is Bridgetown Manor, a modern yet classic white-columned, gallery-porched inn. Though it looks imposing, its 11 bedrooms, each with private baths, are appointed with comfortable furnishings appropriate to the region. Adjacent is a heated kennel for your dog. The clubhouse is a quick walk behind the inn past the five stand and wobble trap ranges. There you’ll find ammo, guns for rent and related gear. Though thoroughly in tune with today’s waterfowlers’ tastes for camo-stocked, matt metal-finished autoloaders, Schrader’s all-time favorite goose guns are the old Browning A5 with its high hump back and Remington’s 870 Express in 3-inch 12 gauge. Hardwood stocked, matt-finished and known for utter reliability no matter what, come gunning season you’re likely to find one stowed on most every Chesapeake Bay waterman’s boat. ■ if you go: For more information about Schrader’s Outdoors, visit schradersoutdoors.com or call (410) 758-1824.

DESTINATIONS

A farm boy who grew up outside of nearby Chestertown, Schrader began guiding goose hunters when chores were finished on his father’s dairy farm and his business grew from there.

He began by helping a neighbor who was hosting clients from McCormick Spice Co., makers of Old Bay in Baltimore, down south across Chesapeake Bay. They hunted from pits, but as goose populations waned in the late early 1990s, Ken saw the virtue of portable blinds that could be moved from farm to farm, wherever Canadas were feeding.

BY JOHN ROSS

Rows of millet make for easy walking for flushing high-flying pen-raised pheasants.

BECAUSE YOUR STAY AT PRIMLAND

WITH

High in the majestic Blue Ridge Mountains, Primland awaits with exciting opportunities to put yourself above all else. With the assistant of a fine-pointing dog, flush pheasants, quail, and chukar across our vast 12,000 acres for an unforgettable upland hunting or driven shooting experience in a one-of-a-kind setting. Or, explore unique activities like guided fly fishing, RTV trail riding, mountaintop golf and deep-space stargazing, then unwind with a glass of whiskey in our luxury lodging. Whatever experience you choose, expect to leave refreshed and renewed. STAYS YOU.

A Getaway that Hits the Mark

JANUARY / FEBRUARY 202140 • SPORTING CLASSICS

The forend is attached with a classic Anson style latch. four-lug system that should prove to be very durable.

I t’s a peculiar thing, but for many years, newly made, hen’sasside-by-sideswell-constructedhavebeenscarceasthelegendaryteeth.Andthefew that were available had prices that would daunt an Arab oil sheik! That wasn’t that way it was when I was a kid. Back then, there were a good many decent doubles made. There were even some that were fairly inexpensive, and anybody who had the urge to do so cold give one a try. Recently, though, the guy who just wanted a reliable entry-level side-by was just out of luck. The only available alternatives were to either fork out a moderate fortune or gamble on the Because of that, I’ve lobbied folks in the industry for at least 40 years to fill the void when the opportunity came along. After all, a double is not such a complicated piece of machinery. How hard could it be to make one of reasonable quality for the averageSeveralshooter?yearsago, I made the pitch to Caesar Guerini’s Wes Lang. We were on a quail shooting foray in Georgia and had some time to shoot the breeze as we followed the dogs through the pines and broomsedge. Caesar Guerini seemed a likely candidate—they make excellent over/unders at reasonable prices. Wes’ response pretty well mirrored that of most of the industry folks I’ve talked to. He allowed that the subject came up occasionally, but never seemed to generate enough steam to go forward. Cost-benefit analysis and all that sort of If I remember correctly, which is always a chancy proposition, it seems to me that the conversation occurred just about the time that Guerini acquired the well-established and respected Italian firm. Fabarm has an enviable reputation for producing good, solid, well-designed repeaters and over/unders. Over the years, I’ve used a number of its guns with total satisfaction. If we fast-forward a few years, we find ourselves in the midst of a modest revival in side-by-sides. As interest has risen, several companies have taken an interest in producing sidebys for the common man. And, sure enough, Fabarm is one of them! A couple of months ago, I was talking with Shaun Burkowski, Marketing Director of Caesar Guerini USA, about Guerini’s “Revenant” over/under, which

BY ROBERT MATTHEWS

The Autumn has an upgraded stock using deluxe grade Turkish walnut with an oil finish.

SHOTGUNS An Imminently Satisfying Double That’s Affordable

Shaun was gracious enough to allow me a little extra time so that I could open the Georgia quail season with the Autumn, and for that I’m extremely grateful, considering the number of writers waiting to review this gun.

As for the field test, it couldn’t have gone better. South Georgia in the first week of quail season is about as glorious as life on this planet gets. “Sweater weather” mornings quickly yielded to shirtsleeve afternoons. It was still early fall there, and there’s just nothing quite like following a brace of pointers through the first glimpse of life’s most beautiful season with a lovely, well balanced side-by across your arm.

I honestly can’t brag about my shooting, because I’ve been a bit of a slump lately, but I’ll gladly brag about the handling of the little Autumn. As with most production guns, its stock dimensions are tailored for the mythical “average man.” Drop at comb is about 1 1/2 inch and drop at heel is 2 1/4. Since I’m about as average as a guy can get, those dimensions suit me just fine.

SHOTGUNS

sized silver bead. It tips the scales at a smidgen under 6 1/2 pounds, and balances just a touch forward, like a proper side-by should. The Autumn will also be available with a pistol grip and semi-beavertail forend, if that’s your preference.

The stock features a hand-fit walnut butt plate to make mounting the gun easier and to avoid snagging on clothing.

The stock is especially gratifying. It’s a classic English-style straight-wrist, paired with a splinter forend. I really like the stock’s details. It’s made of nicely figured European walnut with a satin, medium-luster finish and is finished off with a nice, contrasting wood buttplate. The checkering is clean and crisp. The wood is fit slightly proud of the metal to allow for a refinishing somewhere down the line. It’s not only traditional, but practical as well.

The monoblocked barrels have a highluster finish and come equipped with a full complement of choke tubes, giving the gun a high degree of versatility. Lock-up is via a novel four-lug system that should prove to be very durable. As always, time will tell on that issue, but it certainly looks to be strong to me. It has a single selective trigger that’s inertia operated, and nonautomatic tang safety. The automatic, selective ejectors are well timed and robust.

I just hate that I’ve got to send it back now.

The action is monolithic design machined from a steel forging for the ultimate in strength.

The receiver has a nice, conservative casecolor finish and features what appears to be a multi-technique floral engraving pattern. The overall effect should prove quite pleasing to most folks, and I guess that’s the point.

42 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

The rounded action features ornamental style scroll engraving with elegant color case hardened finish.

With the introduction of the Autumn, Fabarm is helping to fill a gaping hole in the shotgun market by bringing out an imminently satisfying double that’s affordable for most people. It’s a solid, slick handling, 6-poundish 20-gauge side-by-side, and now you can have one while avoiding the considerable hazards of the used gun market! What more is there to say? ■

BY ROBERT MATTHEWS

Fanciers of side-by-side doubles are nothing if not traditional and I think the folks at Fabarm “hit the nail on the head” with this gun.

At Syren, we are passionate about the shooting sports and are driven to help more women become involved. We are obsessed with breaking down the traditional barriers to participation in shooting, hunting and the great outdoors. Our goal is to provide the equipment and knowledge that make the experience more enjoyable and less stressful. This is our mission. Our passion. Your ambition. A perfect fit.

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The AllTerra dual-lug, push-feed bolt-action rifle offers newly patented innovations to increase accuracy.

BY RON SPOMER

AllTerra engineers added at least

That’s step one. Next you have to send that perfect bullet down a perfect bore, one that is dead straight with its lands and grooves equidistant from center and consistent the entire length. Cap that with a perfectly beveled and consistent muzzle crown so high pressure gases cannot exit sooner in one spot than any other. Before we slap that perfect bullet on the butt and sent it on its way, we should back up to the chamber. It, too, has to be concentric to that perfect bore, its throat ramping up smoothly and evenly to the rifling. And the chamber must be secured by a bolt head that locks a perfectly balanced, concentric cartridge precisely in line with the bore. Damn. We’re dancing with an inordinate degree of perfection and concentricity here. And that’s what the patented AllTerra action delivers.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 45JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

AllTerra Carbon Rifle in 6.5 PRC

Say what you will in praise of the newest chassis rifle from, oh, say Bergara. Or the strongest big bore lever-action from Bighorn Armory. Or the lightest bolt-action from Weatherby or Barrett. All might be fine, precise, rugged, accurate. Spectacular tools, the best of the best. They all have one thing in common: they are variations on a 19th century theme. That’s right. Most of our modern rifles are built around basic actions created in the 19th century. Think John Moses Browning and lever-actions. Farquharson and falling block actions. Browning again for autoloaders and slide actions. And Paul Mauser for the née plus ultra in controlled-round-action turn bolts. All created before the 20th century. From Savage’s rotary magazine to Mauser’s hinged floorplate, the mechanics and innovations were hammered out long ago. It seems no bolt-action can offer anything really new. But the AllTerra dual-lug, push-feed bolt-action does. And it has patents to proveJustit.how does anyone go about getting a patent on an action-style that’s already been built in dozens of variations? By incorporating a few tweaks that make it more inherently accurate. Accuracy, as most students of the rifle know, is spelled concentricity. In order for a bullet to fly straight it needs to be concentric to its center of mass. You can’t have the jacket thicker on one side than the other or an air bubble in the lead or the nose leaning to the side.

RIFLES

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All of this in the Carbon model with 24-inch floating barrel plus 1.5-inch muzzle brake weighs just 6 pounds, 5 ounces. Too little mass for the 6.5 PRC pushing a 143-grain bullet 2,990 fps? Not a bit. Yes, the muzzle brake moderates, but more impressive is the raised cheek piece that flows into a wide, rounded, negative comb that rises dramatically to a heel that actually perches higher than the barrel channel center line. This spreads the thin rubber butt pad across all of your shoulder pocket, not just the bottom half. A slightly tilted palm swell fills the hand for more control and cants it for better torque control. When the rifle bucks, it pushes the comb back and under your cheek rather than up and into it. Depending on how much sounddeadening foam you elect in the stock, it

First, in keeping with concentricity, the action is round-bottomed with the oversized, tapered recoil lug integral. The front receiver ring is specially cut with two mortises into which the specially turned barrel tenons mate perfectly via 20-pitch threads. Within the barrel breach is the chamber drilled, bored and finish-reamed to 0.0001inch tolerance to the axis of the bore.

Maintaining this self-cleaning and straight-line bolt lock up at the rear is a slightly oversized ring of the bolt body behind the integral handle. This centers the back of the bolt as precisely as the conical lugs center its front. Yet, AllTerra’s not done. Within the bolt body stands an oversized firing pin body that is also fluted. Why? To reduce weight and lock time. Furthermore, the extra wide body closely fits the interior diameter of the firing spring coiled around it. Said spring, instead of flexing and snaking laterally to put inconsistent and unequal pressure on the pin, concentrates its tension on the forward drive. Augmenting this is the firing pin’s nose residing within its pilot hole at all times. More of that properly aligned, concentric stuff contributing to consistency.

The upshot of all this is consistent, smooth, non-binding function and precision. And it’s all anchored via aluminum pillars to a six-layer carbon fiber stock with effective recoil-reducing lines. A one-piece, aluminum, hinged floorplate secures a 3-inch-long metal box magazine that holds three 6.5 PRC cartridges ready for action. Once chambered they can be ignited by 2.5-pounds of pressure on a crackling crisp TriggerTech Primary trigger.

RIFLES

BY RON SPOMER

The Proof barrel is wrapped in carbon for extra stiffness with minimal weight. Backing up this precision barrel and action is a special bolt with what might be called “crowned” locking lugs precisely round on top to lock into specially cut locking recesses that center the bolt face with the bore. AllTerra refers to these as “conical lugs” and an elliptical raceway. They’re similar to Borden Bumps or a sleeved bolt. Not only do these lock perfectly squarely, but they self clean during cycling, the slightly oversized lugs riding the rails while any dirt, debris or carbon gets scraped and pushed onto the minimally undersized bolt body where broad spiral flutes stand ready to collect detritus.

four things to ensure a concentric lock up and launch of bullets through their perfect bores. Let’s prowl through an AllTerra Carbon rifle and see if we can identify them.

The provided AllTerra handloads with Hornady 143-grain ELD-X bullet resulted in a three-shot group that went 0.252-inch.

A one-piece, aluminum, hinged floorplate secures a 3-inch-long metal box magazine that holds three 6.5 PRC cartridges ready for action.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 47JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 NX8 RIFLESCOPES 8x Zoom and Stunning Clarity in a Compact Package. Now Available in Second Focal Plane. The NX8 family of riflescopes is an evolution of Nightforce’s legendary NXS series. An 8x zoom ratio and compact package make the NX8 a versatile scope for close and long range. Whether you are a hunter, shooter, or professional, the NX8 family of multi-use optics will put your capabilities at a whole new level. Please visit our website to learn more about our newest NX8s: the 2.5-20x50 and 4-32x50. RUGGED. RELIABLE. REPEATABLE. Go to nightforceoptics.com to find a dealer near you. Nightforce is a registered trademark of Nightforce Optics, Inc. © 2020 Nightforce Optics, Inc. All rights reserved.

RIFLES

BY RON SPOMER Within the bolt body stands an oversized firing pin body that is also fluted. Why? To reduce weight and lock time. The front receiver ring is specially cut with two mortises into which the specially turned barrel tenons mate perfectly via 20-pitch threads.

A special bolt has what might be called “crowned” locking lugs precisely round on top to lock into specially cut locking recesses that center the bolt face with the bore.

The final ingredient that makes the AllTerra Carbon unique is its guarantee. Not MOA accuracy. Not 1/2 MOA accuracy. An eye popping 1/4 MOA accuracy guarantee when using AllTerra’s custom loaded ammo. They’ll guarantee 1/2 MOA with select premium factory ammo, too. Either way, this rifle is shooting better than I can. While firing from a Stuckey portable bench in variable breezes flitting to 8 or 10 mph, I consistently punched 0.75- to 0.27-inch groups with Hornady Precision Hunter 143-grain ELD-X factory loads. Switching to the provided AllTerra handloads, same 143-grain bullet, my first three-shot group went 0.252-inch.

Were this a rifle I’d ordered and purchased, I would not be taking AllTerra up on its offer for a full refund after an unprecedented 90-day test period. No sir ma’am. This legitimate tack driver would be riding the river with me. ■

48 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 can weigh as little as 24 ounces. The Carbon model sent me for testing included an optional Picatinny mini-rail at the forend sling swivel position. This is the fashion for quick detach bipods. I’ll stick with the traditional sling stud for hunting. More often than not, where I pursue deer and elk a prone shot is rarely possible. Sitting in a field to clear the grass just yesterday, I employed a portable, hand-carried shooting stick in which the Picatinny snagged and slowed down shot acquisition. When I finally arranged things suitably and fired, the rail bit the fingers of my leading hand. The sample rifle also came with a Nightforce NX8 2.5-20x50mm scope. Bright, sharp, precise, but even with ultralight Talley one-piece rings, this pushed overall weight from 6.5 pounds to 8.5 pounds. There’s two ways to look at this: you’ve compromised what could have been a light, quick, deadly accurate field rifle, or you spend the 2 pounds you saved with the light rifle on a super scope. Option is yours.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 49JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 EXPERIENCE YOUR BEST SHOT.TM Introducing a hunting experience like no other. APEX Ammunition is the ultimate in premium, handcrafted shotgun ammunition, carefully and thoughtfully loaded in Mississippi by dedicated, experienced hunters. As the pioneers in the commercial production of non-toxic, ultra-high-density Tungsten Super Shot (TSS), we know that passion is just as critical as technology when it comes to creating wingshooting ammunition that out-performs anything else available. Experience the passion for yourself. Shop now at APEXmunition.com Comes in 12ga, 20ga, 16ga*, 28ga*, and 410 bore* *Available upon request

Douglassville in southeastern Pennsylvania. At the time—it was the mid-1950s—LeGrande was up to his armpits in the effort for which he’d ultimately be recognized as the savior of the hunting Irish setter and the chief architect of the modern “red” setter.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 51JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 Irish Setter, 1887, by Matilda Lotz (1858-1923), oil on canvas, 33 x 40 inches

It was getting on toward evening when the friend noticed, with under standable alarm, that one of LeGrande’s dogs had climbed the fence and was about to make a break for it. This wasn’t just any dog, either. It was Askew’s Carolina Lady, the most valuable animal in his kennel and the cornerstone of his entire breeding program!

Of course, if your intent is to re-boot a gene pool that’s lain stagnant for close to half a century, infusing the blood of a borderline renegade with white-hot prey drive is a pretty good place to start. The story’s been told many times, but by the late 1940s the hunting Irish setter, historically equal in every respect to the English setter and the pointer, had largely passed from the American scene.

The friend was ready to summon the National Guard…but LeGrande barely batted an eye. “She’s just going out to catch a rabbit for her pups,” he explained.

The Irish setter: A victim of its own beauty

GUNDOGS

BY TOM DAVIS

ne day a friend of Ned Farm,WillowvisitstoppedLeGrande’sbytohimathisWindsnear

And that’s exactly what she did. Before the sun went down, this future Hall-ofFamer who almost single-handedly transformed the fortunes of her breed was climbing back into her kennel with a freshly killed cottontail flopping limply in her jaws.

Askew’s Carolina Lady placed 28 times in FDSB-recognized field trials, was named the winner of the inaugural National Red Setter Shooting Dog Championship and earned an AKC Field Championship for good measure. But while her comportment afield may have been letter-perfect, there remained something gloriously wild, untamed and even a little bit savage about her.

GUNDOGS

BY TOM DAVIS

Askew’s Carolina Lady

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And, in that imponderable way fate has of finding the right person to meet the challenge of a certain historical moment, LeGrande was just the man to do Byit.1952, LeGrande had assembled a small nucleus of field-bred Irish at Willow Winds Farm. Even in the breed’s darkest hour, a few diehards had kept the old bloodlines going, breeding a litter every now and then and selling the pups (or simply giving them away) to local bird hunters. The problem for LeGrande was that, because these men weren’t in it for the money and tended to live in isolated rural locations, they, and their dogs, were damnably hard to track down.

What happened? Well, to put it as simply as possible, the Irish setter had become a victim of its own beauty. Its breeders emphasized coat, conformation and looks—the qualities prized in the show ring, essentially—at the cost of virtually everything else and as a result, the red dogs’ once-vaunted hunting prowess eroded to a pitiful remnant of what it had once been. By the 1940s many Irish setters wouldn’t even point, and even when they did, they were so lacking in style and intensity they looked like they were waiting for a bus. They were awkwardly gaited, too— terms like “lumbering” and “rocking horse” were commonly used—which not only hampered their ability to get over the ground and hit the birdy places but absolutely killed their stamina. The bottom line is that from a hunter’s perspective, the Irish setter of the mid20th century was, for the most part, a pretty sorry animal. Which brings us back to W.E. “Ned” LeGrande. Born in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1911, he’d grown up hunting quail behind the kind of Irish setters that used to be described as “good country bird dogs.” But he drifted away from the sport until his curiosity got the better of him one day and he took his wife, Helen, to check out a field trial restricted to Irish setters—all of them, as was typically the case in those days, from bench stock. What LeGrande saw appalled him. As he recalled years later, those bench-bred setters “looked like they were bred to pull a milk wagon in harness rather than to be taken into the fields to shoot a mess of quail over…short on nose, deficient in point, and without exception equipped with pump-handled tails.” It was while watching this sad charade of a field trial that Ned LeGrande—a big, handsome, charismatic guy who’d been a star football player at the College of William & Mary and was now a successful business executive—turned to his wife and made a proclamation that would change the course of bird dog history. “Something,” he said, “has got to be done about the Irish setter.”

LeGrande was nothing if not persistent, however, and by casting his net far and wide he managed to find a few setters that met his criteria. They were solid gundogs…but they weren’t worldbeaters. Their most conspicuous deficiency, in LeGrande’s judgment, was that they didn’t point with high tails. A level or slightly elevated tail was an absolutely fine attitude for a hunting dog on point, but if the red dogs were to have any hope of putting a scare into the white ones in field trials, their tails had to come up. Through advertisements in The American Field and other outlets, LeGrande spread the word that he was in the market for field-bred Irish setters that pointed with high tails. He looked at dozens of dogs and rejected every one of them. Then he got a tip from one Hunter Grove, a professional trainer in North Carolina. Grove told LeGrande that there was a farmer in Enfield, NC, whose Irish setter female was the best quail dog in those parts—and she pointed with a high tail! LeGrande drove to North Carolina, only to be told by Lady’s owner, Kelsey Askew, that she wasn’t for sale. As dog men are wont to do, though, he was happy to show her off, and when LeGrande saw her slam into point on the “home place” covey he could barely contain his excitement. She pointed not just with a high tail, but with the kind of electrifying intensity that raises the hair on the back of your neck. On the smallish side, she had ideal conformation for the field—and it was obvious that she didn’t have a speck of show blood in her. She was athletic, animated, light on her feet…. It took a while, but at last the two men came to terms. “He didn’t want to let her go,” LeGrande recalled in a 1978 interview. “But we sat down over a jug of cider and finally he said, ‘Everything I raise is forWhatsale.’”LeGrande couldn’t know then, but would learn in breathtakingly short order, was that in Askew’s Carolina Lady he’d found his pot o’ gold. She posted a sterling record in field trial competition, but as a producer she blew the roof off. She was the quantum leap forward for her breed: If the hunting Irish setter pre-Lady was an oxcart, post-Lady it was a Porsche. She was, and is, the foundation female—the Eve, if you will—of the field-type Irish setter as we know it today. In 1972, 14 years after her passing, Askew’s Carolina Lady received the ultimate honor when she was elected to the Field Trial Hall of Fame. Many people who know more about this stuff than I do will tell you that the quality of today’s field-bred Irish setters is better than it’s ever been. Some even insist that, dog-fordog, the reds are the best pointing breed going. Of all the ways you can frame the remarkable legacy of Askew’s Carolina Lady, that strikes me as the one that says the most. ■

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The Signature Lodge byCheyenne Ridge Outfittersis the premier pheasant hunting operation in the country and was the first sporting venue to ever receive the prestigious Beretta Trident rating. Located in the heart of South Dakota pheasant country, The Signature Lodge is operated by High Adventure Company. The perfect mix of agriculture crops, native warm season grass, and shelterbelts provide ideal habitat for one of the most popular game birds in the country, the ringneck pheasant. Over 40,000 square feet, The Signature Lodge is an experience in itself. The lodge has 32 single occupancy rooms, South Dakota’s only ice bar, and a spa and fitness center for our non-hunting guests. Chef Sean Finley produces some of the finest food in the business out of our kitchen. From the very personalized service in the lodge to the top guides and dogs, our attention to detail makes The Signature Lodge an unforgettable experience for the passionate bird hunter.

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The North Platte Outpostby Cheyenne Ridge Outfittersprovides some of the country’s ﬁnest waterfowl hunting and the only waterfowl operation to ever receive the prestigious Beretta Trident rating. In the heart of the Central Flyway, along three private miles of the famed North Platte River, surrounded by thousands of acres of agricultural crops, The North Platte Outpost provides ideal habitat for world-class waterfowl hunting. Our guides and dogs exceed our guests' expectations. When the temperature drops, it’s the best place in the country for mallards and Canada geese. Ideal habitat, world-class personalized service, and outstanding cuisine by Chef Sean Finley have all made The North Platte Outpost one of the country’s elite waterfowl operations. The High Adventure Company proudly operates The North Platte Outpost.

South Dakota pheasant and Nebraska duckhunting experiences that exceed your expectations

America’s Voice for Wildlife BY DOUG PAINTER hey came upon the remains of the buffalo in a thick stand of timber, six hides and heads wrapped in burlap, each strung high from a tree limb to keep it safe from wolves. It was a grim sight, but also a sure sign that they were closing in on their man. It was mid-March of 1894, still winter in the high country of Wyoming. Felix Burgess, a civilian scout for Yellowstone Park and an Army sergeant named Troike, were on the trail of the park’s most elusive and cunning poacher, Edward Howell. Traveling on 10-foot wooden skis and pushing themselves through the snow, each with a single, long pole, they followed tracks of the suspected poacher that led them to Astringent Creek in the Pelican Valley on the north side of Yellowstone Lake.

PROFILES

Grinnell and wife Elizabeth hiking in Glacier National Park, September, 1923.

GLACIER NATIONAL PARK ARCHIVES

George Bird Grinnell

There, in their favored wintering grounds, was the last free-ranging bison herd in the United States. Their numbers had dwindled to no more than a few hundred at the time. It is hard to imagine that some 100 years earlier, an estimated 30 to 60 million of these great, shaggy beasts roamed the vast grasslands that spread from the Mississippi Valley to the Rocky Mountains and from western Canada through Texas and into northern Mexico. Hearing shots ring out, Burgess and Troike quickened their pace and soon saw Howell in the distance kneeling over a bison he had just killed. More bison lay dead nearby. Poachers could often get more than $300—some $10,000 in today’s dollars—for a hide along with its head and horns from taxidermists and their clients. A small fortune lay at Howell’s feet, and there was no question that he would put up a deadly fight to keep his ill-gotten gains. The good news was that Howell had his back to them and was busy skinning his bison. The bad news was that there were some 400 yards of open ground between them and Howell. Burgess crept forward on his own, a .38 caliber revolver in hand. He was able to close in on Howell and get between him and the poacher’s Winchester repeating rifle that had been propped up on a bison’s carcass. Catching Howell completely by surprise, Burgess ordered him to drop his knife and raise his hands. Burgess and Troike took Howell into custody without further incident.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 55JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

While Yellowstone Park was established in 1872, it was, in large measure, a park in name only. From the start, portions of the park had been threatened by railroad and mining interests. Its wildlife, especially its iconic bison herd, was left unprotected and, year over year, was being decimated by poachers. The capture and arrest of Edward Howell, however, marked a turning point that, in many ways, helped kickstart a new movement, a concerted effort to save America’s big game animals.Intimes of peril, when things look impossibly bleak, in rides a knight in shining armor to save the day. It is, of course, the plot line of many a potboiler novel, but from time to time, it also happens in real life. Our hero in this case was a mild-mannered gentleman whose “armor” was his indefatigable spirit and his “lance” a pen that he wielded with an exceptionally deft hand.

One of his early tutors was Audubon’s widow, Lucy, who continued to live on the property. Under her tutelage, George developed a keen interest in ornithology, especially the study of songbirds. At age 12, he was gifted a shotgun with which he began to gather bird specimens on his own in the then still wild haunts surrounding his family’s New York City home.

As a first step, Roosevelt, conferring with Grinnell, invited a small but highly influential group of men to dinner in New York City in December of 1887. All the guests were avid big game hunters. From that event would form what is today the oldest wildlife conservation organization

A key first step in Grinnell’s crusade for wildlife was his effort to ban the killing of song and plumed birds whose feathers were used to adorn women’s hats. Plumed birds such as the snowy egret had already become scare by the 1880s. “Very slowly,” he wrote in Forest and Stream, “the public are awakening to see that the fashion of wearing the feathers and skins of birds is abominable.” He took his effort one step further by creating in 1886 a new association “for the protection of wild birds and their eggs” as an adjunct group of the newOrnithologists’AmericanUnion.Henamedtheassociationthe Audubon Society, and by 1889 public membership in the society had grown to nearly 50,000. This success put a burden on the small staff at Forest and Stream forcing Grinnell to close shop on this fledgling organization. In 1905, however, the original concept was reborn by others as the National Association of Audubon Societies, which continues today as the National Audubon Society, one of the best known conservation and education groups in America. In 1885, Grinnell wrote a review in Forest and Stream about a book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, recently penned by a young but rising New York State political figure, Theodore Roosevelt. While generally favorable, Roosevelt was pricked by some of the criticism in the review and set out to meet Grinnell face to face. Fortunately, this encounter quickly turned cordial and prompted a long and very productive friendship between the two.

George Bird Grinnell was born in 1849 to a well-to-do New York City family and, when he was eight-yearsold, his family moved to a house in upper Manhattan adjacent to the estate of the late John James Audubon, a 16-acre tract still largely made up of woods and fields. For a youngster interested in nature and wildlife, it was like a great wilderness in which he could explore, observe and learn.

PROFILES

As wildlife historians Ward and Mc Cabe point out, “With the younger Roos evelt, Grinnell shared his understanding and perspectives on the serious and frag ile stature of American wildlife. In Roo sevelt, Grinnell found an aggressive and politically mobile ally for his conservation crusade.” Both men, however, were not content to just talk about the perilous state of big game species in America. They were determined to move forward, to seek the enactment and implementation of policies and regulations that would serve to protect these species and, in so doing, preserve America’s hunting heritage.

Grinnell’s naturalist interests took a hiatus when he entered Yale in 1866. In the summer after his graduation, he was one of a small band of Yale students asked to accompany famed paleontologist and Yale professor, Dr. Othneil Marsh, under whose tutelage Grinnell would earn his doctorate in 1880 on a summer expedition to Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming to search for and excavate prehistoric fossils. This first trip sparked in Grinnell a lifelong interest in the American West and, by 1875, he had made six western expeditions helping him build, even at the young age of 26, a voice of authority on America’s fast changing frontier, especially its wildlife and increasingly threatened landscapes. In the summer of 1874, General George Armstrong Custer asked Grinnell to serve as his naturalist on an exploratory trip to survey the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory and the following year he accompanied Captain William Ludlow, who had been on the Custer expedition, to the recently designated Yellowstone Park. It was Grinnell’s good fortune, however, not to join Custer on his next western trip thus missing the Battle of the Little Bighorn in June of 1876. When not traveling, Grinnell worked at his family’s brokerage business but admitted that he really had no taste for finance. He thus jumped at an offer in the fall of 1876 to become the natural history editor for Forest and Stream, a weekly journal with a national audience that covered a wide range of outdoor pursuits and whose founder, Charles Hallock, was among the nation’s earliest advocates of the ideals embodied in the notion of sportsmanship and fair chase.

56 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

In 1880, Grinnell purchased Forest and Stream from Hallock and continued to own and edit this seminal publication for the next 36 years. It is difficult to over exaggerate the value of Grinnell’s voice through this publication in building public awareness and support for wildlife conservation and also fearlessly speaking out against market hunting, poaching and unsportsmanlike behavior in the field. Bison were, by no means, the only American wildlife that faced a bleak and uncertain future around the turn of the 20th century. Wildlife scientists George B. Ward and Richard McCabe of the Wildlife Management Institute (WMI) noted that by the early 1900s, “Beaver, deer, elk, pronghorn antelope, wolves, bear, passenger pigeons, wild turkey, bighorn sheep, plumed birds and other wildlife were killed to extinction or nearly so for subsistence, market or as imagined obstacles to progress.”

In a lucky coincidence, a Forest and Stream correspondent, Emerson Hough, and his photographer, Frank Haynes, who had together traveled to Yellowstone to promote the park’s winter wonders, arrived just after Edward Howell had been arrested by Burgess and Troike.

As Grinnell biographer John Taliaferro points out, “Hough’s colorful on-scene retelling of the capture of Howell, and Hayne’s photos of the carnage, had a sensational effect. Other papers picked up the story, and each episode of Hough’s serial in Forest and Stream was introduced by an editorial written by Grinnell denouncing Howell’s wholesale butchery and Congress’s shameful delinquency and encouraging readers to demand that the government protect the property ‘which belongs to those it represents.’” Acting unusually swiftly, Congress did in 1894 pass the Yellowstone Park Protection Act that, among various conservation measures, prohibited the killing of wildlife in the park while also placing a representative of the U.S. Circuit Court in the park itself and appointing U.S. marshals to arrest game violators. Grinnell’s efforts through Forest and Stream untapped, for the first time, widespread public sympathy for the plight of America’s wildlife and underscored the power of public outcry in influencing political action. As a member of the Boone and Crockett Club, Grinnell was also able to, through the club’s many influential members, gain key support in Congress for a legislative remedy for the Yellowstone’s needs. Wildlife historians point out that the Yellowstone Park Protection Act brought the federal government into the wildlife conservation arena for the first time. The fight to save the park created a long-lasting “model of success” setting the precedent that the protection of wildlife and wilderness areas was an appropriate issue for national policy and law. With the Boone and Crockett Club and Forest and Stream, Grinnell now had a powerful two-edged sword that he deftly swung in the years ahead. Less than a year after he was elected, President William McKinley was assassinated and Grinnell’s good friend and fellow B&C member, Theodore Roosevelt, assumed the nation’s highest office. Wildlife conservation and habitat preservation were among Roosevelt’s key priorities and, largely influenced by Grinnell,

SPORTING CLASSICS • 57JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 in America, the Boone and Crockett Club, or B&C as it is known to hunters and conservationists around the country.

The club’s first initiative was to seek effective protection for Yellowstone Park’s wildlife. Only a few months after the club’s founding, Grinnell wrote in a Forest and Stream editorial, “Every sportsman desires to have the great game which inhabits this park saved from extinction which is so surely impending for each species, unless rigid protection is afforded here.”

In 1897, Grinnell worked closely with his friend and fellow B&C member, Congressman John F. Lacey, of Iowa, in championing a bill in Congress to form a federal law to ban the sale of wildlife products. The bill failed that year, but Lacey re-introduced the legislation in 1900 and, with strong support from Forest and Stream, together with the B&C and the Audubon Society, the billed passed.

The Lacey Act specifically prohibited the interstate shipment of illegally killed wildlife. Wildlife biologists and managers consider the Lacey Act of 1900 to be the legal cornerstone of wildlife regulations in the United States. Once again, Grinnell had fostered public sentiment and marshalled political support for legislation that

Grinnell jabbed his editorial finger at one of New York City’s poshest eateries, Delmonico’s, for serving increasingly scarce woodcock. “For four centuries,” Grinnell wrote, “from the time of Christopher Columbus to Charles Delmonico, we have been killing and marketing game, destroying it as rapidly as we know how, and making no provision toward replacing its supply.” It was part and parcel of his long running campaign to end hunting for profit. “The game supply which makes possible,” Grinnell emphasized in another Forest and Stream editorial, “the general indulgence in field sports is of incalculable advantage to individuals and the nation; but a game supply which makes possible the traffic in game as a luxury has no such importance. Public policy demands the traffic in game be abolished.”

PROFILES

While his effort to save the buffalo of Yellowstone might well be considered Grinnell’s capstone achievement, he continued to vigorously champion wildlife species both large and small. At the turn of the century, waterfowl and upland birds continued to be hunted for sale in markets and in restaurants.Intheearly1890s

58 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

Golden Light, Yellowstone Lower Falls by Xiangyuan Jie, oil on canvas, 18 x 24 inches.

Roosevelt fostered a national policy that emphasized the “wise use of natural resources,” seeking their efficient and renewable administration in perpetuity. It was the critical first step in the road to recovery for America’s wildlife.

RussellMoccasin.com@russellmoccasinFacebook.com/RussellMocc/920-361-2252STEPUPBEFORE YOU STEP OUT RUSSELL MOCCASIN ZIPPER BACK 10 OUNCE BULL HIDE LEATHER SNAKE BOOTS

■ For additional reading, you may enjoy Grinnell, America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Restless Drive to Save the West, by John Taliaferro. Available at Boone-Crockett.org.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 59JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 would prove pivotal in our nation’s early conservation efforts. The last two decades of the 19th century and the first two of the 20th were dark days for our nation’s wildlife. Some species, such as the buffalo, wavered on the edge of extinction. Others, such as the passenger pigeon, whose flights, noted John James Audubon in 1813, were so vast that, “they eclipsed the sun,” were gone by 1914. During that timeframe, most all of our nation’s game species were, year over year, being reduced to remnant populations in isolated habitats. For many of those years, few if any efforts were being made to reverse this widespread and seemingly inexorable downward trend. It was precisely in that era that Grinnell rode in to the rescue. Like a true champion, he always made the “big play” when it counted, and went on to not only a great but, exceptionally long career. Forest and Stream was his editorial pulpit for more than three decades and he had been a member of the Boone and Crockett Club for 60 years when he died in 1938. He was a prolific writer and beyond the conservation arena also wrote extensively on Native American tribes and became a strong advocate for Native American rights in Washington, D.C. He was the first to elicit public empathy for the plight of wildlife and to effectively harness such opinion to urge passage of conservation legislation. His crusades extended to all manner of wildlife and, along with his efforts to halt the indiscriminate killing of game, he played an outsized role in characterizing a new breed of hunter, the sense,defined,PerhapsraiseduckwhetherThesportsman-conservationist.nexttimeyou’reinthefield,highcountryelkcamporhuntinglodge,mayIsuggestyouaglasstoGeorgeBirdGrinnell.morethananyoneelse,heatleastinoneimportantthebestofwhoyouare.

60 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 The Exude OD50 is a high-performance long-distance illuminator. It’s so revolutionary that it’s the first true collimated handheld light that uses four LED chips and a series of lenses to project a focusable, crisp, clear, bright circle of light up to 400 yards away. There’s no flashlight reflector, no spill, no dark spots and predators don’t flare. Identify your quarry. EXUDELight.com/SportingClassics © 2020 Umarex USA, Inc. EXUDE LIKEOD50 THIS. YOU DON’T HAVE A LIGHT

■ FISHING Subimago Homesick Blues (AS SET TO THE MUSIC OF BOB DYLAN’S SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES) BY

Down in the basement, Thinnin’ out the head cement, Thumbin’ through a catalog, Last year’s fishin’ log. Tyin’ Brown Drake males, No hackle, V-tails, New pattern travails, Call ’em spinners if you fail. Look out kid, Another wing just split, You need size ten, But you’re doin’ it again, Better stand up, take a break, Go upstairs, check the date, Make a call upstate, Hope you’re not already late, The tape is

MaybeBigDelaware,BlueFishermenMayfliesHendricksonspre-recorded,reported,areemergin’,convergin’.Quills,RedQuills,Beaverkill,timespinnerfall,youcanfish’emall.

How ya gonna get away? Maybe take a sick day. Caddis bust in early May, But don’t forget Mother’s Day! Keep tyin’ kid, You need emergers and nymphs, For Cornuta, ’tenuata, Dorothea, Guttulata, Slate Wing Blue Dun, Stenonema

Henry’sSalmonSpringYellowstone,BigWadingNewSummerTheYourBeadAAlsoBaetis,Paraleptophlebia,Potomanthus,Fuscum,Vitrea,Isonychia,Hexagenia.coupleweightedMuddlers,headWoolyBuggers,tiredeyesarethrobbin’,threadbreaksinthebobbin.comes,flywest,hat,newvest,staff,won’tslip,Hornfloattrip.cutthroats,creeks,bellyboats,flies,flyin’ants,Fork,LastChance.

Look out kid, For Don’tAForFluorocarbonYou’reIfRubWhenHandsRodHopeGnatsHatchSmuttingOfTheStillbornAndchironomids,allminutiae,pupae,matingcycles,swarmingtricos,risers,disguisers,andskeeters,yernotableeder!jam,twomen,aroundthehandle,youputitinthecase,theferruleswithacandle.youwannabeafishin’bum,gonnaneedsome,leaders,pickysurfacefeeders,betterpairofwaders,forgetthegaiters. JACK GAGNON

SPORTING CLASSICS • 61JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

64 • SPORTING CLASSICS

BY PAUL PASTNOR

SPORTING CLASSICS • 65JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

With a party of four others, I was then camping on Round Lake in the Adirondacks. The hills about us, covered for the most part with hardwoods, blazed from base to summit with brilliant foliage, and the reflection in the calm water of the lake was like a glorious floor of mosaic, clear as crystal, vivid in coloring as Venetian tiles. Our camp was pitched on a balsam-covered knoll overlooking the lake. North and south, and away to the opposite hills in the west, stretched that lovely, almost circular sheet of water, dotted everywhere with gem-like islands. It would have been the despair, and at the same time the joy of an artist, to see, as we saw, evening after evening, the glory of the sunset shining through the white-trunked, golden-foliaged birches of two little islands opposite our camp. From dawn ’til dark, woods, waters and skies presented a panorama of ever-changing beauty. It was all like a magic wonderland to us tired dwellers in cities.

SHADOWCLASSICSPORTINGLITERATURE

This article originally appeared in the November 1895 edition of Outing magazine. at illustrationleft:by andrew wyeth for Outing.

T he October of 1891 will be long remembered by those who were so fortunate as to spend it in the woods. During the whole month the most perfect Indian summer weather prevailed, and the charm of the great, silent, sun-bathed wilderness was beyond the power of words to express.

A SHOT AT A Indian Village, Adirondacks Winslow Homer, 1894

66 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

Like all Adirondack parties, we had a mighty desire to see three or four fat deer hanging in front of our camp. And yet we did not come into the woods solely or even principally for deer. If we had, we should doubtless have brought hounds with us, or at least permitted our guide to bring his hound into camp with him. But hounding was against our principles, although we knew it was legal at that season of the year, and almost universally practiced throughout the Adirondacks. We were after health and a good time primarily, after deer only secondarily. Our guide gave us to understand that, under the circumstances, he would not be held responsible if we left the woods without so much as having seen a deer. We relieved him of all responsibility in the matter and told him we would rather not see a deer than shoot one driven by the hounds. The result was that, up to the 12th of October, after having been eight days in the woods, we were still eating salt pork and canned meat. We had skirted the shores of the lake half a dozen times with our two boats in the gray dawn hoping to run across a buck feeding on the lily pads or drinking his fill before the sunrise. And as many times had we lain in ambush at evening where a welldefined deer path came down to a certain cove green with lily pads; but, as yet, not a glimpse of the coveted buck had greeted ourSoeyes.those glorious October days wore on. It was a joy just to breathe the lifegiving, balsam-scented air, to bask on the rocks, gazing down upon mountain and sky mirrored in the water, to row along under the shadow of the trees or make excursions to the little islands scattered everywhere about us. But we always carried our rifles with us, and never ut I started out to tell about a strange shot at a shadow—a kind of dream shot, quite in keeping with the magical atmosphere that surrounded us, and that formed a natural background to the adventure. Hunter in the Adirondacks by Winslow Homer, 1892 HARVARD ART MUSEUMS/FOGG MUSEUM, ANONYMOUS GIFT

A SHOT AT A SHADOW

I shall not relate how I acted, on this never-to-be-forgotten occasion. It is true that a man may be pardoned some eccentricities and extravagances when he has killed a 250-pound buck by firing, practically, at its shadow! However, I retained sufficient sense and presence of mind to cut the animal’s throat and bleed him; and for the remainder of our stay in camp we feasted on venison that had not been over-heated and spoiled by a race for life with the hounds. ■

The Stag on the Alert (by an imitator of Winslow Homer) HARVARD ART MUSEUM

One breathless morning, cloudless and warm as a summer day, I took my Winchester and wandered away from the camp, down the lake shore. I had walked about a mile when I came to a curious little crescent-shaped clearing in the woods. It was carpeted with thin, long-bladed wood-grass, that grew almost to the edge of the water. Just beyond this clearing, and perhaps 30 yards from it, was a large, flat rock, jutting out into the lake. It was divided into two sections, one a little higher than the other. The higher section cast a grateful shade upon the lower one and seemed inviting me to come and recline against its cool side and smoke a meditative pipe—an invitation that I accepted without further delay.

An open campsite in the Adriondacks, circa 1880.

forgot to keep a sharp lookout for the ever-expected game.

One swift glance at the image in the water, as I cocked the Winchester and threw it to my shoulder, showed that the deer was whirling in his tracks. But I had the point at which I must fire all picked out and, quick as a flash, I pulled the trigger and sent a ball whistling through the matted foliage of the dwarf-cedar in front of me. I heard two or three convulsive plunges, and then all was still.

For nearly an hour after I had finished my pipe, I lay gazing out over the quiet lake. There was not a particle of breeze; the water was as smooth as glass and reflected with the most exquisite clearness every outline of rock and tree, every shade of color above it. The sun had mounted but half-way to the zenith, and shadows from the bank stretched fantastically out over the water. From where I lay, I could not see into the little clearing that I have mentioned, as one of the tips of its crescent-shaped fringe of underbrush came down to the water’s edge, directly in front of me, and hid it from sight. But I could see the reflection of the tall grass in the water and could note the minutest detail of the foliage of mirrored balsam and spruce. I do not know what led me to turn my eyes suddenly from gazing out across the lake and fix them on the little bay directly in front of me; but as I did so, an electric thrill ran through every nerve of my body. There, reflected in the crystal water, was the perfect shadow of a magnificent buck! He was standing motionless, the head poised high on the shoulders, the ears slightly inclined forward, the nostrils dilated. Every one of these details I could note as accurately in that faithful mirror at my feet as if I could see the deer himself. But that intervening fringe of small growth completely hid the animal from myForsight.afew moments I was so fascinated and so overpowered by excitement that I was incapable of action or even thought. Then my senses returned, and I began to consider how I could get a shot at the buck. I dared not make a motion until my plans were formed and action could be taken quickly and decidedly. I strained my eyes in a vain effort to catch even the faintest hint of the buck’s whereabouts through the thick intervening foliage. Then I looked into the water again and began to measure with my eye the relative distances from each other of objects reflected there. Thus, I was enabled to calculate with a certain degree of accuracy, the distance of the buck from the water’s edge. I calculated that he stood very nearly in the center of the little clearing, and about in line with a certain dwarf cedar that spread its thick mat of foliage in front of me. My fingers closed on the Winchester that lay at my side. Slowly, cautiously, an inch at a time, I raised it to my lap.

It did not take me many seconds to spring from the rock and dash down into the little clearing. Not a sign of my buck was to be seen, but, hold! here is a drop of blood on the grass—another—and another!

SPORTING CLASSICS • 67JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

I remained in this state of suspense, with the rifle across my lap for perhaps three minutes. It seemed an hour in the intensity of my excitement. Then the buck snorted. I could hear the sound plainly enough, though I could not see the animal himself. This meant either that he was getting impatient, or suspicious or that he actually winded me. In any event, I knew he would be off into the woods in a moment, and if I was going to take even my ghost of a chance of hitting him, it was time to act.

Then I waited to see if the buck would not move forward and come into sight. My eyes were fixed intently all the while upon the shadow in the water. I was all of a “fine tremble,” as I have heard an old guide express it—not a quaking, fever-and-ague shiver, but a kind of delicate, vibrating thrill.

I ran forward, pushed into the tangled woods—and almost stumbled over the body of the big buck. There he lay, stone dead, with a bullet through the base of the neck.

JANUARY / FEBRUARY 202168 • SPORTING CLASSICS This article Petzal1981September/OctoberappearedoriginallyintheissueofSportingClassicswhenDavewasAssociateShootingEditorforField&Streammagazine. BY DAVE PETZAL IMAGES COURTESY ROCK ISLAND COMPANYAUCTION THE YANKEE SIDELOCK this spread: Extremely rare documented factory engraved and gold inlaid L.C. Smith Deluxe Grade. This is one of about 30 Deluxe Grade sidelock shotguns originally built per customer specifications from 1908 to 1946. This example was manufactured in 1926. L.C. SMITHT o thatofsomethingunderstandmusttheunderstandguns,youfirstthetimesproduced them. The half-century from 1890 to 1940 took America from the last of the Indian wars to the eve of Pearl Harbor, and it also encompassed what is now known as the Golden Age of Shotgunning. CLASSICS Classic

JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 SPORTING CLASSICS • 69

The late nineteenth century was a time of great change and innovation in firearms, and L. C. Smith was shrewd enough to know that his guns were becoming dated. Salvation arrived in the form of one Alexander T. Brown, who had been with Smith since 1878 and who, in February 1883, applied for a patent on what he called a “Smith top-action, double-cross-bolted breech-loading gun.” This patent marked the beginning of the true L. C. Smith, for it was Brown’s sidelock design that set the form for Elsies for the next 60-plus years, and the first of the new guns, when they appeared in 1884, were stamped “L. C. Smith.” To appreciate what Brown wrought, and thus appreciate the Smith, a brief lecture on shotguns must be absorbed. There are two basic forms of modern double shotgun action: sidelock and boxlock. The sidelock carries the firing mechanism attached to two long sideplates that extend rearward from the breech. There are two advantages in the sidelock system. Because the flat springs are longer than those in a boxlock, and therefore more lightly stressed, it is easier to open and cock the gun, and it is easier to obtain a superior trigger pull. The other advantage is artistic. The extended sideplate continues Lyman C. Smith

This was an era when America was still rural. Superhighways and shopping malls were undreamed of. Farms were still small, and farmers saw no sin in leaving the occasional patch of cover. If the ground was not harvested clean of every solitary grain of wheat, it would not adversely affect corporate profits. The environment, the single most important element in determining game populations, was largely intact. There were a lot of birds to be hunted, and a lot of time in which to hunt them. If you examine photos of the era, you will see men posing before days’ bags that seem incredible by today’s standards. Posing in their dark pants and vests and open white shirts, with their long-barreled shotguns at port arms or parade rest, they are the lucky ones. The gun. In those days, there was only one type that really counted—the side-byside. There were single-shots and pumps and recoil-operated autos, but they were ungainly objects, suitable for meat hunters, lacking in form and grace and style. The double was the gun that could make a boy dream or light a grown man’s eyes. And the most famous doubles came not from England, where names like Rigby and Westley Richards stirred men’s souls, but from places like Ithaca, New York, and Meriden, Connecticut. The names of those guns formed a litany for the times: Parker, L. C. Smith, Ithaca, Lefever and A. H. Fox. Although each make had its adherents, the one that emerged as the premier of the Golden Age was the Parker. But the others were great in their time, and they bear a close look by collectors—especially America’s only sidelock double, Sweet Elsie, the L. C. Smith. Somewhere, there may be a line of firearms with a more unlikely pedigree than that of L. C. Smith, but it would be hard to find. American Arms and Armsmakers, compiled in 1938, says of the firm: “Established at Syracuse, N. Y., by Lyman Cornelius Smith in 1877. Smith sold his interests in 1890. During his term as head of the business he gave employment to an average of 176 workmen and produced more than 30,000 shotguns. The Smith line is now made by the Hunter Arms Co., Fulton, N. Y.” This is like saying that “Hamlet” is a play about a man who is very irritated at his uncle. The full story is much richer and begins with a gunmaker named William Henry Baker who designed a drilling. This three-barreled rifle/ shotgun was patented in 1875 and was made by Baker in comparatively small numbers. By 1877, he had moved to Syracuse, New York, where he entered into a partnership with Lyman (L. C.) Smith and his brother, Leroy Smith. Under the name W. H. Baker and Company, the firm offered both the drilling and a double shotgun. The prospered,companybutby the end of the decade, both Leroy Smith and Baker had sold out to Lyman Smith, who continued to manufacture the Baker gun under the name L. C. Smith & Co.

Brown introduced two other innovations. The first was a rotarylocking bolt that was located at the top of the standing breech that pivoted through a rib extension. The rib extension had a rectangular hole cut out of it, and the bolt fitted through this hole and over a lip at the end of the extension.

70 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 L.C. SMITH: THE YANKEE SIDELOCK

a much larger surface to work on.

The purpose of this is to resist the bane of all double guns shooting loose, or the development of play between the barrels and the breech, which can render a gun unshootable. Every time a double shotgun is fired, the muzzle is wrenched up by the force of the burning powder, and this constant twisting upward is what works a gun loose.

Traditionally, the finest doubles have been sidelocks, but they have one major disadvantage. Unless the locks are inletted very carefully, the stock will be weak as it lacks the “chest,” or broad shelf of wood, that a boxlock incorporates where the action abuts the stock. In other words, there is no large bearing surface to absorb the force of recoil. The boxlock is the far more common form of action and was shared by the other great makes of the time. It incorporates the firing mechanism in the lockplate, and is, in its modern form, quite as good mechanically as the sidelock.

The trick in preventing this is to lock the barrels as solidly to the breech as possible, and the Smith system was unique. The Smith locking bolt, rather than passing laterally through the rib L.C. Smith/Hunter Arms 3 Grade hammerless sidelock manufactured around 1893.

Factory engraved L.C. Smith/Hunter Arms Co. Specialty Grade with Hunter One trigger.

and try to wiggle the barrels, they’ll feel absolutely tight. But, if you swing the top lever to the side, removing the locking bolt from the rib extension and then wiggle, you’ll find that there is indeed play between barrels and breech. Smith made a great deal of this locking system in the company’s advertising, and in its 1918 brochure, we are advised on every other page that “Smith guns never shoot loose.” They do, just as any gun can, given sufficient time and wear. Brown’s other innovation came in 1886, with the patent for the L. C. Smith hammerless gun, and consisted of rotation cocking bars. When other shotguns used (and use) twin spurs or tabs that are pushed straight down to cock the action, Brown employed two crank-like levers that engaged recesses in the forend iron. When a Smith is broken, the levers are rotated downward about 40 degrees, and cams inside the receiver cock the hammers. It is indeed unconventional, and a good system. The L. C. Smith gun was a success. It was made in both hammer and hammerless models, in a range of six different grades numbered 2 to 7. They were available in 10 or 12 gauges only and were fitted with twist, or Damascus, barrels. (The hammer gun remained in the line until 1934; a tribute to its popularity in the face of more modern designs.) But in 1889, the L. C. Smith Gun Company went up for sale, due to—of all things—the typewriter. Alexander Brown had become intrigued with the new device and developed a model that was superior to the ones then in existence. He persuaded Smith that the future lay in upper and lower case type, rather than side-by-side barrels, and history proved him correct. The Smith Premier Typewriter Company eventually became Smith-Corona, and finally Smith-Corona-Marchant. L. C. Smith died in 1910, a rich man.

L.C. SMITH: THE YANKEE SIDELOCK above and below: Factory engraved L.C. Smith/Hunter Arms Crown Grade. Only 52 Crown Grade shotguns were manufactured in this configuration.

72 His gun business was purchased by the Hunter Arms Company of Fulton, New York, and in 1890, the first guns emerged from the Hunter plant, marked Hunter Arms Company, Fulton, N. Y. The basic design that Alexander Brown created was never changed. Hunter offered some new grades and introduced modern steel barrels. The one significant development credited to Hunter Arms appeared in 1904, and bore the name The Hunter One Trigger. It was, as you might surmise, a single-trigger gun. The One Trigger was selective, and although complex, it worked well. In 1913, Hunter revised its entire line, and post-1913 Smiths can be identified by the grade of the gun stamped on the right-hand barrel near the breech. A dizzying array of models and options was offered. The 1918 catalog lists no fewer than 36 variations, ranging from the economy model Fulton boxlock at $32.50 to the Delux, at $1,000 even. (The Fulton was something of an aberration, and is not considered an L. C. Smith shotgun.) Each successive grade offered more elaborate engraving, fancier wood and checkering, and refinements such as the One Trigger and automatic ejectors. Smiths were made in every gauge from 12 through .410, with the probable exception of 28. No one knows why, but apparently none were made in that bore size. Each gauge had its own frame size, and the smaller gauges are considerably trimmer than the larger bores. If I recall correctly, Larry Koller, the late gun writer, stocked a 20-gauge Elsie for his wife, and the gun weighed 4 1/2 pounds. The Depression and World War II spelled the end of Hunter Arms, as they did to the other great makers of doubles, and in 1945, Hunter Arms was sold to Marlin Firearms in New Haven, Connecticut. Marlin cut down drastically on the number of models produced, and the Smiths made in New Haven are marked “The L. C. Smith Gun Company, Inc.” Six years later, the end seemed to have come. The public’s taste had turned to repeaters, and those who wanted two barrels preferred the over/under.

It appeared that Sweet Elsie was goneButforever.notso. In early 1967, Marlin re-issued the L. C. Smith in two grades, Field and Deluxe. These were plain guns with case-hardened locks, 28-inch barrels and vent ribs. They were made in 12 gauge only. The new Elsies improved significantly on the old models. The inletting around the sidelocks were reinforced with fiberglass and the locks were positioned with jackscrews, which further took the strain off the wood. The stock dimensions were more modern; that is, they had less drop. The Field Grade, when introduced, sold for only $200, but it was not a success. Between 1968 and 1971, only 2,539 of the new Elsies were made, and then the curtain was drawn for good.

L.C. SMITH: THE YANKEE SIDELOCK Engraved L.C. Smith Specialty Grade Single Barrel Trap manufactured in 1929.

Hunter Arms Company of Fulton, New York

Collectors must view the Elsie with a critical eye. It was a good gun, but flawed, and can present problems to the person who wants to shoot it. The main problem is the sidelocks, and their tendency to crack the stock under use, and thus interfere with the trigger mechanism. One authority with whom I talked claims that this is a problem only with the lowergrade guns, and that it is rarely seen in the higher grades where the fitting of wood to metal was more careful. Another says that all Smiths cracked sooner or later.

Syracuse production: L.C. Smith Quality 2 sidelock hammerless manufactured in Syracuse, New York, sometime before the transition to the Hunter Arms facility.

L.C. SMITH: THE YANKEE SIDELOCK Factory engraved Marlin L.C. Smith

Scarce factory engraved L.C. Smith/Hunter Arms A1 Grade hammerless ejector shotgun introduced after the Hunter Arms takeover of L.C. Smith and only manufactured until 1901 with a total of 739 produced.

If you are thinking of investing in one, it is imperative that you have the sideplates removed and the wood examined for damage. At the same time, have the gun checked for tightness and tinkering. Some Elsies were handed to the local blacksmith for repair, and these gents, having never seen a sidelock before, did some horrendous things to the mechanisms. These “repairs” can come back to haunt you. From a shooter’s viewpoint, the Smith presents a problem in that the pre-1967 guns are stocked with far more drop than a modern shotgun, and require that you shoot with your head far more erect than is standard nowadays. If this proves difficult, as it probably will, you can have the stock bent upward, or you can have a new stock made entirely. If you choose the former, the stock may break. If you decide to have a new stock made, have it done by someone who has already worked with sidelock guns. Do not get rid of the old stock. Keep it against the day you may want to sell the gun to a collector. On today’s market, it is the Parker and the Best-Grade English guns that are commanding high prices. [Editor’s note: Valuations reflect 1981 market and dollars.] Smiths are quite reasonable by comparison. A Hunter Arms Field Grade gun can run anywhere from $300 in 12 gauge to $650 in .410. The higher hisindeed20-gaugedealer.asfiveandpossiblynowandcollectiblemoderatecommands,really$30,000youaround20-gaugecondition,Idealaremore.others—canSpecialty,grades—Olympic,CrownandthecostsubstantiallyThesmallergaugesthemoredesirable,andGradeingoodboredforshells,canbring$4,500today.Whencomparethistotheto$60,000thatatopflightsmall-gaugeParkertheSmith’sisindeedaprice.Consideralsothatthemarketforgunsissubjecttowhimfad.TheslightlydementedpricespaidforothergunsmayquitepushcollectorstotheSmith,thusdriveupitsprice.Twenty-hundreddollarsmaybelookedonthegroundfloorinafewyears.YoumustbuyfromarecognizedTheguywhooffersyoutheSpecialtyGradefor$350mayhavehadtoraisemoneyfastforaunt’sprefrontallobotomy—orhe may have just stolen it. Be acutely aware also that any alteration, repair or change to an original gun detracts from its value as a collector’s piece. And that means any alteration. Since there were so many different grades and models offered over the years, you are advised— yea, implored—to do some reading on the subject and know just which gun is which. Toward this end, I highly recommend L. C. Smith Shotguns, by Lt. Col. William S. Brophy. It is profusely illustrated and carries a wealth of detail. For a lively history of the L. C. Smith I recommend The Best Shotguns Ever Made in America, by Michael McIntosh. It deals—in eminently readable terms—with Parker, L. C. Smith, Ithaca, A. H. Fox, the Winchester 21 and the Remington 32. The Elsie was not a perfect gun; indeed, she was not as good as the best of her time. But she was graceful and elegant—and there were more than a few who loved her. ■

BY DAVE BOOKS

74 • SPORTING

LONGCLASSICS LIVE KINGTHE

“Of the American ducks, the canvasback is easily the most famous…its fame is now too firmly established ever to be shaken and it will continue to be regarded, as it has so long been, as the king of our ducks.”

In the hands of the right hunter that gun could bring down ducks at extreme range, but I wasn’t that hunter.

—George Bird Grinnell, 1901

he Manitoba prairie, five decades ago. Fresh out of college, I was a rookie waterfowler with a brand-new Remington 870 pump, ventilated rib and full choke.

This time, though, I got lucky. My two friends—my duck hunting “mentors”— had each shot at the passing flock of highflying ducks and missed. I shot at the trailing bird in the V-formation and down it came—a beautiful “bull” canvasback, rust-colored head, wedge-shaped bill, red eye and glistening white belly. Not a bad way to start your duck hunting career.

Dogless, I watched as bushy-bearded Rodney’s yellow Lab, Punch, splashed into the marsh to retrieve it. My buddies were green with envy and I didn’t know why. Rodney launched a stream of tobacco juice into the cattails and I readied myself for a lecture in Duck Hunting 101. “Dammit, Books, I’ve been hunting ducks since I was a kid and I never shot a canvasback. You don’t know a coot from a Canada goose and you get the first one you shoot at. That just ain’t right.” That night, over good Irish whiskey, I came to understand that I had shot the king of ducks, the regal canvasback, the bird most sought by gourmands from New York to Chicago around the turn of the 20th century. In those days, a brace of canvasbacks in prime condition fetched $5 or even higher, while bluebills (scaup), known to market hunters as “blackheads,” might bring only 30 to 50 cents a pair. A $3 duck in 1900 would cost north of $75 in today’s money.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 75

Obviously, market gunning for ducks could be lucrative, especially for the men who earned a hard living on Chesapeake Bay and other duck-wintering meccas along the Atlantic Coast. They risked life and limb in cold water, gunning from sink boxes, sneak boats and skiffs, to supply a growing demand for meat from large cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Boston. In a span of less than 50 years, market hunting—and satellite industries such as decoy carving and boatbuilding— became a way of life for baymen of the Eastern Shore and up and down the coast. Thanks to “King Can,” places such as the Susquehanna Flats, Back Bay and Currituck Sound are permanently etched in waterfowling lore. But it couldn’t last forever. Unregulated market hunting too often led to huge bags and birds sometimes wasted for lack of refrigeration. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 put an end to market hunting, although poaching continued along the eastern seaboard for many years until the market hunters, most of whom had never known another way of life, got too old to go to the marsh. The Act might have been the death knell for many coastal communities had it not been for the increasing popularity of sport hunting and the lavish private clubs that sprang up to keep the hunting tradition alive. In the end, the once-vast canvasback populations of the Chesapeake were decimated not so much by market hunting as by pollution and increased silt loads in the bays and estuaries that choked out submerged beds of wild celery, sago pondweed and widgeon grass. That, added to wetland drainage and drought on the northern nesting grounds, caused canvasback numbers to spiral downward. By the early 1970s the canvasback population had dwindled from millions to about 400,000 birds. As moisture returned to the prairies after a devastating drought in the 1980s, canvasback numbers began increasing. Conservation efforts on Chesapeake Bay and other Atlantic Coast wintering grounds slowly led to improved water quality and a modest resurgence in aquatic grasses. From a low point of less than half a million 40 years ago, canvasback numbers during the spring waterfowl survey now stand at close to 700,000—not a complete recovery, but cause for optimism.

THE CANVASBACK: LONG LIVE THE KING

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peoplelordlyforconservationistIowa-bornAldoLeopoldsaiditbestwhenhewrote:“Weoffernoapologythuselevatingthecanvasbacktoaclassicalrole,foramongduck-mindedhehaslongbeenthe‘goldstandard’againstwhichalllesserfryareweighedandmeasured.”

A few years after shooting my first canvasback I stood at the edge of a pond near Missoula, Montana, talking with a dentist about the dog sitting at his side. An active field trialer, he had several good prospects in his kennel and thought he might sell this three-year-old female Labrador named Bullet. “She’s not going to make it as a trial dog,” he said. “She’s stubborn—won’t listen to the whistle. She’d make a good gun dog for you, though.”Forme, looking down at her silky black coat and bright eyes, it was love at first sight, though I tried not to show it. A starving graduate student at the time, I couldn’t afford the asking price. I offered him $50 and held my breath. He turned to leave, then stopped and looked at me. “Will you hunt her?” he asked. “Every chance I get,” I said, and meant it. Just like that, I had a dog of my own. I headed home with Bullet riding shotgun, hoping I wouldn’t need the dentist for a root canal anytime soon. On an October evening that fall I sat in a folding chair scanning a prairie lake with my binoculars, watching ducks

Renowned

An occasional squadron of lowflying divers skirted the lakeshore, just out of shooting range. Then a flock of a dozen ducks bored straight toward me, closer to shore—big, fastflying ducks, the drakes flashing red, black and silver in the morning sun. Cans!

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THE CANVASBACK: LONG LIVE THE KING above: The King’s Realm left: Where Kings Reign Both paintings by Adam Grimm. FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT ADAMGRIMM.COM OR CALL 440-225-2267

trade across a distant point, thinking that’s where I would set my decoys in the morning. I’d driven there with my girlfriend, Cindy—an Irish lass with long auburn hair and eyes the color of a glacier-fed lake—in my old Ford Pinto wagon, Bullet nestled in a jumble of decoys, waders and camping gear in the back. I was deliriously happy, having just sold my Remington 870 and squandered my life savings ($900) on a used Browning Superposed, a gun I truly couldn’t afford. In the morning well before dawn, I pulled on my waders by lantern light, grabbed my gun, shells and a bag of decoys, and began the long trek into the marsh. After placing the decoys off the point I’d scouted the night before, Bullet and I settled into the cattails to wait for legal shooting time. Before dawn arrived, I could hear the whoosh of duck wings out over the water. Sitting at my side, Bullet shivered with excitement. As the sun crept over the eastern horizon, tendrils of mist slowly vanished into the brightening sky. The wind picked up and sang across the marsh, carrying with it the rich scent of marsh mud and decaying vegetation, raising a chop on the dark water.

THE CANVASBACK: LONG LIVE THE KING

“While most Upper Bay decoy makers were producing vast numbers of working decoys to be used as mere tools of the waterfowl hunters, John Graham created these masterpieces of art.… These Canvasbacks set the standard against which others can be judged.”

John B. Graham (1822-1912) Charlestown, MD, c. 1880

Canvasbacks & Redheads by Lynn Bogue Hunt CIRCA 1917 E.I. DU PONT DE NEMOURS & CO.

—John Sullivan Sometime around 1880 John Black Graham, a cabinetmaker, boatbuilder and decoy carver from Charlestown, Maryland, fashioned a lovely pair of canvasback decoys. What Mr. Graham received for his labor we don’t know, but his two decoys recently sold at auction for $216,000. These wooden birds, now more than a century old and still in fine condition, were most likely created as works of art, but the vast majority of Graham’s decoys were “working” birds that proudly rode the waters of Chesapeake Bay. It is known that John Graham carved thousands of birds in his lifetime, and that his favorite decoy was the canvasback. President Grover Cleveland, an avid waterfowler who enjoyed gunning for canvasbacks on the Susquehanna Flats, stayed at the famous Wellwood Club and gunned over a special set of decoys, now known as the “Cleveland Canvasbacks.” Although the maker of those wooden birds remains unknown, many authorities believe it was Charlestown resident John B. Graham.

Hands shaking, I managed to knock one down and watched to make sure I wouldn’t need to shoot it again before sending Bullet to retrieve it—crippled cans are strong divers and notorious escape artists—but it lay still on the water, the one canvasback per day the law allowed that year. I shot a few other ducks that morning, but they paled in comparison to the regal can. Wonder of wonders, the next morning I shot another drake canvasback, and we returned to Missoula triumphant. That night we dined like epicures, feasting on rare roast canvasback and wild rice washed down with a good bottle of merlot and topped off with pumpkin pie, whipped cream and steaming mugs of coffee. I could now understand why canvasbacks fetched $5 a pair in the market hunting days of old. Bullet went on to be a wonderful dog, strong-willed but tireless in the uplands and courageous in the water, regardless of weather. Cindy, I’m sorry to report, eventually moved on to greener pastures, perhaps foreseeing—correctly as it turns out—a lifetime of duck hunting, muddy paw prints and shedding Labradors— not to mention the financial strain of too damn many shotguns.

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Canvasback Pair

AUCTIONSARTFINECOPLEYPHOTO:

I’m on my fourth Labrador retriever now, a barrel-chested, otter-tailed British Lab named Bailey. One day a few years ago on a public marsh she retrieved a drake canvasback for a man and his young son hunting several hundred yards away. One of them had hit the bird but it kept flying; I tried to knock it down when it passed by me but was pretty sure I’d missed. The bird slanted down 150 yards out in the lake, fluttered a few times and died. When the man didn’t go after the duck—neither of us had a boat—I assumed he had conceded it to me, if I could get it. I gave Bailey a line and she swam toward the bird, head high and eyes searching. With a whistle correction or two she closed the distance, then took a direct line as her nose locked on the scent. When she finally spotted the bird lying prone on the water, she churned full speed ahead, damn the torpedoes. As she was bringing in the duck, I thought longingly of a roast canvasback dinner, but reconsidered and gave it to its rightful owners. The man explained

At His Best – Black Lab by Ron Van Gilder. Oil, 34 x 50 inches.

Dave Books is the author of Wingbeats and Heartbeats: Essays onGameBirds,GunDogs,andDaysAfield,publishedbytheUniversityofWisconsinPress.

THE CANVASBACK: LONG LIVE THE KING Bailey.

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they had a young dog that hadn’t been trained to take hand signals and they knew trying to get the bird would be futile. The excited look in the boy’s eyes made up for the meal I’d missed. Bailey has gray in her muzzle now and so do I. Next fall we’ll go back to the point where I shot those two drakes nearly 50 years ago. I’ll take a bag of decoys, the same old Browning Superposed I used back then and a box of bismuth shells. With luck the canvasbacks will once again have swept south from the parklands of northern Canada, stopping to rest at my prairie lake on their southward journey. If I’m lucky enough to bag one, I’ll raise a glass or two to tradition, to Labrador retrievers and to the canvasback, the king of ducks. ■

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By 1880 the breech-loading side-byside double as we know it was near full development with the Purdey sliding underbolt and the Scott spindle; in 1909 Boss & Co. patented its superb over/under. Not to be left in the dust, in 1883 Christopher Spencer launched his pump-action shotgun that included for a few extra dollars screw-on chokes, which were a set of three rings—improved cylinder, modified and full—that screwed on at the tip of the muzzle. The Spencer, later bought by surplus arms magnate Francis Bannerman, used a toggle action that at best was clunky. However, 10 years later, in 1893, Winchester introduced its John Browning-designed Model 1893 pump. By then, smokeless powder began shoving blackpowder out of the ammunition formulary and the 1893’s action proved to be too weak for the higher pressures of smokeless. Browning did a rework, and the Winchester 1897 was born. It stayed in the line for 50 years. In 1903 Browning again struck paydirt with his long recoil-action Automatic 5 that lasted nearly a century in the Browning catalog. Concurrently in 1903, Danish gunsmith Christer Sjörgren launched his semi-auto Normal that is part and parcel of today’s inertia-style semi autos.

opposite page, left to right: Super Fox, L. C. Smith and Parker, all classic duck guns shown with an F. A. Allen duck call, Mason mallard decoy and original-style rolled-crimp Super X shells.

BY JOHN M. TAYLOR

THE DUCKGREATGUNS

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hich came first, the chicken or the egg? We’ll never know, but I can tell you the great duck gun came after the ammunition. Certainly there were heavy, largebore shotguns in 6, 8 and 10 gauges, but even at that their payloads of shot were modest. The 10-gauge at the turn of the 19th Century carried 1 1/4 ounces of shot.

above left: 1924 Parker disassembled. above right: The Parker forend shows excellent inletting of iron.

Using a single-barrel A. H. Fox trap gun, Askins and Sweeley shot patterns and had the bore continually altered in search of the best combination. Their final boring joined a tightly tapered chamber (at that time, most were straight cylinders or only mildly tapering) to an extended forcing cone that provided a gentle transition of the shot into the barrel, Maryland Eastern Shore market hunter Altie Langford killed 10,000 ducks and geese a year for the market with his Remington Model 11 semi-auto.

In 1921 a Twin Falls, Idaho, lawyer E. M. Sweeley and ballistics expert Charles Askins, perhaps the best-known gun writer in the nation at that time, set about developing a shotgun barrel that would take advantage of the Super X’s ballistics.

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The end result was a shotgun shell that cut the length of the shot string (a shotshell’s pattern when fired has both width and length) at least in half, providing increased killing power.

PHOTO: THE HARRY WALSH COLLECTION OF THE CHESAPEAKE BAY MARITIME MUSEUM, ST. MICHAELS, MARYLAND

In addition, the Olin’s copper-plated the shot, not so much as to add lubricity as they are jostled down the barrel, but to prevent pellet fusing from the white-hot propellant gasses that seeped past the card and felt wad column.

In 1921, the Western Cartridge Company in Alton, Illinois, owned by Franklin Olin and his sons Spencer and John, brought forth a newly designed shotshell that used progressive-burning propellant. Blackpowder exploded and rammed the shot down the barrel; Western’s propellant shoved the shot along in ever progressing speed. For years, shotshell manufacturers had tried various ways to prevent pellet deformation and shot stringing. The new Western Super X used the contemporary paper hull made by winding glued paper into a tube, aging it, then cutting it to length, crimping on the brass head and loading it with powder, wads and shot, finally rolling the crimp with its over-shot wad. Rolled crimps lasted into the 1940s and are still occasionally used because they need less of the hull’s overall length than the more common folded crimp.

At the time, some began seriously questioning how the relationship of chamber, bore and choke affected the downrange performance of the Super X.

When the Super Fox came on the market, Fox’s advertising promised, “80-percent patterns at 40 yards,” intended for use with factory-fresh Western Super X shells. When hunters began stuffing it with handloads and other lesser ammunition, hate mail began pouring into Fox’s Philadelphia factory. Very quickly the barrel flats were stamped “Barrels Not Guaranteed See Tag,” which elaborated on the quality of ammunition for which the guarantee was extended. Not to be outdone, L. C. Smith sought to make a competitor to the Super Fox.

Called alternately the Wildfowl or Long Range, it was little more than a fieldgrade gun in which the chambers were lengthened to 3 inches and on most a 3-inch reinforcing web was welded between the barrels extending from near the end of the forcing cone area. The beauty or the beast of the L. C. Smith is that, while it is America’s only sidelock-style shotgun of that era, it comes at a price. The sidelock in all its British grandeur offers excellent trigger pulls, a safety sear and broad canvas for engraving. The Smith delivers on some but not all. The trigger pulls can be excellent and there’s lots of space for engraving, but L. C.’s sidelock has two flaws: One, it does not have an intercepting sear to catch the hammer should the gun be dropped or jarred.

I bought a Smith Long Range over the phone and the seller swore on stacked Super Fox barrel flats showing “Barrels Not Guaranteed” inscription, O-weight barrels and Fox proof mark. An L. C. Smith showing the decorative “LONG RANGE” stamp. Close-up of the steel reinforcing web welded between the barrels of an L. C. Smith Long Range.

Second, and more insidious, is the fact that the back of the sideplates are square. Square, too, is the tight inletting of the plates into the wood. The result? Cracking of the head of the stock.

I own two Super Foxes, one 2 3/4-inch shipped from A. H. Fox in 1924 and the other, a 3-inch chambered, shipped in 1923. Some knuckle dragger cut the barrels of the 2 3/4-inch gun from 32 to 30 perhaps to shoot steel shot, who knows, so it wears Briley X Thinwall chokes. The other 3-inch gun has original 30-inch barrels. Using my digital barrel micrometer I measured the bores of the 3-inch gun; the right barrel’s cylinder bore is .741-inch and the choke constriction is .040-inch and the taper to the choke from the cylinder bore is 4 1/2 inches. The left barrel measures .741-inch before the lead to the choke which is 4 inches, and the constriction is .044-inch. Just what Askins and Sweeley ordered!

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The action used only coiled springs that even when broken often function.

The L. C. Smith “Hunter One” singleselective trigger. Winchester Model 12 Heavy Duck with “For Super X and Super Speed 3 inch” barrel stamp.

THE GREAT DUCK GUNS which was overbored to .740-inch from the traditional .725-/.729-inch and finally a long taper into a tight .040-inch constricted choke. When they finished, the A. H. Fox HE-Grade Super Fox was born. For my money it was the first real duck gun. The 9-pound-plus Fox used the heaviest O barrels on a wider, heavier action with great attention to the boring of the barrels. As was customary to any shotgun of the day, the customer could order it in any stock configuration and dimensions he desired. Barrels were 30 or 32 inches and otherwise very plainly finished with just a squiggle of engraving around the case-hardened action. The 12-gauge Super Fox was made in both 2 3/4- and 3-inch chambers. A 3-inch chambered 20 gauge was also made and are somewhat rare. Fox offered a singletrigger, but most had double triggers. Of note is that the Fox action had only three parts—the trigger, sear and hammer—which also carried the firing pin—very little to go wrong.

Buttstock cracks in L.C. Smith Long Range is typical of many L. C. Smith shotguns.

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The stock is odd for that era because it has a straight comb with drops of 1 1/2-inch at both comb and heel. Like so much of my life the factory record book for my particular serial number has been lost, and I therefore have no idea in what configuration it left Parker’s Meriden, Connecticut, factory. It also has a straight grip, not unusual, but for an otherwise work-a-day VHE-Grade, somewhat puzzling. I showed it to a couple Parker afficionados and they said they thought it to be all original. Parker, and in fact all of the Americanmade shotguns of that era were not hand made in the British tradition where each part began as a block or strip of steel that was hand shaped and fitted, but rather very carefully assembled from a bin of machine-made parts that were then hand fitted. Certainly not as simple as today’s AR-15s into which you can toss a jumble of parts and come up shooting, but complex enough that virtually any replacement part must be hand fitted.

My Parker started life on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and, because of its configura tion, might have been a live-pigeon gun. Who knows? At any rate it’s meant for busi ness with 32-inch 3-inch-chambered barrels that measure in the right barrel at .728-inch with a constriction of .038-inch and the left at .729-inch and .040-inch constriction. Measuring the choke forcing cones both were right at 2 inches. I shoot my Parker just for fun once a year with Tungsten-Matrix or one of the recent bismuth loads. The trigger guard always bites me on my middle finger, so I tape up first.

Bibles that the stock was not cracked. On arrival it looked good, but after a couple of weeks in my gun safe with a Goldenrod keeping the humidity low, it looked like the map of a Montana drainage. My now-retired master gunsmith, Greg Wolf, painstakingly put it back together and delivered it with the suggestion of shooting only very light loads in the future. I shot one goose with it using Kent’s TungstenMatrix and it rests forever in the safe. My 1925 Smith has a Hunter One single-selective trigger that selects just great provided you want to shoot the left barrel first. The cylinder-bore diameter of the right barrel is .734-inch and the choke constriction is .046-inch; the left barrel goes .732-inch and the choke .037-inch. While these barrels measure a little on the wide side between standard and Fox’s .740-inch, it’s hard to say that this was much other than their standard field gun dolled up. Of course, not mentioning Parker Bros. would lead to my burning at the stake and justifiably so. Parker has become synonymous with perhaps the premier quality American-made shotgun. Actually, all of our American greats were made very well and beautifully, so let’s not get into hair pullin’ and eye gougin’ over that. I will say I often like just looking at the forend of my 1924 Parker. The excellent inletting of the forend catch is a thing of beauty, not even surpassed by my fine British Henry Atkin (from Purdey’s).

THE GREAT DUCK GUNS

A. H. Fox HE-Grade Super Fox (restocked) with a Tom Turpin duck call, cork decoy with cypress bottom board and poplar head by Carl Eswine, Shawneetown, Illinois, and Super X shells.

Offered in 30- or 32-inch barrels, you could order a Heavy Duck with any choke you wished, but full was the standard of the day. In Winchester’s literature introducing the Heavy Duck it mentions using Winchester Brush Loads (spreader loads) for quail, woodcock and other close-range birds. The barrels were all stamped “For Super Speed and Super X,” subtle advertising of the WinchesterWestern brands of ammunition.

THE GREAT DUCK GUNS

The advantage of the Model 12 pump action was that you could shoot any 12-gauge load because the cycling is by strong arm not mechanical. One of my most enjoyable shotguns to shoot every season is my Model 12 Heavy Duck made in 1942, the year I was born. Its bore is .729-inch—within acceptable manufacturing standards—and the choke .0355-inch, which was Winchester’s standard full choke constriction. My favorite wears a solid Winchester Matted Rib that added to its price, which in 1942 with rib was $73.20.

The Repeaters Not to be slighted, we should look at two of the trend-setting repeaters. The Winchester Model 12 pump came along shortly after the 1903 Browning Automatic 5 and both were a staple in the blind for decades. Winchester introduced the Model 12 Heavy Duck in 1931 and Browning upped the Auto 5 to 3 inches in 1958. Although the Belgian-made Browning Auto 5 was the topdrawer of the long-recoil semi-autos, the “American” semi-auto was less expensive and with “Five Shots Under Your Finger,” as Browning’s advertising boasted, became a favorite of market hunters. When John Browning first offered his Auto 5 to Winchester, he sought a royalty on each Auto 5 made, not the cash buyout as with his previous designs. Winchester declined. Remington was within a heartbeat of a deal for the manufacturing rights to the Auto 5 when Remington’s President Marcellus Hartley dropped dead of a heart attack as Browning waited in his outer office. Frustrated, Browning then took his design to Fabrique Nationale in Belgium and there the Auto 5s were made from 1903 until the 1975 when production shifted to B. C. Miroku in Japan. In 1905 Browning licensed Remington to produce a slightly modified version of his Auto 5. Initially called the Remington Autoloading Shotgun it was renamed the Model 11 in 1911. In the 1906 Remington catalog, the Autoloading Shotgun listed for $40. Maryland Eastern Shore market hunter Altie Langford, who gunned the Elliott Island marshes from 1900 to 1918, claimed to have killed 10,000 ducks and geese a year. When the Remington Autoloading Shotgun came along, he bought one. For cleaning and lubrication, he sluiced it out “every so often” with gasoline. The long recoil-style shotgun allows the barrel ring to impact the rear front of the wooden forend as the barrel slams forward. Langford said he had to replace the forend at least once a year from the battering it took. The Winchester Model 12 Heavy Duck was released on February 15, 1935, just 13 days after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s signing of the Federal Migratory Bird Act that, among other things, legislated the reduction of the magazine capacity of all repeating shotguns to no more than two shots. Hence the Model 12 Heavy Duck came with its wooden two-shot magazine restricting plug installed. In addition, the stock was cut a bit shorter at 13 5/8 inches as opposed to the regular Model 12’s stock of 14 inches to accommodate heavy hunting clothes. Inserted into the buttstock was a lead plug to add recoil-dampening weight and to balance the heavier than standard full-choked barrel, and a 1-inch solid red rubber pad completed the stock.

Winchester Model 12 Heavy Duck with Winchester Super Speed shell box, early P. S. Olt duck call and Super X shells.

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The lore of waterfowl hunting is deep, perhaps deeper in tradition than any other hunting. Decoys, calls, shotguns, ammunition, boats, literature—the list goes on—and in each instance there are long historic roots that extend back decades and even centuries. Because we are blessed with ammunition such as Kent’s Tungsten-Matrix and bismuth loads, so long as your dad’s or grandad’s shotgun is safe to shoot with modern shotgun-shell pressures, you can take it to the blind and again let it hear the hens quacking in the marsh or the geese awakening with their raucous honks as the sun peels back the stygian dark of night and hopefully always will. ■

BY ROBERT ELLIS

ife had creaturesOnlyhiswasDanintolerable,becomebutMcMurryputtingforthbestface.twootherknew the extent of his misery. Dan didn’t count his wife as one of those creatures. She and Dan were in different stages of healing, different stages of denial, and he was through trying to be strong for her. They tried talking it through, aided by a therapist, but that ended in harsh words. They settled for embittered silence. Alcohol entered the picture and the concept of divorce gained credibility. Dan and his wife were in icy detente.

JANUARY / FEBRUARY 202186 • SPORTING CLASSICSSERMONFROMTHEMOUNT

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Dan heard Kendy’s footsteps coming down the stairs. This set off a panic. Dan scanned his desk, then opened a drawer and relaxed when he saw his pint of Southern Comfort tucked safely away. He quietly closed the drawer and spread the cape awkwardly out in front of him.

SERMON FROM THE MOUNT

The mounts looked down on him. They had become close friends. In this he had at least partially humanized them. Why not? Once they ate, drank, sought pleasure and safety, made decisions, got frustrated and died by something they never saw coming. Just the other week the silence was broken by mysterious words—You, too, will die one day. Rather than discount them, Dan began speaking back, hoping the participation would encourage more talk.

“How are you doing, Dad?” Kendy asked, coming through the door for a look. “Fine. I think it will turn out all right.”

Dan said gently so as to not spoil the moment, “does usually don’t get mounted.” “They don’t? Why not?” Dan was stuck. He didn’t want to say any more. She looked at him and wiped away another tear but another one came out right away.

He sat looking at the unassembled mount sitting in pieces surrounded by tools. It wasn’t just ignorance that delayed the project. With its extended phases of curing, the project furnished a logical excuse to disappear. The perfect “hide” so to speak. The fleshed-out cape had thawed and it was time to tan it, he guessed.

This was Dan’s first attempt at taxidermy, and so far he was mostly thumbs. Frankly, he didn’t care if it ever came together.

The big-headed mule deer looking down on the scene was a monster. Chocolate, ivory-tipped antlers, 173 on the score sheet with markings that testified directly to God. Artfully designed by nature, one could say. His neck was the size of a running back’s thigh. Positioned nobly, black whiskered, dignified, gazing toward his next conquest. Six feet away, Kyle’s deer was inquisitive, turned a bit toward the bruiser. Its compact antlers didn’t actually fit the head, but it was his boy’s first. It meant much more to Dan than the mule deer.

“It might be hard to find a taxidermist,” Dan said, leaving out who would bother with it. “I want her mounted though,” Kendy pleaded. She didn’t understand. “Then you do it,” Kendy said. “You can do anything, Dad.”

Fit, 40 years old, a sharp nose centering an intelligent looking face and long brown hair struggling to hold its customary part, Dan sat with familiar numbness on a wooden stool in his small shop in the basement of his house. The door was closed, and he was cozy, sealed off. Looking down on him were two deer mounts, fashioned expertly by a local taxidermist. One was a giant mule deer Dan shot three years ago, the other was a comparatively small but nonetheless handsome 6-point whitetail—his son’s first deer. His son was killed in a traffic accident a year ago. The two animals overlooking the scene were the ones who knew the intolerable side of his life. Dan spent a lot of time down here, telling them. On the large workbench in front of Dan were the various parts of a deer mount in progress. The ghastly white form with haunting, pre-set eyes stood with its nose to the ceiling along with two clear plastic ear liners, the thawed-out cape and a can of Instant Tan. Farther away were a hide punch, touch up paint and brush, a staple gun, needles and nylon thread. If Dan ordered the form size correctly, he told himself, maybe he’d be able to get a good night’s sleep.

Dan’s 14-year-old daughter, Kendy, shot the doe. She became legal hunting age two days before late doe season. Dan knew his daughter was not a hunter. She bought her license to replace her dead brother Kyle, thinking it would help. After she bravely shot the doe, mopping a tear with the back of her hand that had reached her chin, she said she wanted it on the wall next to Kyle’s“Honey,”deer.

The mount was of a plain, forest-variety doe. For a taxidermist, probably a couple hours labor. For Dan—a seasoned architect— weeks, the labor equivalent of sketching, researching and designing a formidable structure. So far, the sputtering project was pounding in one of his college professor’s foundational axioms—in order to understand everything, you must know one thing entirely. By this the professor meant the realization that every endeavor comes with myriad challenges and layers of unseen problems to be solved. Knowing that, the professor claimed, was what separated the amateur from the professional.

The doe was proving the professor’s point. Getting the damn thing caped would be an ordeal; the shampooing and fleshing a messy, bad dream.

“How much longer ’til we can put her up?” “Say, you’re in a hurry, aren’t you?” “Kind of.” “Not long now, Honey.” Dan smoothed out the cape. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his daughter looking up at the other mounts. It wasn’t so long ago that she said the room made her feel creepy. Now she’d shot a deer and wanted her mount. Dan loved her for that because he knew she still felt creepy. She shot it only to help him out with Kyle. Somewhere close to his heart, he quivered.

Dan told her as he’d been taught. Then he realized he’d never bothered to tell Kyle. An avalanche of remorse tumbled over him. Before Kendy left the room, Dan asked her to repeat in her own words what he had told her. Somehow, it seemed vital that she knew. Kendy did this, took a last look and left a moment later.

“Won’t be much longer now,” he said. “Just some fine work.” Dan fiddled with an ear liner, pretending he knew what he was“Kendy,doing. did I ever tell you how you can understand all things?” “Who told you?” Kendy asked apprehensively. She was there when Dan told his wife that he was talking to the mounted animals, and that they were showing him a way out. His wife jumped on it, said he was crazy. It flared into a shouting match. “My college professor.”

A day later, he heard Do not waste the days before the surprise hits you. Dan reported this to his wife who promptly accused him of mental illness. And Dan wasn’t sure that it wasn’t.

Dan took a sip. “I’m sorry, if it helps any.” Oh, no. I helped you live. I brought a heart-felt moment to your life. It was very much worth it. “It was?” I moved someone’s life. That’s the point of everything. Dan felt these words plant somewhere inside, and it felt like a pleasant advance. His eyes went over to the whitetail. “You did the same for Kyle.” Here I am. Dan thought back to the moment. Exchanging a hug, high fives, relieved laughter, don’t forget to unload the gun, a solemn prayer, Kyle saying, “I did it, Dad.” Very difficult moments now. Dan managed a nod, a tear, a sip. The whitetail read his mind. Never fail to remember the transcendent joy I brought to you at that moment. This is the entire purpose—enjoying the moment, exchanging love, goodness, special times. Be these moments for others, Dan. Create them. Live as if it is your last chance. Dan perceived a language heavy with meaning. The mule deer clarified. If we brought joy to you in death, bring joy to others while you live. Or we hang here for nothing. From deep inside, Dan suddenly felt a great longing for these deer. With hope he asked, “Did you live that day as if it were yourThelast?”whitetail responded.

Dan put down the ear liner and took out the Southern Comfort. He switched seats to the spare recliner in the corner. He wanted just a quick nip or two while he looked at the animals.

Well done. Teach your offspring. This is your only immortality. The words were spoken audibly, or were they? If they weren’t, how did he hear them? “I failed to tell my son, though.” He will be told all that he needs to know. Dan pounced on this. He threw out three, four questions all having to do with Kyle. The mounts went silent.

“You never saw it coming either, did you?” he said in more of a whisper. No one does. They see it happen to others and put it out of their minds. Apply it to your own life as if it will happen tomorrow. Trust me, Conqueror, you will never see it coming, either.

88 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 SERMON FROM THE MOUNT

Then I am happy.

Gillespie Gold by Brian Grimm, oil on canvas, 22 x 35 inches.

Dan tried to apply it. Here’s what came of it: The story of any hunt is a brief testimony tolerated but once by a handful of listeners. The photos will eventually end up in flames or a second-hand store. The head will move where time takes it; the circumstances will become unknown. This was the best he could think to say. Yes, came from the direction of the mule deer. When you are gone, I will still exist. Death exists longer than life. Think back, did you enjoy our little moment together? “Yes,” Dan said abruptly. “I was humbled. I thanked you, even said a quick prayer. In your death, you were very beautiful. I was thoroughly moved.”

“The day of death teaches us there is an end to life. We can’t see it coming, but it will. It is how we live before the day that matters. If we live without considering the simple things of today, we will live poorly. It is not for wealth, or position or the envy of others we live. One day it will suddenly be over and all we will have is how we lived. Right?” No one spoke further. The next night, Dan again stared at the parts of his project, unclear how to solve them. They intimidated him because he did not understand the process in its entirety, only in partiality. His training told him this was more dangerous than knowing nothing. The best move seemed to be to the recliner with the Southern Comfort. There he waited for his mind to clear, hoping for something to hit him. A man given to sensual pleasure winds up poor. And he that is given to wine is never rich, forget the money. It wasn’t what he was hoping for. He quaffed crudely.

What I had of it. And every day before. If we live only for gain tomorrow, we miss today. A habit of that is a life unlived. I lived. You live, too, Dan. Through the vent came far away voices. They were as clear as the animals. Kendy was reciting her dad’s professor’s teaching to her mother. Dan got a boost. Then the volume rose and began to get angry.

SERMON FROM THE MOUNT

“Dad, let’s go put her up between yours and Kyle’s, where she should be.” In the shop, Dan stepped on a stool, placed the doe and stepped back down. They looked up together, arm and arm. Deer looking left and right, huddling. The submissive semi-sneak had been the right“Canchoice.Iget Mom?” “Sure. Let’s both go get her.” ■

You die only when the last person you loved dies. Go! Seize the day! Do it with all gladness and joy and thoroughness. Fear nothing. Waste not a moment before the unexpected hits you. At the bottom of the stairs with the mount under his arm, Dan called out, “Kendy? Kendy, your mount is ready.”

Kendy never saw him. Her big eyes zeroed on the mount under his arm.

“I did it,” he said.Because of the heavy conversations that had taken place in this room, Dan heard himself say this like Kyle had said it when his animal went down. A day later, the paint was dry. He had a nail pounded into the wall where Kendy had indicated, and now, cradling the mount gingerly in his lap, with a hammer he tapped on a hanger against the back of the mount. The work checked out. He looked up at the other mounts.

“Wow Dad, you did it! Just like I wanted.”

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“At least he’s not pretending!” “Don’t you speak to me in that tone of voice!” Dan put the pint between his thighs and clapped his hands over his ears. Tears squeezed out and he could only hear his sobs from the inside. Love her anyway. Keep your word. On that unexpected day it will matter. On that day how you handle this will be what you have left. Dan recovered, sniffling, wiping away tears with his fingers. Combining all he had heard so far, from nights past to now, he recited what he believed the words were saying.

Our lives have been wasted. The cutting words upset him because it seemed to tip over everything they had spoken about so far. Dan looked at the pint, a few fingers left in it. He heard Kendy’s feet on the stairs. He didn’t move. When she saw him, she screeched. “Dad, what are you doing?” “I’ve been drinking, Kendy. But as of this moment, I quit. Here,” he said, holding the pint bottle out for her. “I want you to throw this away. I won’t do this again. You have my word.” Kendy froze. “I mean business. Here, take it.” Kendy took it and ran to the basement restroom. Dan could hear liquid splashing in the toilet. She returned with the empty bottle.

“I don’t want you listening to your father anymore. He’s down there going crazy. Drinking again, wasn’t he.” “No!” Kendy said. “And he didn’t say anything about what you do,“Thateither!”isprescription medicine, dearest daughter!”

“Now let’s go see your mother.” Holding Kendy’s hand, they sat on the sofa next to his wife. Dan told his wife he loved her, would always love her and they as a family would see this through no matter what it took. “We’ll start a new start, and after that another if we need it. I’m sorry for all I have done and failed to do.” The three of them stood and hugged and cried. A week later, following the directions he had amassed from various sources, Dan had the cape positioned over the form. Apparently he’d measured and ordered within the parameters of correctness. The hazel eyes seemed to line up, the ears propped with stanchions seemed right and she was stitched snugly. He trusted it was drying and adhering all right. He’d stapled the cape to the end of the mount and trimmed the excess hide. All the doe needed now was some black touch-up on the nose and a bit to bring out the eye assembly. Dan was secretly glad for not having antlers to position because his lack of skill had reached the breaking point several times already. All the fear had passed heedless of the concern he attached to it. The mounts overlooking the process had a hand in it, he was sure. He stepped back from the table and climbed his stool for a look down on her. She was in a right-looking semi-sneak, as Kendy remembered just before the moment.

He heard feet running across the carpet and down the stairs. Maybe his wife would come too, but if not, he understood.

“Can I hold her first?” Kendy cradled it and peeked around at the face; gingerly she touched an eyelash. Dan said he hoped the eyes were the right color, and that she was posed how Kendy remembered her. “Just like it. She’s beautiful, Dad. I knew she would be. I’ll never get rid of her. Never in a million years.” Dan was close to instructing her to converse with it as he had with the other mounts, but it didn’t seem to fit the moment.

“Shall we put it up?”

BY TONY KINTON

MOOSEANDNOISYAIRPLANESHAUNTEDHILLS,

oor seals of the Super Cub leaked. Those doors on the right where one panel raises, the other lowers for ingress and egress. A tortuous affair, this getting in and out, but it works and is a basic part of this ingenious little aircraft. It, this Super Cub, was a modified unit with big tires and an enhanced engine, an engine that could generate flight within surprisingly few yards. As it turned out, this flying machine was a near marvel. We were young back then.

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The hunting area was difficult but purely magnificent.

I was first in camp that afternoon before the hunt. Friend Bryce Towsley waited at base in that distant valley for the Super Cub’s return. As quickly as the plane glided to a stop, Darwin pushed open the doors and encouraged haste. “I’ll go back for Bryce,” he said. Dark lay not long removed over that mountain there and would creep in with haste once it got a running start. Flying bush planes in this environ is basically a visual affair—as opposed to instruments. If you can’t see, you can’t fly. And then Darwin was off, the bumblebee buzz of that tiny Cub fading behind that same mountain over which night would slide.

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Hunters were delivered to camp one at a time via that little Super Cub. Later, moose meat would replace hunters and gear for a trip or two out at hunt’s end, hunter extraction to come afterward of course, and massive antlers would festoon wing struts, one set on each side, during that trip. This was a bizarre production— that plane heavy with meat, massive antlers providing lift or drag or whatever antlers do to an airplane, screaming down a runway in the back country, kicking up puffs of snow that had fallen. From a distance it all appeared an apparition.

But that leaking! Down lower off the mountains, in a valley housing a quite remarkable assemblage of log buildings, there was rain. Higher up, snow. The Cub bounced once, twice and on the third was airborne. That’s when the leaking began, driven by natural winds and forward movement and the wash of a powerful prop, the latter made even more efficacious by that reconstituted engine. Stock car practitioners would nod affirmation. My right shoulder and arm were soaked within minutes And that plane was noisy. The pilot and outfitter, Darwin, sat just ahead, my knees bumping his seat back. We attempted conversation, but it was burdensome. Presently, we abandoned any efforts of verbal communication. But the scenery, a few hundred feet below and out to each side, spoke more distinctly than tortured words. That scenery, even in silence, was fully adequate, telling its own story and fielding no questions. Behind me, bloated with duffel bags and rifle cases and camera gear, the luggage compartment served as a lumpy headrest; I thrilled to the adventure of it all. With hands cupped over ears for protection from that engine’s clamor, I proffered a silent prayer of thanksgiving, for in every direction there were rock walls and mountain tops and snowy slopes and stream edges dressed in concert. A herd of elk decorated a nearby meadow. There, just outside those leaking doors, I saw the fingerprints of God. Earlier, in preparation to land another plane, I saw a small specimen bent and battered as if someone had dropped it. “I zigged when I should have zagged,” Darwin opined when I asked about the crumpled Cessna below. We were at that moment, the moment of my question, in an identical craft. But at least we could talk, for that Cessna was much quieter than the Super Cub in which we would, for a brief time, remain sequestered. During the latter’s bouncing and rattling and chattering and slipping to this side and then that side in heavy gusts, I put that crinkled four-place out of mind and enjoyed the ride. But something I had read once about old pilots and bold pilots and such crawled down the back of my neck and into my jacket.

I quickly threw gear into the assigned hut, grabbed an extra jacket, pulled my rifle from its case and stuffed it full of 250-grain Core-Lokts. There were grizzly bears about.My plan, eventually accomplished, was to walk out to the river, sit on a rock and watch daylight age. And with that drone of the Super Cub gone, there was only silence. Silence unlike anything found in more occupied spaces. But it was not total silence in the specific definition of that word. There were sounds—snowflakes splatting against river rocks, wind moaning through aspens and spruce and mountain crevices—so there was sound.

Alongside that strip were three low-slung log huts, the pipe from a woodstove protruding from each. Two huts were for sleeping, the other for cooking and eating. A pole corral was just off to the side. An outhouse, quite alone, rested in the spruce. This camp was an altogether extraordinary setting— functional, well placed and scenic. Remote is a weak definition. Horses and tack had been trailed in some 20 miles from the base—back there in that valley where the trashed Cessna lay peacefully.

HAUNTED HILLS, MOOSE AND NOISY AIRPLANES

A hunter, one of two who joined Bryce and Kinton on this moose hunt, poses at one of the hunter’s cabins at base camp.

This entire package was, in short, a moose hunt. The Canadian Rockies of British Columbia, upstream from Christina Falls along the Graham River. Darwin had chain-sawed a short landing strip from an old burn just along the river’s edge. In fact, one end of that strip found its terminus at the river itself. Approaches to land would have those bulbous tires in contact with ground just a whisper from that water.

What went missing was noise. There is far too little of this silence in our hurried world. I sat and thought.

A fire and hot tea were common and welcomed occurrences. Whether toting saddles or panniers, the horses were reliable and skilled participants.

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Solitude is a productive practice. It gives pause for contemplation. Still, it frightens. In a modern world such as ours, we have little opportunity for quiet. And when that quiet comes and spreads its full impact across the landscape and across our inner cores, it can be alarming. We must then face what lies within more vigorously than we face what lies without. And though the noises of everyday living can be troublesome, even confusing and frustrating, these are familiar. Perhaps we, given a choice, choose the certainty of pain within the familiar rather than choosing the pain of uncertainty within the unfamiliar. Honestly, I was glad when the Super Cub returned. Moose hunting is a grand pursuit. It can also be a laborious enterprise. Logistics alone can confound the senses and dissuade the most ardent and industrious. This trip began with long flights that delivered Bryce and me to Fort St. John, British Columbia. Darwin fetched us the following morning, and we made a 90-mile drive. At the end of a dirt road used for logging, we parked the truck, stored gear into a Cessna four-place and zipped off toward the main camp 30 miles in. A short flight that ended at the base of operations—and in sight of that discarded plane that did not experience a pleasant demise. From there it was maybe 20 miles into deep wilderness. Combined, this translated into fatigue, but this condition tempered by anticipation. And then there is the hunt, itself often toilsome, a logistical nightmare with untold possibilities for discomfort. In our case, there were the horses and tack and another camp. Supplies had to be brought in. No simple solutions to problems existed there, should these arise, and even a medical emergency would, of necessity, have to wait for a daily flyover recognizance from Darwin—if the weather allowed. A note here: today there are technologies that mitigate some of the potential obstacles we faced. Satellite phones and other instruments of navigation and communication could help avert a disagreeable situation. But back then, when we were young, these were blatantly absent. One must also consider the actual taking of game. Even when conducted in more sedate venues than those we faced, locales that ATVs and perhaps even trucks can reach, moose are gargantuan beings. What do you do with a moose after you shoot one? That is a ponderous question and one that must be addressed before the rifle pops. In our case, we took a tarp in and butchered the bulls, placing them in panniers on pack horses afterward. The horses knew their way back to camp. And that meat produced by a moose is genuinely superb. Every scrap deserves the hunter’s respect. So does the moose.

That first day found us climbing high into surrounding mountains, horseback of course, six miles via serpentine trails to where the timber stopped and gave way to peaks that were both austere and breathtaking. Skies were foreboding, spouting insults of iced raindrops down low and snow at increased elevations. Horses plodded, saddle leather squeaked, winds howled, the heavens scowled. It was cold up high. And there were moose. Scattered in every direction it seemed. Some were bulls. Two were impressive but still not what we should take from this venturesome hinterland of intrigue and wonderment. Most were the young.

The big ones, those bulls of genuine interest, were, for the most part, ensconced in thick stuff, nursing bruises incurred from their rutting battles just past, waiting for heavy snows that would transform the high country and push all moose to brush-lined stream bottoms and favorable meadows downslope. Those same snows would put the grizzlies and black bears into hibernation, would encourage the mountain caribou to huddle against the wind and seek shelter, prod Stone’s sheep to ease from mountaintop abodes in search of scarce grasses and peaceful surroundings. The wolves, now heavy with bulging fur that afforded some semblance of protection, as Robert Service so deftly put it in reference to the huskies, “...howled out their woes to the homeless snows.” A grand land, this, even if it weren’t gracious. Camp was welcomed that evening. Not being one who puts a great deal of credibility in tales of phantoms and ghostly goings-on, I found myself

SPORTING CLASSICS • 93JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 HAUNTED HILLS, MOOSE AND

Heavy antlered but narrow, bulls that hung tenaciously in proximity of cows no longer receptive to breeding and warding off failed juvenile advances with a head shake and posture that shouted, “No!”

particularly surprised at becoming enamored of one occurrence, an episode that was both captivating and chilling.

Then it appeared—over a rise and encircled by spruce. It was a meadow, an hourglass affair that spoke of the genteel, proffered a welcoming kindness that would soon vanish in a sensation that I then found and now still find unthinkable to entertain—haunted. Various forms of that word can be handily used as clever descriptives in poetry or prose: haunting dreams, haunted hills…. But in reality? However, there, in this surreal setting, a hardened heart became pliable. This place was, if not haunted, then certainly haunting.Toone side of the meadow, where a steep wall rose to form a new horizon and chastised those walls surrounding it for their lack of initiative, was a waterfall, its body trim and defined. It roiled from some unseen stream above and descended predictably with a roar that became NOISY AIRPLANES

High meadow romance: a young bull attempts in vain to gain the respect of a lone cow.

The third day, maybe the fourth, I don’t recall, we had followed the usual regimen of riding from camp along the Graham and gaining high country. Rain again. Exposed fingers quickly morphing to appendages that would surely snap off their bases if coaxed to do so. We climbed, horses bowing to the wind with a countenance suggesting their preference for some other locale. Still, they climbed— surefooted even if begrudging.

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thunder claps hovering surface-level of the pool beneath. Creation at its finest. Out in the meadow and away from that fall were aspen groves—a house-sized blob here, a simple and smaller collection over there, packed tightly in what might be considered an effort to thwart intrusion. This cloistering worked for horse and rider, but the cold must surely have gained entry. Long scars from freezing said as much. And there were rocks and small brush and shivering, browned grasses. Game sign was present but much desecrated by age. Moose had likely moved lower. With no fresh impetus to hunt this particular spot, we elected to build a fire, warm aching fingers, boil water for tea and eat a sandwich. Precipitation was now no issue. We would ride on presently. But despite our best efforts, fire would not come. We had ample ingredients, including skill, to start fire, but each effort—and there were several— ended the same. Flicker and fade. Flicker and fade. No success. While in the throes of despondency, our guide said something about a Native hunting area or camp site or some such. He was a man of few words and fewer social graces but knew the mountains as intimately as a suburbanite knows his lawn. A better guide I can’t imagine, but more clarity in verbal communication would have been appreciated. We put away what few accoutrements we had retrieved from saddlebags and rode off. I looked back. There was just some peculiar essence about this valley. It was haunted. Bryce was the first to get a moose. A fine specimen. On the side of a mountain, the tried and proven 375 H&H performed as it always had and does. Afternoon had consumed us, and we made the essential chores as brief as possible, a return with pack string planned for first light the next day. We implemented that plan and by noon were headed back to camp, four maybe five miles down through twisted trails and marauding spruce limbs that assaulted and snatched and clawed at boots and pants and stirrups. Snow was blowing sideways. A grizzly grumbled from a thicket along Police Creek. I think there could never be a more pleasing sight than the faint lantern glow at camp, this observed from the last hillside before entering that narrow plain along the Graham. Somewhere within the mix—days had become nameless and numberless—we rode into the distance, a frigid sunrise accompanying, one moment trailing, the next gaining purchase and besting the train of horses and riders. Leading us now. Way off from camp, over a towered peak high and bleak and frozen and inhospitable. But reverent up there. Then down into a bowl. A low outcropping of rocks lay half-way across that bowl. We rode in that direction. Upon our approach of that outcropping, time stopped, frozen as solidly as the trickle we had crunched acrossTheredownslope.shewas—erect, swaying, popping teeth, guttural growls. An incredible and striking silverback in that 94

A young bull moves out ahead of the horses in a high meadow. The antlers collected during this hunt. Every hunter was pleased.

Bryce Towsley poses with his moose, taken with a 375 H&H from the side of a mountain.

Bryce (left) and Sandy take time out to watch a small group of Stone’s sheep near the crest of a far-off slope.

morning sunshine. She, a sow grizzly, had two young, these cubs the size of a full-grown Brittany. Cute and cuddly like the spaniel they were, but minus that pleasant disposition. A superior selection, the Brittany, should someone desire an affable consort. They mimicked their dam. This trio was on the paltry remains of a moose. She, they, swayed and popped and postured—standing on hind legs, front dangling human-like. Horses performed an unwelcomed ballet of angst. Riders wore bulging eyes, legs clamped tightly to heaving sides of agitated equines, hands grasping saddle horns in an effort to avoid separation from a viable means of Suddenly,transportation.thedramaended.

And there were Stone’s sheep— three full-curl rams lying near a handful of ewes and young over on a distant slope. Sandy, the guide, spotted them, and this discovery prompted the setting of spotting scope and an hour delay in travels.Ididcollect a moose. Not that day but one day at some point and from those magical mountains. I was using a 35 Whelen, and like my colleague’s .375, the Whelen was up to the task asked of it. That same prescription used for the earlier bull was used for mine. Within a day or so after that, it would be time to leave this land, leave aurora borealis to its own devices.

Lassitude prevailed. Majesty and motherhood and madness and grandeur and danger galloping away across that bowl, the occasional backward glance cast toward unwitting interlopers, these with no malice toward those they had disturbed. Three bundles of wildness—and potential ferocity—heading toward a quiet spot higher up that would contain and protect them from the brutality soon to envelope. Richer we were from this chance encounter.

First in camp at the beginning, I was the last out at the end. That noisy Super Cub again. Darwin stirred up snow and then took to wing. He banked over Christina Falls, dipped low along the Graham, wrestled in adroit fashion with angry winds pouring over and around cliffs. I watched as sunset began its struggle with daylight. We ultimately bounced along a grass strip at base camp. ■

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96 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 Decorated Warrior Benton Henderson Clark (1895-1964) Oil on board, 23.25 x 19.25 inches

JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 SPORTING CLASSICS • 97

In the days when the world was young, the ground was kambiali, soft like porridge. Over it flew the first animal, buligbadi, the tiger heron. Until the earth hardened, buligbadi could not perform the funeral rites for its parents, so buried them in its head’s white crest of feathers. Later came the chameleon, kankambinatuolo, who crossed the cooling crust with arrested steps so not to break through. When the earth was ready, the plants were placed into it. The people of the south say that every animal was given a plant to grow; but the hyena came late and was given te’e, the baobab. Filled with disgust at its ugliness, hyena planted it upside down. The Arabs, though, believe that it was the devil, Shaytan, who came upon it and out of vileness tore out the tree and forced it back into the ground, its roots in the sky. BY THOMAS McINTYRE

A Story of the Gourmantché

98 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 Swart Kei River by Stephen Townley Bassett

The monkey hurried back to the other carnivores and told them it had seen how the man killed. He had only to raise and lower his arm for an animal to die.

Tienu, feeling pity, opened the tree where the man sat and took out a bow, arrows and a spear and gave them to the man, whose tears stopped. Tienu taught the man, then, how the bow and arrows and spear were used.

The monkey with its long fingers parted the dry stalks of grass and watched the man.

The carnivores saw that the man and woman did not come to their kills anymore to try to take meat. They knew they must still be eating something, but with no claws or fangs, not even like the long sharp canines of the monkeys and baboons, how did they kill? The carnivores had to know, so they sent the monkey to spy.

THE ARM THAT SEES

Already, though, Tienu, God, had created man and woman. Man and woman lived among the carnivores of the savanna, lion, cheetah, leopard, hyena and baboon and monkey, the humans taking the meat of the roan and the buffalo and antelope the carnivores killed, killing nothing themselves. After a time, the wild carnivores wearied of feeding the man and the woman and kept them from the meat they killed, snarling if they came close while the carnivores fed. The man, unable to kill animals for food for the woman and him, sat beside a tree and wept. Tienu, walking in the evening, came upon the man. “Why are you weeping?” Tienu asked. “Because,” the man lamented, “you let the carnivores keep us from their kills and gave me no fangs or claws with which to catch and kill animals myself. And we are hungry.”

A waterbuck the color of shade, ribbed horns like a bow doubled in reflection, reaching up from its lifted head, came down to the pool. Moving its eyes side to side and turning its ears, the waterbuck lowered its head. The man crawled through the grass behind the drinking animal. He rose to one knee, and in a smooth motion was running. He lifted his arm and cast it down, and the waterbuck jerked up its head and leapt into the pool, then swung back around and began running away on the land. It ran a short way, the man chasing behind it, until it slowed and stumbled, then stopped and swayed and fell as the monkey watched.

The monkey did not know what the spear or the bow and arrows were. The monkey had only seen the moving arm. It did not know that the man had gained the ya n’un nua, the arm that sees, or that he had become onubiman-daano, the owner of skillful

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King Jaba Lompo, gowned in white with sword in hand on the back of his white charger, came down to earth with his wife, Kombali, bringing with him two kinds of every animal.

On the savanna, the man shot arrows from the bow into animals and took their meat. With his spear he ran after animals, sometimes for hours and miles until the animals tired and slowed, and the man thrust his spear into them. He came back to the woman with hindquarters carried on his shoulder, and the woman cooked the meat over the fire Tienu showed her how to make.

The monkey, even though it did not like awaking until morning light, left its tree before dawn to be on the savanna when the man came there to hunt. A little after sunrise, the monkey hid in the tall grass near the waterhole when the man came out on the savanna and hid, too, by the water.

The man could not raise his chest and fill his lungs. He twisted his head, trying to breathe. His eyes went to the open door of the hut, and he saw the monkey watching. After a moment the monkey got onto all fours, knuckling out of the doorway, out of the man’s sight, going to tell the carnivores.

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The carnivores tensed, seeing the man killing by just the raising and lowering of his hand. One by one, they slunk from the hollow of the baobab, the lions the first to go, running when they thought they were beyond the man’s sight, until the man was by himself.

Beside the doorway against the circular inner wall stood a spear, a bow unstrung and an animal-hide quiver holding arrows fletched by the hand of God. ■

Stephen records a particular rock art panel only once. This ensures that not only do each of his artworks stand as a unique and accurate record of a threatened and irreplaceable art legacy, but also, that each work holds an intrinsic and escalating monetary value. His works presently hang in corporate and private collections around the world. Contact Stephen at : stephen@stb-rockart.co.za Tel: +27 83 7749565

The woman grew sick first. She lay on the straw mat, curled like a pangolin, beside the smoldering cooking fire in the hut. When she died, the man drummed and sang beside the body all night, praying her spirit could go back to Tienu, then lifted the body up and carried it out to bury it. Then he began to sicken, too. He lay on his mat in the hut, feeling fever all through him. It hurt more, though, to think, the woman’s dying before childbirth, that there would be no one to drum and sing for him, or to bury his body in the ground. Or place it even in a crest of feathers. Without the rites, how could he return to Tienu?

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

The man went out from his hut to hunt, bringing back meat. It was good at first for him to hunt, as the carnivores did, even if they would not let him be with them; but away from them and their ways, he began to forget. He did not kill the animals merely by raising and lowering his arm, as the carnivores thought; but it was easy enough for him to kill with the arrows and spear Tienu gave him. Yet he also needed to give honor and respect. Sometimes he did not take all the meat or build a rack from bare branches and upon it smoke the meat so he could dry it and bring back to the hut in the trees, using it all. Worse, he began to ignore the malevolent spirit, ciciliga, that lived in the animals he killed and for which he needed to prepare medicine over the bodies so that which was bad in the death of the animals, yalli’m bia, did not follow him back to his hut to kill the woman and him.

South African artist Stephen Townley Bassett has for the past 31 years devoted his life to art and in particular, the meticulous documentation and preservation of Southern Africa’s rock art heritage. His millimeter accurate, life-size recordings are painstakingly rendered with natural pigments and materials collected in the field. His paintings reveal a wealth of detail and imagery that is often faded and not clearly visible when at the rock face.

The man heard something within the sound of the rain and looked around. A mosquito buzzed in the air inside the hollow. All the carnivores watched the man as the mosquito hovered over him. The man followed its flight. His skin was naked, and the mosquito landed on his bare forearm. The man studied it before lifting the hand of his other arm and bringing it down. The mosquito was dead.

THE ARM THAT SEES fingers, making him an expert shot with arrows or spear. For the monkey and the other carnivores it told, there was only the movement of the arm. It rained. It fell so heavily the carnivores came for shelter in the hollow of a great baobab. Looking out, they saw the man splashing toward them, his skin sheened with water. He stopped, but because none of the carnivores snarled, ducking, he entered the hollow and hunkered down among them. They all feared him, in a way that made them afraid to try to drive him away, as they had when he came for food. Instead they watched his arms. The man folded them over his knees and looked into the rain falling through the warm air. The big drops plashed down beyond the opening of the baobab, pattering the standing water a thousand times in a minute.

The red buffalo and copper-clad roan and the smaller antelope had always kept far from the man and woman; but the carnivores, even when they stopped them from taking meat, let them walk among them. After seeing the way the man killed, though, they, too, did not let him or the woman near them at any time. The man and the woman, alone in a way they had not been, left the savanna and moved to a place among the trees where they built a round hut of wattle and straw and mud and thatched the roof with long grass stalks and lived there, apart.

He fell dark. When he opened his eyes a last time, he saw the hut filled with animals, the red buffalo and copper-clad roan and all the other ones. They came to be with him, he thought, to be present so he would not be alone and to help his spirit over to Tienu. Then he saw they were all the animals he had killed and not shown respect and honor for by making the proper medicine. They wanted only to see his body die.

A waterbuck the color of shade came forward, lifting its cloven hoof. The man raised his arms to hold the waterbuck away; but he was too weak and his arms fell back onto the mat, striking it with the dry rattle of straw. The waterbuck placed its hoof on the man’s chest, easily at first. Then it stepped onto him with all four of its hooves and stood, though only spirit, with the weight of death.

AN OKAVANGO

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On the trail of the buffalo of Eden.

DELTA DAWN

BY CHRIS DORSEY

104 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 OKAVANGO DELTA DAWN  PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN MACGILLIVRAY, DORSEY PICTURES

he difference between a wounded buffalo and simply a buffalo, to borrow from Mark Twain, “is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.” Every story of a hunter getting gored starts with a bad first shot. In no form of hunting is the refrain, “aim small, miss small” more applicable than when pursuing buffalo. The phrase becomes the mantra of the buffalo hunter as he moves in close—smelltheir-farts close. Should a buffalo decide to come for you, don’t worry about it being a mock charge, they don’t know the meaning of the word. As my late friend Robert F. Jones once wrote, “Buffalo are as mean as a half-ton hemorrhoid,” and they can be judge, jury and executioner in one charge. The buffalo roaming Africa today are the descendants of beasts that have endured for millennia, the genetically superior survivors left over in a landscape top-heavy with apex predators. Is it any wonder, then, that they forever look as though they’re ready for a fight? There’s no animal that absorbs more lead without effect than the Cape buffalo. None. Killing a buffalo is often less the question than stopping one, for they seem to die when they’re good and ready—sometimes after they’ve stuck their horns into the guts of the man who fired a round into them. An old African saying sums it up well, “The buffalo is death that carries two knives on his head.”

Who doesn’t want to sign up for this?, I think to myself as my single engine Cessna lands in Jeff Rann’s Okavango Delta camp where I’m soon to be hunting buffalo. I have stalked the beasts from Tanzania to Mozambique and many places in between. Of all of Africa’s dangerous game, there’s none more intoxicating to me—especially when hunting them in herds where you must be both patient and persistent to infiltrate past so many sets of eyes andWhynoses.the fascination with buffalo, you ask? Because extracting an epic bull out of a herd—not just any bull you happen to encounter within big bore range—is the most challenging stalking in the world of dangerous game hunting. They’re constantly being pursued by lions so they’re always alert and, when you hit one, it’s a flip of the coin as to which direction he’ll run— and he’ll almost certainly be running because one shot seldom anchors a buff. Then there is the cunning of a wounded buff, circling back to attack his pursuers from the side or behind. Thus, if it’s adrenaline you seek and you’re not partial to leaping from perfectly good airplanes or tying a bungee to your ankles and plunging from a bridge, perhaps buffalo hunting is for you? In the flatness of the Okavango Delta, the elevation of termite mounds and trees often provide just enough vantage to spy a bull worth taking. below: The herd isn’t yet alerted to our presence.

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My guide for the foray is veteran professional hunter Cecil Riggs, a 70-something survivor of countless dangerous game encounters who received his first professional hunters license four years after I was born. He moves through the Okavango like a species that evolved there, as if he possesses the spirit of an old Simba from a previous incarnation thatknows—unconcerned—andhewilleventually catch up to the buffalo we are about to begin hunting. We drive from camp, beginning our islandhopping search for an old bull with a heavy boss, the kind of scarred-up warrior that has survived many a lion encounter. Soon we are poking and prodding a thicket where we can see small pieces of buffalo through brush and leaves. The animals are merely 30 yards away as we alternate between standing and crouching like inquisitive meerkats in an effort to find a vantage where we can see a buffalo in its entirety—or at least enough of the beast to discern head from tail. Before we can see them well, the small group of dagga boys runs into the marsh, splashing water as they disappear into the long grass as if slipping through a parted curtain.

Jeff Rann leads David Morris to the promised land where the bull Morris has been haunting for days awaits.

f all the places to pursue buffalo, there’s no environment like the manifestation of Eden known as Botswana’s Okavango Delta. It’s a vast, 6,000-square-mile oasis formed where the Okavango River meets a tectonic trough in the Kalahari. The river never finds a sea and the majority of the water evaporates. The Delta consists of countless, palm-covered islands surrounded by crystalline waters so pure from being filtered through many miles of sand that you can drink from it without purification. All manner of Africa’s charismatic mega-fauna is found there: elephant, lion, leopard, hippo, giraffe, crocodile and a wide variety of greater and lesser plains game as well as countless species of birds and fish. It is, in a word, paradise.

Riggs and I start a morning hike hoping this will be the stalk that delivers the bull we’ve been shadowing for days. Never trust a giraffe, they will blow your cover just as you’re about to make a final stalk on a herd of buffalo. I used to wonder why anyone would want to shoot one...I don’t anymore.

Hunting buffalo in herds will test a man’s patience, for between the ever-present cover and shape-shifting mass of buffalo, getting a clean shot often seems impossible.

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OKAVANGO DELTA DAWN

This is what Ruark saw when he penned his famous line about buffalo, “He looks like he hates you personally. He looks like you owe him money.”

The next morning, we strike off to find the same herd that has been working this part of the concession for several weeks, a few hundred head that are always haunted by a pride of lions that cull the occasional buff, keeping the herd purified of the sick and injured. In a couple of hours following the spoor, we catch up to the mass of bovines, first seeing the bulls that hang to the back where they position themselves to fend off any lions that get too close. “Don’t move...don’t anybody move,” says Cecil. “We’re out in the open and they’ll see us.” That means it’ll be another couple of hours of tracking to catch up to them should they spook and there are, as they say, only so many hours in the day. “There’s a cow looking right at us.” We stay motionless and eventually the relaxed herd moves ahead into heavier cover that we hope will allow us to approach closer. We wait a beat as the soft light of the end of the day

e return to camp for the night, a tented affair that is far more luxurious than my first house, with comfortable beds, showers and toilets in each private abode. There is a much larger dining lodge with hardwood floors and a magnificent table and chairs. A well-stocked bar sits next to a fire ring and is the preferred habitat of the safari hunter at sunset where gin and tonics are served for purely medicinal purposes. Between the tents are a series of elevated boardwalks that keep visitors dry through even the wet season when the Delta rises as if at an extended high tide.

washes over the Delta, and we remain kneeling, watching an old bull that is peering at us through a screen of grass. When buffalo are aware that they’re being followed, they turn back to check in, always heading downwind so that they can keep track of you. That’s exactly what the old bull does, eventually spinning and trotting off with the rest of the buffalo that have had enough of us. Such is the hallmark of buffalo hunting in herds. For every successful stalk, there will be a dozen failed attempts. Embrace that fact going in and you’ll approach the safari with the right mindset. The alternative leads to frustration and regrettable decisions, like rushing shots or settling for lesser bulls.

above: Five days of tracking and now the moment of truth...I just need a cow to clear. Thank God for softs when hunting in a herd.

“Let’s have them come to us,” he says. We do a loop and, within minutes, the old bull we are after steps into the open, facing us. After days of haunting the same herd looking for Mister Right, there he is as I rest my .416 on the point of his shoulder. He’s looking at us but seems uncertain as to what we are. Thoughts of the bull turning and sprinting at any instant run through my mind. That, and the fact that if I don’t get him now, we’ll have to come back the next day because we’ll never catch up to this herd again before dark. Then, he cocks his head to his left, as if he heard something, which exposes his chest and shoulder perfectly.

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“Ka-boom!” the old bull plunges to the ground as 400-grains of lead burn through the length of his body, dropping him in an instant. To this day, it’s the only buffalo I’ve ever shot—on any continent—that collapsed to the first shot.

he next morning, dawn breaks surprisingly cool as I throw on a down jacket before we embark for the last known location of the herd. Within an hour we are back on the trail of the buffalo. We walk less than an hour and the trail of buffalo shit is now steaming and the skin that dries on it within minutes hasn’t even begun to form, as if a dung beetle had ordered it rare. They’re close. Then we hear the telltale call of the oxpeckers just ahead, the birds that live off the ticks on the backs of buffalo. Soon we can see a mix of bulls and cows milling about the cover, feeding and unaware of us. One bull starts to act edgy, however, looking away and then swinging his head quickly back to us to see if he can catch us moving. He does but doesn’t run off, but rather just ambles away in the classic, “I see you,” buffalo manner with his tail raised slightly and looking suspiciously like a middle finger. One tracker shinnies up a dead tree while the other eases to the top of a termite mound to see if they can spot a good bull in the distance. At the same time, they both come back to earth and share that they have seen a dandy, raising their hands above their heads as if telling a fish story, but in this case it’s the universal sign for “herd bull ahead.” Cecil decides to circle in front of the buffalo since our attempts to approach from the back of the herd have thus far proven futile. It’s a page out of the wounded buffalo playbook.

OKAVANGO DELTA DAWN

T he satisfaction of hunting long days and covering countless miles to not just hunt a buffalo but to find the buffalo you first coveted, blew countless stalks on, dreamed about and finally took is only known to the big game hunter. Making the first shot count prevents the alternative—a story you do not ever want to live. While hunting some species once might be enough in a person’s quest for adventure, pursuing buffalo tends to be habit forming. Sneak into the midst of a herd that is 15 yards all around you and you will never be so alive. The adrenaline and nerve cocktail that is served in such moments is a natural narcotic that transports you to a different time when man wasn’t atop the food chain, when survival depended on wits and will... and no small amount of good fortune. Awaken those genes and they will forever call you to return to the bush and the great herds, for as Ruark once wrote, “In the pigeon chest of the clerk is still the vestigial remnant of the hunter’s heart; somewhere in his nostrils the half-forgotten smell of blood....” We cannot escape who we are... what our kind has always been. ■ There’s no place like the Okavango Delta this side of the Old Testament, for this expansive oasis is as close to Eden as you will ever find.

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SPORTING CLASSICS • 109JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 OKAVANGO DELTA DAWN

It’s

Editor’s Note: This photo essay is adapted from Chris Dorsey's new book, Director's Cut, Big game hunting through the lens of the largest outdoor TV producer in history. The book and companion film set is more than a decade in the making with the world's greatest sporting photographers and cinematographers. The 400-page, full color landscape hardcover book and four-hour DVD set is an unprecedented celebration of the world of big game hunting by one of the world's most widely traveled hunters. A limited number of leather bound Deluxe Editions along with companion DVD set is available for $125. The Collector's Edition and companion DVD can be purchased for $75. Visit the Sporting Classics store at SportingClassicsStore.com or call toll-free (800) 849-1004 to order your copy today. After untold miles and days of tracking, the old bull stepped out of the herd and into my sights. watch the hunt easy! Just scan this code with your smartphone’s camera.

A quick offhand shot at 11 yards broke both shoulders of this male leopard, crouched in long grass.

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Most dangerous game? On a perch, a leopard is just a cat. In long grass, think a grenade with a grudge.

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Hallet’s charitable view of crocs reflects the leanings of a naturalist who accepts killing for need, but questions sport hunting. He confirmed as much in his 1967 book, Animal Kitabu, where he shared insights on Africa’s big game. There he made a case for snatching the lion’s crown as King of Beasts and giving it to the leopard: “intelligent, coolly calculating, patient and extremely wary.”

BY WAYNE VAN ZWOLL

A powerful man in the prime of life, Hallet would credit his survival to a change in body position as the crocs closed in. With remarkable presence of mind, he went from a crawl to a slower, upright dogpaddle. Vertical, he would not be so easily snatched by jaws designed to operate in a horizontal plane. A clever decision—but one demanding great courage, given his bleeding arm and throttled pace. Repeating the tale to me decades later, he reiterated his defense of the crocodile as a creature with natural cravings. “The beast has nothing against humans. It responds to hunger. As do we all.”

SPEED SPOTSWITH

One day in January, 1957, Hallet was at the rear of his 16-man caravan winding through the bush between the Semliki River and the Ruwenzi Massif—the “Mountains of the Moon.” The kapita, or man in the lead, was clearing the trail with a machete when the second porter spied a big male leopard crouched in a tree. He shrieked. The entourage shed loads and scattered like marbles. Hallet dashed forward as the cat pounced, claws tearing at the porter who’d screamed.

I shook his left hand. There was nothing below his right elbow. He was strong, an aging giant six-foot-five, with a raw-boned frame to carry the muscle. His eyes bore hardships endured in places that had broken lesser men.

The faulty fuse ushered spark almost instantly to 200 grams of gelatin explosive. The blast blew off his right hand and threw him into the crocinfested water. His helpers, fearing implication in a white man’s death, paddled furiously to beach their craft and fled. Ears ringing and partially blinded in one eye, Hallet saw two crocodiles head his way, “scaly backs carving a wrinkled wake,” he would write later. He pressed his bleeding stump to his side and began a desperate crawl toward shore with his good arm. Seven more crocs converged, one “almost as large as a native dugout. He shot toward me like a ridged green torpedo; an instant later I heard…jaws snapping shut. Seconds later, another clack sounded near my right shoulder and I felt a crocodile pass behind me, his scutes scraping my back….”

The big Belgian wouldn’t suffer small talk, so I gave him none. “Have you been to Africa?” I nodded. Not “of course” or “often.” He had explored Africa, lived with the Pygmies in the Ituri Forest, killed a leopard with a knife. His eyes softened just a Octoberlittle. 24, 1955, Jean-Pierre Hallet was fishing in the shallows of Lake Tanganyika, dynamite in hand. A catch of herring like ndagala would feed a few starving people in the droughtstricken Mosso region of Burundi. With his Bagoma companions, he guided a pirogue into a cove a rifle-shot off shore. Igniting a fuse was the last thing he would do with two hands. He saw the Bickford cord light up and hurled the charge—but too late.

With no weapon and only one hand, the powerful Belgian sprang upon the leopard from behind. “I passed my arms under his HehimhalfstifflyhiselbowandenoughTheeachdislocatingforequarters…partiallyhisshoulders[byforcing]humerusintothesideofhisneck.stumpofmyrightforearmwaslongtohookaroundhisrightfrontleg,Ilockedtheholdbygrippingmyrightwithmyhand[whilescissoring]hindlegswithmyown,forcingthemandwidelyapart.”ThewrithingcatweighedaboutHallet’s250pounds,buttossedaboutasifhe“wereameretoy.”couldn’tlastlong

Solitary and secretive, leopards are well-camouflaged and except in parks, seldom seen during the day. Males stake out territories approaching 100 square kilometers, which overlap female ranges about a third that size. Both sexes spray urine as a marker. The call of both resembles the sound of “a thin board being cut with a coarse saw.” It is heard most often evenings in the dry season. After a 93- to 103-day gestation, the female gives birth to as many as six cubs, normally two or three—only one of which may reach maturity. She raises them without help from her mate. They open their eyes in a week, are weaned and killing by their sixth month. Self-sufficient soon thereafter, they stay with their mother for 18 months or so, are sexually active at two to four years of age. On average, litters come every two and a half years. Physical size varies by region. Fullgrown leopards in South Africa’s Cape are smaller than those in Zimbabwe, where males average just over 2 meters (nearly 7 feet) in length and weigh 60 to 71 kg (132 to 156 pounds). A 90-kg male is exceptionally heavy. Females are much lighter: 32 to 35 kg in Zimbabwe and 30 percent smaller farther south.

On the trail of a Namibian leopard, Wayne used a 375 H&H bolt rifle with a 2.5x scope in cover like this. A powerful cartridge isn’t needed for leopards; but a nimble double affords two quick shots in cover. Forest with dense undergrowth, as here on Namibia’s Caprivi Strip, easily hides these secretive cats.

Panthera pardus occurs across Africa’s game fields, where the English name “leopard” and the Swahili “chui” apply. Spotted black-on-yellow around head, neck and legs, the cat typically has two black stripes across its lower throat. Black rosettes cover the torso; stripes mark the distal half of the tail, whose tip is white underneath. Black leopards, all but unheard of in Africa, are rare genetic variants elsewhere. A close look reveals the rosettes in the black coat. Kenneth Anderson, who hunted and wrote of leopards in India, surmised the black color phase occurs more often in “Malaya, Burma and Assam.” These cats are commonly called panthers, though Anderson used that term to describe the spotted leopard too. In his 1959 book, The Black Panther of Sivanipalli, he described the hunt for that cattle-killing beast, the only black leopard he’d ever seen.

SPEED WITH SPOTS

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“Kisu! Kisu!” he shouted. Knife! Knife! For long minutes, none of the terrified porters within sight of the battle dared leave his spot behind or in a tree. At last the kapita threw a crude, foot-long blade. It landed several feet from Hallet. Shifting his weight to pin one of the leopard’s forelegs, he caught the blade’s tip, almost lost it, then “just missed stabbing myself in the chest” before plunging the knife hiltdeep into the beast’s ribs. Exhausting minutes later, the great cat was still. Thoroughly spent, Hallet lay contemplating his fate had the leopard broken free. “He would have mauled and killed me, [then dragged my] cadaver into a dense thicket and torn out the entrails and buried them. Starting at the face and working his way down, he would have eaten rather daintily— unlike the lion who ploughs into the hindquarters and works his way up. Once he had polished off the nose, tongue, ears, heart, liver and lungs… he would have hauled the remainder aloft and stuffed it into a tree crotch.”

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Nocturnal hunters, leopards hunt mainly by sight. Anderson’s contention that they have “little or no sense of smell,” however, might be contested. Typically they ambush prey with a short rush. Jumping astride and grabbing with fore-claws the neck and shoulders of large animals, they rip into ribs or loins with their hind claws while clamping their jaws on the throat or biting the base of the skull to kill. Pound for pound among the strongest of animals, the leopard can bring beasts twice its weight—big antelopes, young giraffes and cattle—into a tree, there to dine without disturbance from lions and other pests. Their main prey is smaller: springbok, impala and the young of antelopes such as hartebeest. Leopards kill lesser game too: dik-diks, duikers, klipspringers, also young warthogs and small mammals from mice to dassies. They relish domestic goats. On the Kalahari, up to 30 percent of their scat has shown porcupine remains. Leopards feed on carrion well past onset of rot. Occasionally they take fruit and vegetables. Professional hunters I’ve accompanied have baited leopards with a variety of animals, but a zebra haunch ranks high on the list. Wildebeest serves too. “You want to hang an item big enough to ensure the cat won’t polish it off in one sitting. That way, you needn’t sit on a bait until it’s been hit.” Hunting stockkilling leopards and man-eaters, hunters in the early 20th century often tethered goats. Left alone, a goat will bleat, effectively calling the cat. But a cow, ordinarily silent, held the size advantage. Anderson tied donkeys as bait to find the man-eating panther of the Yellagiri Hills. A kill was salvation for all remaining donkeys, as it yielded enough meat to bring the cat back to that carcass, into the hunter’s lap.

Hunters hang more than a leopard will eat in one visit so they can wait for the cat’s predicted return.

SPEED WITH SPOTS

Out On A Limb by Bob Kuhn

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A lethal threat to baboons caught outside their troop, leopards evidently pose little hazard to other wild primates. Few leopards on record have attacked full-grown humans. Dogs enjoy no such immunity. In fact, leopards seem to relish their flesh. John Hunter, in his 1952 book Hunter, wrote that while “half a dozen little curs can hold the biggest of leopards up a tree,” a leopard will “go to any extremes to catch and kill a single dog,” even enticing a dog from jungle’s edge by lying down and, head to earth, twitching its tail as if it wished to play. Like Hallet, Hunter put the leopard at the top of the roster of dangerous game. By far smallest of the “Big Five,” it is also the fastest, and hardest to see even at very close range. We humans are relatively frail creatures; a leopard’s teeth and talons, in a blur of blood-letting, can leave us shredded if not lifeless. A lion is also fast, but bigger, so easier to see and an easier target. Buffalo, rhino and elephant can kill on impact; but bush that conceals cats barely reaches their knees. While faster than they appear before they come, huge herbivores lack a feline’s rocket launch. Their mass can absorb bullets; but you needn’t be an exhibition shooter to hit it.

Approaching a leopard blind, wise hunters move stealthily, in cover, lest the animal be resting nearby.

Professional Hunter Don Heath, with whom I’ve hunted, told me that “in Zimbabwe, 80 percent of animalinflicted injuries suffered by hunters are from leopards—mostly when hunting parties trail a wounded cat.” But elephants cause 80 percent of fatalities. “When they want to hide, leopards are almost invisible. A charge is always up close and unbelievably quick. A leopard needs very little time to hurt you badly; but unlike an elephant, it needs more time to kill you. If an elephant coming for blood reaches you, your odds of surviving are slim.”

Leopards own the night. Unless certain of a kill, hunters are wise to limit trailing to daylight hours.

Opinion differs on whether a leopard keeps ripping at his first target in a tracking party or jumps from one to another. “He wants to hurt everybody,” insists one PH. “A leopard with running gear intact and dentition in place will have all of you in tatters quicker than you can say ‘shoot the bloody thing!’ He bounces from one man to the next until he dies. That’s why many people have survived leopard attacks. The greatest danger is Checking bait use with binos from a distance minimizes human disturbance that can send a cat away.

SPEED WITH SPOTS Leopard Drinking From Pond by John Macallan Swan (British 1847-1910), 13 x 18 inches

SPEED WITH SPOTS

Trailing a leopard into cover, stiff loads of buckshot in a short pump-gun like this Mossberg excel.

One of the moran missed with his spear. “In an instant the leopard was on top of his shield, mauling him about the face….” As the man fell, spotted cyclone clinging to him, another moran stabbed at it. “Instantly the cat turned on him….” Down he went, the leopard’s claws ablur, ripping him open. Hunter jammed his rifle’s muzzle against the beast’s neck and ended the melee. Tending to the Masai, he was “astonished at the amount of damage [inflicted] in a matter of moments.” Hallet’s encounter with the leopard that leaped upon his porter is remarkable on two counts. The first is the attack, given this animal was uninjured and otherwise unprovoked. Hunter did note, however, that such a leopard in hiding is much more likely to spring when acknowledged—per the porter’s shriek. “[If] their eyes meet, the leopard is on him like a flash….The instant he sees a look of recognition…. He charges instantly.” That Hallet survived hand-to-claw combat is darned near miraculous. Famously, naturalist Carl Akeley also killed a leopard unaided. Though a smaller animal (an 80-pound female) and hampered by Ackeley’s ill-aimed shot that broke a foot, she quickly minced his arm from wrist to shoulder. Then he managed to ram a fist down her throat. Using his knees to keep her down and crush ribs, he finished her with a knife. Very rarely, leopards resort to hunting people. From 1959 to ’62 the man-eaters of Bhagalpur in India claimed an estimated 350 victims. As chilling was the record of a single feline whose depredations claimed at least 125 people. For eight years the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag eluded traps, poison and sportsmen inspired by the Kumaon Division of India’s United Territories. The Rudraprayag leopard proved one of Corbett’s deadliest opponents.ThePanar man-eater, by local body count even more lethal, was his first man-eating leopard. And nearly his last. According to Corbett, no mention of man-eaters was made in government records before 1905. It would appear, he wrote, “that until the advent of the Champawat tiger and the Panar leopard, man-eaters in Kumaon were unknown.” While hunting the tiger in 1907, he heard of the leopard, then credited with killing 400 people. Corbett was new to hunting such beasts, attributing his success with the Champawat tiger and, soon thereafter the Muktesar man-eater, to luck. In April of 1910, in a remote patch of brush to which the Panar leopard had dragged four human kills in a month’s time, he tied two goats. The cat killed one. Corbett was loath to organize a beat in the thicket, lest the leopard, sensing the push, turn back and endanger the beaters. At thicket’s edge, he had his men strap 10- to 20-foot blackthorn shoots either side of a tree that jutted into an opening. A rotten branch afforded a make-shift seat.

They may eat in trees, but leopards lie up in rocky places with dense low cover. Tracking here is hard.

Fast open sights on an agile rifle excel on the trail. A scope helps with a careful shot from a blind.

In part to add stability, “I gathered the shoots on either side…pressed between my arms and my body.”

sepsis from the filth on teeth and claws. Disinfectant is your friend.” John Hunter wrote of a leopard that burst from behind a boulder. “The creature simply whizzed through the air…a yellow flash of light.” He fired “as though my rifle were a shotgun.” The cat’s leap carried it 12 feet onto the client, where it expired. Another time, with Masai tracking a wounded leopard, Hunter heard a low growl just as the creature shot from the undergrowth “like a bullet from a gun.”

SPORTING CLASSICS • 115JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

The shriek was short yards away, in steel-wool cover shielding the fellow. I tore through the bush as other trackers scattered. He jabbed a hand toward skeins of shade between us. A black-on-gold shard in dun grass. Somehow, as the rifle found it, I sifted shoulder from shadow and triggered the .375.

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I n thorn that got thicker as the sun ascended a white sky, the trackers slowed, fanning to catch any sign. I’d seen pug-marks at dawn, beside the calf’s carcass, before soil gave way to rock. Now I looked ahead and to the sides for a fleck of gold, a black rosette, the glint of an eye. This was not a wounded cat. But it would know by now of the men trailing it. What would it do?

“Cats are soft”

SPEED WITH SPOTS

Leopard by John Seery-Lester

Recoil was a bump, the blast a faint pop as the leopard catapulted trampoline high, swapping ends aloft with a screech—sharp, guttural, final. The bolt flicked shut, the empty a wink. “Shoot! Shoot! Shoot again!” yelled the trackers. But where grass had swallowed the leopard, all was still. I kept eye and barrel trained for a full minute.

Oddly enough, that view of leopards holds sway with other hunters who’ve barely escaped them.

Settling in that evening, Corbett listened to bird calls and the goat’s occasional bleat to keep abreast of events in the bush. He had no torch; his only shooting aid would be the white rag tied about the muzzles of his 12-bore shotgun. Presently he felt a tug on the blackthorn shoots held to his ribs. The man-eater! Ignoring the goat, then finding it could not climb over the thorns to Corbett, the cat was trying to unseat him. It almost did, pulling on the branches, then releasing them suddenly. In the dark its growls, short feet away, were unsettling, but also informative. “It was when he was silent that I was most terrified.” At last the cat gave up and killed the white goat, a pale smear in the night. Corbett took imperfect aim and fired. Hearing the blast, men from the nearby village arrived with torches. Reluctantly Corbett agreed that they should help find the cat, but singlefile behind him. They advanced at measured pace. Suddenly, from a shadow in the torchlight, sprang the wounded leopard! His unarmed companions “turned as one man and bolted.” Fortunately for Corbett, they collided with each other. Burning torch splinters knocked to the ground flickered just long enough for him to kill the maneater with a shot to the chest. One by one the villagers crept back from the darkness. Soon they were celebrating, Corbett with them. But if not then, certainly later, his satisfaction was tempered. The Panar leopard was doing what it had been so perfectly equipped to do. It had thrived not because it was hateful or vindictive or cruel. It killed because it was hungry, and chose the most vulnerable prey. Corbett would pursue the Rudraprayag leopard off and on for more than two years, and later title one of his books after the cat. In memory he described it as “the best-hated and the most-feared animal in all of India, whose only crime…was that he had shed human blood…in order that he might live….”

■

SPORTING CLASSICS • 117JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

SPEED

The animal was dead, the bullet having shattered both shoulders, mincing vitals between. “You don’t need a powerful rifle for cats,” an African PH told me. “They’re soft. But to kill one quickly you must place the bullet well. Wounded, a lion or leopard wants first to escape. Its next option is to make you bleed as it dies.” As most leopards hunted under license are baited and shot carefully from blinds, a scoped rifle in .308 with a mid-weight soft point will suffice. So will equivalent loads—too many to name. This creature has thin skin, light bones. It weighs no more than a whitetail deer. Powerful rifles are the rule in large part because visiting hunters plan to use them also for tough plains game. A “stopping rifle” is out of place, as it probably doesn’t wear an optical sight that affords the necessary precision. And any load that can knock a buffalo or an elephant senseless with a hasty frontal shot kicks too hard for most sportsmen and women to shoot with rosette-centering accuracy. Stalwarts hunting man-eating cats early on used pedestrian arms. J.H. Patterson, whose pluck and determination offset mediocre marksmanship, bagged the Tsavo man-eating lions with a bolt rifle in 303 British and a single-shot Martini, perhaps in 500/450 No. 1 Express. Jim Corbett carried a 500 Nitro Express double on occasion but preferred his lightweight Rigby bolt-action in 275 Rigby. Kenneth Anderson favored an 1895 Winchester lever-action in 405 Winchester. Even those hunters were wont to trade rifle for smoothbore when trailing injured leopards. Wrote John Hunter: “I prefer to use a 12-gauge shotgun charged with heavy shot. When a leopard leaps for you, his strung-out body makes a very difficult target.” Corbett killed the Panar man-eater with “a charge of slugs”—likely referring to big shot, not the bore-diameter slug modern hunters fire as a single missile. ■ WITH SPOTS

118 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 BIG GAMEARGENTINA

SPORTING CLASSICS • 119JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 GAME the big, the bad, the beautiful & the weird

BY NICK MUCKERMAN

120 • SPORTING CLASSICS I do not know whether I use travel as an excuse to hunt or use hunting as an excuse to travel. The truth probably lies a little bit in both. My wife, God bless her, has come to terms that she married someone who is a vagabond at heart who has made a habit of short notice hunting trips to other continents. She is no longer surprised when I discuss the possibility of a hunt that will require me to “leave Wednesday,” or something like that, for another country.

In typical form, I made a last-minute booking with Caza y Safaris, an outfit that offers hunts in various places around Argentina. Having traveled a fair bit myself, a hunt in South America would be my sixth continent visited. Argentina is renowned for its bird hunting, but also boasts a variety of both native and introduced big game species. My hunt was to be in an area that offered a good variety of species to hunt. One of the highlights of any trip is the people you meet at the destination and along the way. Things started interestingly on this trip as soon as my plane landed in Buenos Aires when I found myself in the customs and immigration line behind Danny Trejo. He has starred in his own movies but is usually cast in a supporting role as a bad guy. Until meeting him, no matter what movie I saw him in, I always pictured him as the guy throwing the knives at Antonio Banderas in “Desperado.” Thankfully, he was much nicer in person than the characters he plays on the big screen.

Leo, my hunting guide, and I walked alongside Gaucho and his horse as his dogs casted in front of us. I watched the hounds zigzagging ahead, loping through the grass at what I guessed was something like one-sixth of full speed. With their tucked up bellies and muscles glistening in the rising sun, the hounds were the epitome of potential energy. They were coiled springs, but they just needed something to chase. When it finally happened, it was a spectacle to behold. A group of black pigs broke from a thicker section of tall grass and some prehistoric switch flipped deep in the brains of the hounds. They went from loping to full speed in about two steps and transformed into flashes of dark in grass homing in on the hogs like heat-seeking missiles and gaining fast. I stood there witnessing the chase with a stupid grin.

The pig was fast but was no match in a foot race with the hounds closing the gap with perfect economy of motion. With few options, the large boar made it into a marshy area next to a stock pond and disappeared into the tall grass. We made our way to the action, and I heard a couple of agitated grunts and the yipping of excited dogs. At the edge of the thick grass, we could not see any of the action. Instead, we heard the primordial noises of

ARGENTINA BIG GAMEARGENTINA BIG GAME

right: Gaucho’s hounds fight a large wild boar near a stock pond in Argentina.

It ended as quickly as it started. I heard Gaucho say a command while hardly raising his voice, and the dogs immediately broke off the chase and returned to him and his horse. The hounds did not even have e-collars on them. I was simultaneously amazed at the dogs’ speed and the fact that Gaucho called them off of the chase with one stern word. I looked over at Leo. “Too small. Was just a sow and young” he Wesaid.kept hunting and Gaucho worked the dogs through various patches of thicker vegetation until we eventually bumped a lone boar from one of them. He took off through an open area with a lead on the hounds that began to diminish rapidly as they gave chase.

As a houndsman myself, I knew pursuit hounds were the least far removed from wolves in the domestication process of all hunting dogs, and I knew Gaucho’s hounds were doing exactly what they wanted to be doing. Simply put, some dogs need more than a frisbee or tennis ball to chase to be content.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 121 beasts fighting. The grass moved and flicked, but we saw nothing else. Then the hog burst from the cover with the pack of hounds on his heels, one actually attached to the hog’s backside. The boar whipped around and the dog that had his teeth in him was thrown clear of the melee. The same dog immediately reentered the fray, teeth barred and barking. Then the boar backed up to a small stock pond to make his stand. The pig was built like a tank—tough, thick-skinned, stocky and, though outnumbered, didn’t cower but stood tall and fought hard instead. The white tusks that curled out of his mouth stood in contrast to the black of the rest of his face. They were his weapons of war and, combined with speed and incredible strength, used them well. One of Gaucho’s dogs, a tan mutt heavy with Labrador blood, got too close and the pig lunged at his face. It happened too quickly to comprehend, but when the blur of movement was over, the dog’s face had been ripped open along his muzzle leaving a deep, bloody gash that ran from his nose to just below his right eye. Wild boars are bad to the bone, so the dogs need to be just as tough to be effective. The dog kept fighting unfazed. Hog dogs live to fight.

These dogs are supreme athletes, tough as nails and love what they are bred to do.

I eased toward the fight, rifle in hand and looking for an opening, knowing this was the most dangerous part of the hunt for the dogs. Gaucho gave a stern command to his pack and immediately the dogs abandoned the hog and returned to their master on his horse. I shot the boar as soon as the dogs were out of the way. As in all hound hunting, the shot was anti-climactic. Witnessing the dogs work always reigns supreme to the shot. In what appeared to be a last act of defiance after the shot, the hog ran into the pond and died with nothing more than a leg out of the water. It wasn’t the worst problem to have, but I figured I’d be getting wet to go and retrieve the boar. Before I knew it, however, Gaucho, true to his name, whipped out his rope and lassoed the thing’s leg before towing it from the water with his horse. The hog was ugly and smelly, like all trophy boars, and I knew I would later gaze upon his tusks with reverence in my home, for both him and the hounds who caught him.

Gaucho pulls the author’s boar from the pond it ran into after being shot.

Muckerman rates male blackbucks as one of the most beautiful big game animals on Earth.

The rest of the hunting took place directly from the lodge instead of Gaucho’s ranch. Leo and I would leave camp on foot. The property had a huge expanse of wetland area surrounded by a mix of open forests and green fields. I enjoyed the process of hiking around, attempting stalks and sizing up males of the species we were after.

Before Leo and I left to head back to camp, Leo told Gaucho in Spanish that I was a houndsman, and I showed a few pictures of my own hounds to Gaucho. When I shook his hand, I told him how great his dogs were. He clearly understood more English than he was willing to speak, because he gave me a grin full of pride and a nod, houndsman to houndsman, just before we departed.

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On our first hike, we crested a small rise and I saw a couple brown animals against the green grass and put my binoculars up. They were a type of rodent, and a capybara was my most desired game animal on the trip. But these did not look that big to me and it was disappointing to say the least.

Muckerman with the weirdest animal he has ever seen or hunted, the capybara, a rodent as large as a deer.

ARGENTINA BIG GAME

Then Leo said, “Those are coypu. You call them nutria. There are some capybara a hundred meters to the left.” I scanned my binoculars left and stopped on a group of brown critters that were much larger than the coypu. “That’s more like it,” I said. “Those are huge.” Leo laughed quietly. “Those are babies,” he said. Then I felt Leo’s hand on the top of my binoculars, shifting them a little farther left. What I saw startled me— rodents as big as deer! I may have said an expletive or two in shock of the freaks of nature that appeared through my binoculars. They were anomalies of creation, like some sort of lab experiment that had gone haywire in which the creatures had escaped and propagated.

They are spooky animals, and seemed to be turned on all the time, not unlike pronghorn in North America.

We moved on from the herd with a plan to hunt the rodents at night later in the hunt. We spent the next few excursions trying to close the gap on the herds of blackbuck antelope.

Blackbuck are easily one of the prettiest animals in all of creation. Black and white, with a painted face and stunning corkscrew horns, the males possess a regal beauty that few other animals come close to. Originally from India, they are transplants to Argentina.

It was a herd of capybara, which was an odd way to think of a group of rodents, but considering they are the world’s largest rodent and can weigh between 100 and 200 pounds, it seemed to fit. They were near the edge of the water and reeds, some standing, but most bedded, taking in the winter sun. Before my trip, my wife had joked that I was flying 12 hours in a plane to hunt a 100-pound hamster, but the adventurer inside of me preferred to think of them more like the ferocious R.O.U.S. (Rodents of Unusual Size) from the “Princess Bride” movie. I have always been intrigued by the weird and obscure when it comes to game animals. One look at that herd of rodents and the capybara jumped right to the top my list of the weirdest animals I have ever seen. Leo explained that the males had a strip of black on their nose that was some sort of gland. I noticed one in the group.

“He is just decent. You can take him, but we can find a bigger one if you want to go out at night.” I wanted to shoot the male just out of curiosity of seeing the thing up close, but I have learned in these situations that it is best to trust the professional guide. Plus, I admittedly liked the idea of a night hunt because there are not many opportunities to do that in a legal manner in my home hunting grounds.

Just like pronghorn, hunting them was pure fun, and characterized by many failed stalks. The herds always seemed to know to stay somewhere between just out of rifle range and the far horizon, but over time Leo and I were able to close the distance and get one down.

With the blackbuck down, we switched gears and guns and hiked to an area we had not hunted. Now armed with a 375 H&H, we began the search for a water buffalo bull. When we eventually spotted an ominous black mass in the distance that appeared to be as big as a Volkswagen bus, we got the wind right and made a purposeful stalk. What South American water buffalo lack in horn size, they make up in physical stature. They are significantly larger than their famous African cousins, Muckerman had not planned to hunt water buffalo on his trip, but after seeing some around the property decided to pursue an old bull.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 123SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2020

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SPORTING CLASSICS • 125JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 ARGENTINA BIG GAME and an imposing animal to hunt. When I faced the bull I killed, it seemed as if his major muscles had grown muscles themselves, and that his skin was holding on for dear life just to keep from ripping open from the pressure beneath.

I had planned for a day in Buenos Aires, as I had heard positive things about “B.A.” as a city. Having spent a good part of my life backpacking and traveling through more than 45 countries, I generally do not enjoy time in big cities, but I gave B.A. a chance to surprise me. My day wandering around Buenos Aires was not as exciting as hunting 100-pound rodents, stalking a water buffalo or watching a well-trained pack of hog dogs risk their lives to do what they love. But admittedly, as far as cities go, I loved the pulse. I spent a day getting lost on its cobblestone streets and discovering delicious eateries and interesting history. Mostly, I just enjoyed the anonymity and freedom of being in a crowded city seemingly a million miles from home with no itinerary other than to explore the unknown. ■ Nick Muckerman has had features published in Sports Afield, DSC Game Trails, Sporting Classics Magazine, Huntin’ Fool, Earned DIY Journal and Outdoor Guide Magazine. He was a finalist for DSC’s 2016 Dave Baxter Literary Award. E:

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He was definitely the type of animal that hunters should put an extra bullet through once they’re down, just in case. On the last night of the hunt, we left camp in the darkness in Leo’s truck in search of a big capybara. I normally do not hunt from a vehicle, and definitely not at night with a spotlight, but part of international hunting is trying new things, and I have no problem doing so as long as what I do is within the local law. We didn’t have to go far to find our first herd of capybara, or our second or third, for that matter, and it was evident why Leo had not worried about me being able to find a mature male in a single night out. The creatures were all over the place, like some sort of nocturnal invasion from the swamp. It seemed that every time the truck turned there was a new group of glowing eyes. We would stop and Leo would look through his binoculars, and then keep going. Half of the things looked big enough to saddle up and ride, so I was not sure what we were waiting for until we found the one I ended up killing. We wrapped the truck around a large stand of reeds and saw a herd, and I immediately picked out a male that dwarfed the others in the group. “He’s the one. Go ahead and get out and take him before he gets into the reeds.” I did as I was told, jumped out, and was able to get a shot off just as the herd figured out it was time to scram into the safety of the swamp. The hunting phenomenon of ground shrinkage was not a problem on my capybara.

I do not know at exactly what point a rodent goes from being cute to just plain weird, but that thing had passed that threshold about 100 pounds ago. It was a fine way to end the hunt, but one of the benefits of hunting foreign places is that the adventure is not merely contained in just the hunting portion of the trip.

No matter, Elmer still remains at the top of the decoy carving list. In 2003, his preening drake pintail as well as a sleeping Canada goose decoy commanded a whopping world record $1.13 million at auction…each. Even the United States Post Office loved his work, and it featured two of his decoys on postage stamps, one in 1974 and the second in 1988.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 127JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 Preserving Tradition, One Block at a Time

But sportsmen recognize a different Crowell who lived a few towns away, and that’s the master decoy carver, Elmer.

Phillips Rig Preening Black Duck A. Elmer Crowell East Harwich, MA, c. 1912 13 inches long PHOTOS: COPLEY FINE ART AUCTIONS DECOY CARVING

BY TOM KEER

Preening Black Duck Preening Black Duck A. Elmer Crowell (1862-1952) East Harwich, MA, c. 1900 15 x 6 1/4 x 6 1/2 inches

O dds are high that folks in my county know a Crowell. The family landed there 15 years after the Pilgrims and for centuries they’re well known as hard-working, solutionsoriented innovators. Take my neighbor Chandler for instance. In 1872, Chand’s great-grandfather Luther patented a machine that manufactured a product that changed the world. His squarebottom paper grocery bag wasn’t sexy or glamourous, but that simple bag increased retail sales so much that they replaced the round-bottom cotton sack. Think about that next time you visit a Piggly Wiggly.

Crowell’s Pleasant Lake gunning stand was a notorious hot spot for action, partly because in the early days he mixed live decoys with carved blocks. When market hunting was abolished, as was the use of live decoys, Elmer had to dramatically ramp up his slow and meticulous production. Demand for his artistic blocks was so high, but with more, faster work, his quantity surpassed quality.

ecoy manufacturing has always been a big business, and it is enormous even today. The only difference is that most current options are made of plastic, with some even having electric motors to flap wings. Tradition begone? Not so fast, at least, not if Utah’s Riley Dabling or Michigan’s, via New York State, Chris Williamson have their say. These two waterfowlers are among a cadre of contemporary carvers who connect our modern duck and goose hunting to the past.

One might think that Dabling would have grown up in historically significant decoy country such as Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Instead, he’s from West Point, Utah, and lives a mile from the shores of the Great Salt Lake. In the early season, Dabling hunts the sweetwater, and when the temperatures drop and the ice forms, he shifts to the Great Salt Lake. Saltwater freezes at 28 degrees, and he closes out the late season ice-free.“Myfirst dozen decoys were Flambeau plastics,” he said. “They were inexpensive, they were light, and I killed a lot of ducks over them. But I just didn’t like the way they performed. They rode on top of the water instead of in the water. On a windy day they bounced around and didn’t swim in the current. Wary, late season ducks didn’t respond quite as well, either. “One day I was in my workshop and found the head from an old Herter’s block. I looked at the craftsmanship in the cedar, I was enamored by the realistic and durable painting and the glass eyes were exquisite. That head was so nice that I decided to make a body for it. I started with some foam that I had in my shop and made a decent body. That decoy worked OK, but the foam was lightweight so it, too, bounced around on windy days. “I had so much fun working on that body that I decided to take it to the next level. I went down to the public library in search of books about decoy carving. The only title it had was by an Eastern Shore author from Virginia, Grayson Chesser. His book, Making Decoys: The Century-Old Way, got me started. My wife says I’m an old soul, but his process was right up my alley. I experimented with foam and burlap and then quickly moved on to closed cell cork. After honing some of my skills, I ultimately moved on to solid wood bodies. “Ninety percent of my tools are hand tools, so I use two types of wood. For bodies, I really like clear pine. It’s a softer wood, it’s easier to carve and the grain is straight like cedar. I also use basswood. It’s similar to clear pine, but is much more dense. Basswood takes a knife really well, it’s easy to sand and readily absorbs paint. I like the way both take a shape, and they look and work well. Because of its properties, I’ll use basswood for heads. Cedar is the classic wood to use, but it’s difficult to source out here in Utah.

“When I have plenty of time to carve, I’ll start chopping a block of wood with a knife. Then I’ll move on to chisels and rasps to get the right shape. If I’m shy on time, then I’ll rough out a block with a bandsaw and follow it up with a hatchet spoke shaver. Once the shape looks good, I start sanding. Sometimes I think I sand more than I carve, and to get a smooth, polished look I’ll use a combination of power sanders. I always finish sanding by hand. “When the block is ready, I’ll start painting. I like oil-based primer as it’s a good sealer that keeps in the sap and covers up knots. When it’s dry, I’ll pull out the oil-based paint. A decade ago I spent a year in Montana learning the art of taxidermy. That study of animal positions and coloration is invaluable for helping me to get just the right shapes and colors.

“If I finish a block that I’m especially high on, I’ll enter it in a number of carving shows around the country. I’ve been fortunate to win a bunch of ribbons. Those are nice, but my real joy comes from setting a spread of decoys I’ve carved. I’ll pull on an oilskin jacket, load up my Model 21 and wait for the ducks to arrive. My daughter killed a swan over a block she carved, and to me, those memories are priceless. When shared with my kids, I can think of no better day, even if the ducks don’t cooperate.”

Utah’s Riley Dabling takes his time while cutting in the back feather detail with a hand chisel.

Riley Dabling

128 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 DECOY CARVING: PRESERVING TRADITION, ONE BLOCK AT A TIME D

SPORTING CLASSICS • 129JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 DECOY CARVING: PRESERVING TRADITION, ONE BLOCK AT A TIME

A workshop floor covered in wood chips makes customers think Riley Dabling carves a lot. He does, but the key to a stunning finished product comes from an incredible amount of sanding. For more on Dabling’s work, visit waterfowlworkshop.com

PHOTO: ZACH BENSON

Chris Williamson

130 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

“I’ve got a workshop set up for all of my materials and tools. I like that setup because it means I can carve every day. On some days I’ll carve for several hours, but if I’m short on time I just might work on a head for an hour or do some sanding. It’s a tremendous amount of fun. Carving is an ideal winter project, and it makes the time between the end of late-season waterfowl and spring turkey hunting pass quickly. “Most of the time I square up blocks with a table saw. Then, I’ll move on to cut out a bird profile on a bandsaw. I take a break from the power saws to create a rough shape with draw knives, and then move on to add rough details with a grinder. Knives and gouges add

At least that’s what Michigan’s Chris Williamson does. “Most folks don’t like driving around with me,” he said. “As a bird hunter I’m constantly searching for new covers, but as a waterfowler and decoy carver I’m also looking for trees. Fortunately, there aren’t any oncoming vehicles when I’m out in the woods, because if there were, I’d be in trouble. Nonetheless, I’ve got a tremendous supply of cedar and white pine logs that are drying in my barn. “I got started carving when I was living in Lake Placid, which is in Upstate New York. When bird season wound down, I’d trade my pointers for my Lab and go duck hunting. Around 2006 I started carving. I started with Herter’s kits, the Model 52s and the Model 72s. “They were a good place to begin, but I was looking to take my duck hunting to the next level. I wanted diversity to my rig, so I sourced some white pine and cedar from the woods, cut it up and dried it in my barn. I’m self-taught at pretty much everything, so it took some time for me to figure out the process. Those early blocks weren’t much to look at, but they inspired me to do better.

DECOY CARVING: PRESERVING TRADITION, ONE BLOCK AT A TIME

Chris Williamson with a whistler shot over one of his hand carved decoys on the St. Lawrence River.

On Lake Saint Claire, Canada, the handcarved gunners brought in a canvasback and a redhead.

Fly tiers who hunt experience the true joy of harvesting game, tying some bugs and catching a fish with the feathers, hair and fur of the animals they harvested. Decoy carvers who grab a chainsaw, fell a tree, and carve a block experience the exact same thing.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 131JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

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I like the Clayton, New York, show and the Ward World Championship Wildfowl Carving Competition in Maryland. There aren’t many new shows being launched, so I like to help keep our tradition alive. Over the years I’ve been blessed to win over 150 awards. But I’m a hunter, so once the shows are over, I’ll add those blocks to my rig. It’s a tremendous amount of fun to shoot a bird over a decoy I carved from wood I sourced.” The more things change the more they stay the same. That’s fitting, especially because just as with Elmer Crowell, Dabling and Williamson are both self-taught carvers. They’re preserving tradition, one block at a time. Instead of tying so many flies this winter, maybe I’ll give carving a try. Maybe you will, too. ■

Williams’ classic gunning pairs won the blue ribbon at the Ward World Championships in Ocean City, Maryland. Williamson looks forward to tossing these blocks in the marsh.

132 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 detail and give me control over some of the fine tuning. After that it’s sanding, sanding and more sanding. I carve heads by hand, but do use a drill press to make the hole that holds the head and stem.

“The fun part about where I lived in New York State and where I live now in Michigan is that there are always different types of ducks. In the early season ponds and rivers, I’d see a lot of puddle ducks like mallards, woodies and teal. When those waterways froze up, I’d move to the bigger water for divers. Common ducks include canvasbacks, scaup, buffleheads and goldeneyes. With that kind of diversity, I always had plenty of inspiration. On some days in the blind I wouldn’t shoot. Instead, I’d watch birds on the water to get a better understanding of their body positions and coloration. Those mornings were always worthwhile because they gave me plenty to think about when carving. “I got into competition because that’s a fun way to meet other carvers and learn new techniques. I’d travel to many shows and send birds in to others.

DECOY CARVING: PRESERVING TRADITION, ONE BLOCK AT A TIME

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It was a cold, snowy New Year’s Eve, and the wind seemed to be coming from all directions that morning when Dad and I and my little brother decided to fish Doe Creek.

We started out fishing Pandora’s Bridge but had no takes. Then we moved downstream to Cook Hollow and the Falls Hole where Dad had one good strike but failed to hook the fish. Climbing back to the car, we dug into the sandwiches Mom had made for us, then drove up to the old stone barn that overlooks the creek. Little brother took shelter from the wind while Dad and I fished. But we raised nothing. Finally, with daylight growing short, we decided to move up to the Old Mill Hole before calling it a day.

A Winter Trout

But the memories remain. And for me, none of those memories are more firmly entrenched than that last big trout he and I caught there together.

RAMBLINGS

Claude Altizer (right) and his cousin Verlin, home from their first trip to Doe Creek in 1957.

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BY MICHAEL ALTIZER

Dad and I were fishing, and Alan was tagging along with Dad’s long-handle boat net. It was at least a foot longer than he was tall, and he was constantly tripping over it or getting it tangled in the thick cover that edged the creek.

Winters spent fattening on shad that had been introduced into the new reservoir caused them to grow to previously unimagined sizes, and eventually they began to revert to their primordial instincts to return to the places of their birth to spawn. Being the highest of the creeks impacted by the rising lake, Doe Creek had been only partially submerged, leaving its upper reaches flowing freely for miles. So when its former residents decided to return to their native stream, there was still an abundance of clear, free-flowing water available to them.Ithad been Jack Wilson who’d first discovered them. Mr. Wilson owned a farm a couple of miles downstream from Doe Creek, and when the Tennessee Valley Authority began appropriating land for the new lake, he negotiated a concession to establish a boat dock. Four years later while fishing the stream for creek chubs that he could sell for bass bait, he hooked and landed a six-pound rainbow trout. Eventually word seeped out about the huge trout in this small stream, and fishermen began trying to find it. One of those fishermen was my father. On their first trip to Doe Creek, Dad and his cousin Verlin brought home four big rainbows that averaged more than three pounds each. When Dad finally decided to get his family out of the coal country of Virginia and West Virginia, he looked south to Tennessee—in large part because of Doe Creek. Eventually he became a fixture on that stream and learned the names of all its signature runs that offered the best fishing opportunities. Some of them he even named himself.

There was the Sarge Hole, the Jake Hole and Pandora’s Bridge. There was the Falls Hole, Cook Hollow and the Old Mill Hole. It was in fact the Old Mill Hole where Jack Wilson himself caught the giant 12-pound, 10-ounce rainbow trout that stood for decades as the Tennessee state record.

It was the last fish they ever caught together from that legendary stream.

Dad and I fished that stream together from my late single-digits until he died, and his memory still lingers over its hallowed waters. But what is memory if not a link to the past—even though that past is gone forever?

t’s known as “The Old Mill Hole.” Or at least it used to be, back when Doe Creek was brimming with legend and some of its classic runs had names. It had become famous for its winter runs of giant, lake-fed rainbow trout that began showing up in the little stream four years after the new dam was closed, trapping all those small-stream, mountain-bred trout beneath its rising waters.

Throughout the morning, the blustery weather gradually subsided until the snow turned into a few idle flurries and the wind lost its edge. I think I even recall a small fleeting patch of anemic blue sky somewhere off to the north. But when we stepped from Dad’s station wagon and started trekking across the meadow, the temperature suddenly dropped and the wind returned and the snow once more began blowing sideways, plastering our coats and hats and hip waders. Dad and Alan bore downstream while I headed straight for the sharp bend in the creek, over which loomed a tall and imposing sycamore tree. I worked a few yards upstream through the woods and crossed a shoal, then eased down to the inside of the bend. There was a deep run curving away beneath the high bank and exposed roots of the big sycamore along the far side, and I waded into the frigid water and laid my first cast upstream along the near edge of the current. I guided it deep into the dark water far back beneath the roots, then out into the shallower flow downstream. Mindful not to let the water seep in over the tops of my waders, I stripped out another eight inches of fly line, repeated the drift, then stripped out another few inches and tried it again. On my fourth cast, something hammered my offering. I struck firmly but failed to connect. Confident I hadn’t stung the fish, I lifted my line from the water, checked the sharpness of the hook against my bare thumbnail and decided to wait a couple of minutes before making another cast.

BY MICHAEL ALTIZER

That’s when I spotted Dad and little brother coming up the far side. I waved them down and motioned them to me. “I just had a good hit directly below you,” I called. “See if you can reach him from where you are.” But try as he might, Dad couldn’t make an effective cast across the over hanging roots eight feet beneath him. “Can you climb down to them?” I asked.“Uh,maybe,” he replied, then handed his fly rod to Alan. With his back to me, he eased over the edge and gingerly maneuvered downward until he was perching precariously on the iced-over roots themselves. Only then did Alan lower his fly rod to him, and I pointed to where I thought the trout was positioned. On his third drift, Dad hooked him. The fish thrashed the surface and then dove deep. Dad inched as far forward as he dared. The water beneath him was dark and swift and clearly over his head, and to lose his footing there could have been catastrophic. So he thrust the tip of his fly rod as far forward as he could manage, trying desperately to keep the big fish from gaining the deep water back beneath his feet. And then the trout leapt. He was huge—at least four pounds.

“Mike!” he yelled from atop the far bank, waving the big boat net he’d been lugging around all morning. There was no way Dad could safely net the fish from where he was positioned and still maintain his balance. So I waded from the creek, set my fly rod aside, then stepped back into the water and motioned for Alan to heave his big boat net to me. Now we’re in business, I thought.

But I was wrong. For it quickly became apparent that even with the longer-handled, largerdiameter net, I still couldn’t quite reach the big fish. I moved upstream a few feet, then downstream for a few feet more. But with the water’s surface now just a couple of inches below the tops of my hip waders, I was still a foot or two short. Dad tried everything he could think of, including trying to pressure the big fish away from me, hoping its instinct to resist the pressure might coerce him into turning back in my direction. But nothing worked.

The icy water burned like cold flame as it poured in over the tops of my waders, soaking my wool pants as it clawed its way upward around my waist and cascaded downward around my thighs and knees and ankles and toes—altogether filling my waders as that big beautiful trout filled my net. As quickly as possible I turned and began hobbling out of the creek. But the line still connecting Dad and the fish stopped me, and with the trout still in the net I reached down and bit through theAlltippet.Icould think of was getting out of the water, and the water out of my waders. As soon as I reached dry land, I set the net and fish down and unsnapped the bindings that held waders to my belt and peeled them downward as the freezing water gushed from them. For a moment I considered removing them completely. But I still had to make my way upstream and cross to the far side. So I pulled the still wet but mostly empty waders back up around my legs, retrieved my fly rod, and with the trout still in Alan’s big boat net, staggered upstream and across the shoal where he and Dad were waiting to help me up the bank.

And so I looked at Dad and he looked at me and, lowering the net deep beneath the surface, I deliberately took that one irrevocable step forward.

Standing thigh deep across the creek along the inside of the bend where the bottom sloped into much deeper water, I glanced down at my landing net and realized I was in trouble—for it was clear that I wasn’t going to be able to reach the fish with its short handle. Enter little brother.

Finally we paused, the four of us, with Dad and me facing each other, the big trout holding station between us and little brother overseeing the entire operation. Again Dad tried to pressure the fish into circling toward me, but without success. We were clearly at an impasse, for Dad could move the fish no closer to me without risking a fall, and I could move no closer to him without the water seeping in over the tops of my waders. Meanwhile, the big rainbow was growing evermore impatient and beginning to catch his second wind. It was clearly time to consider a third option—one that up until now had been totally unthinkable.

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RAMBLINGS

Doe Creek and Pandora’s Bridge.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 137JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

The author welcomes and appreciates your comments, questions, critiques and input. Please keep in touch at Mike@AltizerJournal.com.

138 • SPORTING CLASSICS JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

BY MICHAEL ALTIZER

Signed copies of Michael Altizer’s newest book, Ramblings—Tales from Three Hemispheres, along with his previous books, The Last Best Day and Nineteen Years to Sunrise, can be ordered online from Sporting Classics at SportingClassicsStore.com. Click on “BOOKS” or simply call (800) 849-1004.

RAMBLINGS

Dad took my fly rod and Alan took the trout and the net, and together we slogged and sloshed as rapidly as possible to the car. By the time we got there, my waders and wools were freezing solid. It’s a daunting task, changing from wet frozen pants and socks to warm dry ones while being blasted by snow and wind that are blowing sideways, and I will offer you no further commentary here. But still we are friends, Dear Reader, and you are free to insert whatever crude and indelicate phrases or clichés your imagination may conjure up. Suffice it to say that Mom served that trout for our supper that very night along with her golden-crusted cornbread and tasty cole slaw, and I quickly wolfed down my portion as my body temperature gradually returned to normal. As I said earlier, it was the last trout that Dad and I ever caught together there on Doe Creek. And now I can’t remember what we did the next day. ■

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BY TODD TANNER

A fly fisherman fights the wind on Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 141JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

If you’re old enough to have a full cupboard of fly-fishing memories, chances are pretty good that you have a couple of personal, “Lord, that wind was tough” stories. I still remember the day I hit a mile long stretch of flat water with two anglers in my drift boat and a serious gale blowing upstream. It took me almost an hour and a half to row through those whitecaps to the take-out. Then there was the time we put a threeman pontoon boat on Idaho’s Teton River and gave up on our float after getting pummeled by upstream gusts for the better part of an hour. When we finally called it quits, the wind blew us the 300 yards back upstream to the put-in. The absolute worst, though, was the day I floated the Box Canyon on the Henry’s Fork and, with no warning at all, a hurricane force storm came rolling in. Not only was it impossible to fish, but there were so many limbs breaking off trees and trees snapping in half that it wasn’t safe to try to wait things out on the bank. We anchored up and huddled in the boat while a microburst that resembled an atmospheric chainsaw did its best to turn the surrounding forest into kindling.

Fortunately, those types of days are rare. If you have a mobile phone and a decent weather app, you shouldn’t

The more it howls, the harder it is to cast.

The harder it is to cast, the harder it is to fish effectively. That’s just the way it works.

I don’t care where you live, or which fly rods you use, or what species of fish you like to chase. There’s not a fly fisher alive who wants to wake up in the morning and hear these three words: “Damn, it’s blowing.”

FLY FISHING

Wind is a big problem for anglers.

Wind: Fighting the Invisible Enemy

PHOTO: DEE HOGAN

“Come, Fairies, take me out of this dull world, for I would ride with you upon the wind and dance upon the mountains like a flame!” — William Butler Yeats

While soft hackles and other wet flies aren’t nearly as popular as they once were, keep in mind that they work reasonably well on breezy days. Your casts will be short, your casting accuracy with soft hackles isn’t absolutely paramount, and since you tend to feel, rather than see, the strike, it doesn’t matter if there’s a ripple on the surface.

FLY FISHING

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Of course, there are always going to be days when it blows too hard for even the most ardent angler, and that’s where you need to be prepared for every eventuality.

First, if you have a full quiver of rods and reels, it makes sense to go a line size or two heavier. A heavier rod and line almost always perform a little better when it’s blowing hard.

I also agree with my friend, John Juracek, who, when it comes to wind, tells his casting students to “find the right stroke length first, then speed up your stroke as necessary.” It’s never a good idea to change the basic shape of an effective casting stroke. Assuming that your mechanics are solid, you just want to be a little quicker with your cast when you’re out in a brisk wind.

Third, it helps to keep your casts low.

Over the years, there have been a fair number of “how-to” stories dedicated to the subject of fly-fishing in the wind. Fortunately, it’s easy enough to sum up the most helpful advice.

Second, if there’s a prevailing wind coming from a particular direction, you can look for areas that offer extra protection. For example, the lee side of an island, or a stretch of river with lots of trees on the windward bank, can make the difference between a decent day on the water and a complete waste of your time.

The higher your back casts and forward casts, the more likely you’re going to end up with serious problems. Anglers who are adept at casting sidearm enjoy a real advantage in windy conditions.

If you absolutely have to fish when it’s really blowing, then nymphs probably make the most sense. You won’t have to false cast and you can sling a weighted nymph in anything short of a hurricane-force gale.

Streamers are another potential option, although there’s a caveat I should mention. It can be dangerous to throw a weighted streamer in high winds—and that’s doubly true if the wind is blowing sideways into your casting arm. I remember working my way down a long, fishy stretch of Alaska’s Kvichak River as a heavy wind kept pushing the fly line, along with my lead-eyed streamer, back into my rod arm. I managed just fine for a few hours, until a particularly heavy gust changed the trajectory of my forward cast and that weighted streamer hit me in the back of the head. I didn’t knock myself out, but it sure hurt like hell for the rest of the day. Please be extra careful if you decide to throw streamers in the wind.

If there’s one particular aspect of our sport that’s poorly suited for breezy conditions, it’s dry fly fishing. Dry flies are difficult to cast with pinpoint accuracy in the wind, and they’re harder to see in the surface chop on a breezy day. It’s also tough to get a good drift when gusts play havoc with your aerial and on-thewater mends. At the same time, trout tend to ignore dry flies when the wind is up. There are exceptions, of course—the hopper fishing is usually better when terrestrials are getting blown into the water—but dry fly-fishing in the wind is a poor choice more often than not. Which is probably why some of us like to fish dries on windy days. There’s something to be said for being stubborn enough and foolish enough to do things the hard way. It’s difficult to throw an accurate 60-foot reach cast underneath an overhanging branch while the wind howls. In fact, it’s a royal pain in the backside. But that’s also what makes it challenging and interesting. After all, if we truly wanted to make things easier on ourselves, we’d just grab a spinning rod, a bobber and a Styrofoam cup full of night crawlers. The whole point to fly-fishing is that we’re figuring out new and effective ways to tempt our quarry at the same time we continue to challenge ourselves. Fishing in the wind adds a whole new level of complexity to the sport, and that’s not always a bad thing.

I should also point out that when it comes to gusty days, not all fly-fishing styles are created equal. It probably won’t make much difference if you’re fishing for bonefish, tarpon, bass or pike—with most still water or saltwater species, you’re making a basic straightline cast—but trout anglers enjoy a wider variety of options, some of which are more suited to windy days than others.

If you think it’s going to howl, and you absolutely have to be on the water, be sure to bring a kite. ■

have too much trouble keeping an eye on the forecast and avoiding wind that puts life and limb at risk. The bigger issue for most of us is that it’s just not much fun to fly fish in a stiff breeze. A steady 10 mph wind can take the shine off an otherwise stellar day. Add an extra 5 to 10 mph and most folks struggle with errant casts and seriously diminished accuracy. I usually draw the line at 25 mph—although there’s a little wiggle room in there. If the forecast calls for lighter winds with gusts to 25, then I may well give it a shot. If it’s a straight 25 mph, though, or higher—well, there are more enjoyable things than fighting an invisible enemy who exists solely to ruin your time on the water. Fly-fishing is supposed to be fun. When it’s so damn windy that your angling becomes an exercise in masochism, then it’s time to consider more pleasant alternatives.

SPORTING CLASSICS • 143JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 866-549-9278COORDINATOR@JACKSONHOLEARTAUCTION.COM|JACKSONHOLEARTAUCTION.COM JACKSON HOLE | SCOTTSDALE | SANTA FE | NEW YORK OVER A DECADE OF EXCELLENCE IN SPORTING ART W.H.D. Koerner (1878–1938), Fly Fishing, oil on canvas, 24 x 36 in., SOLD: $99,450 The Jackson Hole Art Auction is pleased to present the Wyoming Art Auction! An online auction of exceptional quality, scheduled for February 20, 2021. Go West. Go Wild. Go Online. John Clymer (1907–1989), The Caribou Hunter, 1956, oil on canvas, 30 x 28 in., SOLD: $26,325 Stanley Meltzoff (1917–2006), Autumn Hunter and Pointers, oil on board, 26 x 20 in., SOLD: $42,000 NOW ACCEPTING QUALITY CONSIGNMENTS

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Sweet Wyoming Home by Clark Kelley Price, oil on canvas, 24 x 30

September 17-18, 2021

Eider Duck Shoot by Stanley Meltzoff, oil on linen on board, 36 x 40.25

New Jackson Hole Art Auction Online February 20, 2021

15th Annual Jackson Hole Art Auction

wyoming art auction

Canada Geese by David Maass, oil on board, 24 x 36 wyoming art auction

Trailside Galleries and the Gerald Peters Gallery are pleased to announce the 15th Annual Jackson Hole Art Auction, scheduled for September 17-18, 2021 in Jackson Hole,TheWyoming.annuallive auction has quickly become one of the premier wildlife and Western art events in the country, defined by the high standard of works offered by both contemporary artists and deceased masters. The Jackson Hole Art Auction continues achieving top prices for iconic wildlife artists such as Bob Kuhn and Carl Rungius, among others.

AUCTIONS &

EXHIBITIONSSPORTINGCLASSICS2021 wyoming art auction

• 145JANUARY / FEBRUARY

The Jackson Hole Art Auction is pleased to announce a new online auction—the Wyoming Art Auction. Scheduled for February 20, 2021, the sale features high quality wildlife, sporting and Western works at an accessible price point. Among the highlights for the February online auction are works by Stanley Meltzoff, Luke Frazier and manyThemore.Jackson Hole Art Auction is currently seeking consignments for the annual September live auction by wildlife and sporting artists including Robert Abbett, Ken Carlson, Bob Kuhn, Friedrich Wilhelm Kuhnert, Philp R. Goodwin, Edmund Osthaus, Carl Rungius, David Shepherd, Tucker Smith and more. ■ jacksonholeartauction.com

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SPORTING CLASSICS • 147JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 AUCTIONS & EXHIBITIONS

Copley is honored to have been selected to sell the following important collections in the Winter Sale:

February 19–20, 2021

■ Fifty decoys lots held in a New York City museum since 1953. ■ Forty decoys lots from the Len Carnaghi Decoy Collection.

■ The Dale W. Farrell Collection of coastal and fish paintings.

This year, many of us had plans that we had to set aside—an anticipated hunt, a trip or even a convention. We could look at those events as just “canceled,” but those with experience look at them as “postponed” because now is the time to prepare.

Now is the time to perfect a shooting technique, to become physically ready for that next stalk or to make sure you have the absolute best firearms at your disposal. Where do you find the ideal firearm? Rock Island Auction Company.

■ The Herb Wetanson Collection of decoys. ■ copleyart.com

■ The Kroghie Andresen Collection.

Pleissner Oil on

■ The Dr. Peter J. Muller Jr. Collection of American bird decoys.

■ Approximately 75 lots from the du Pont Collection, including an exceptional Crowell curlew and Ward goose.

Rock Island Auction Company isn’t cancelling anything—it ADDED auctions in 2020, hosting more than ever before.

Experienced Hunters Know: Preparation is Key to Success

■ The Ted and Judy Harmon Collection.

■ The Dwight Miller Collection.

Copley Winter Sale

Jimmy’s M. canvas, 24 1/4 x 36 1/4

■ The John Dillon Collection.

Tucked-Head x

Goldeneye Albert Laing Grey Trout, or Weakfish Samuel Kilbourne Oil on canvas, 10

When you’re ready to prepare for your next hunt or upgrade your firearms collection, the upcoming April 16-18 Premier Firearms Auction is the perfect event to satisfy either ambition. ■ rockislandauction.com

Pool on the Restigouche Ogden

■ The Dr. Leonard O. Oden Collection of bird carvings.

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Nick Lyons: Giant of Modern Sporting Letters

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BY JIM CASADA I would contend, with plenty of evidence to support my views, that over the course of the last half century there has been no more important figure in American sporting literature than Nick Lyons. His contributions, particularly when it comes to works on angling, touch many areas. There are, for starters, his stellar efforts as a writer. With the appearance of his latest book, Fire in the Straw: Notes on Inventing a Life (Arcade Publishing, 2020, ISBN 9781951627195, hardbound, $24.99), his books on fishing total upward of a dozen original works along with another half dozen or more anthologies he has edited with his meticulous attention to detail and uncanny eye for what fellow fanatics of the long rod and whistling line are likely to enjoy. Then there is Nick’s work in another editorial guise—as the individual responsible for seeing efforts of other writers through the publishing process to the printed light of day. For many years he worked from Crown Publishers in this capacity (amazingly while holding a full-time position as an English professor at Hunter College), and then he was the founder of a leading player in the field of outdoor books in the past three decades, Lyons Press (later Lyons & Burford and today Skyhorse Publishing, with his son currently at the helm of a major producer of new titles). Yet the arena where his impact has arguably been the greatest is one that most readers, even his avid fans, will be vaguely aware of at best. This involves his unstinting efforts as a mentor, exemplar, sympathetic ear and perpetually flowing fount of encouragement to other writers. Perhaps sharing a couple of personal examples of Nick’s involvement in this behind-the-scenes portion of the world of outdoor literature will offer a fuller indication of why scores of contemporary writers look up to him with a degree of appreciation that approaches sheer veneration.Somethree decades ago, when I was just beginning to find my footing in the field of sporting letters, unbeknownst to me (and I suspect today completely forgotten to him) Lyons recommended me as a potential contributor to a start-up fly-fishing magazine. Although the publication is now long gone, the gig that resulted from his putting my name forward opened up some meaningful doors for me as well as providing me much-needed confidence in what I was doing. Fast forward the better part of two decades, with sporadic exchanges by phone and snail mail, and I took the admittedly somewhat brazen and certainly presumptive step of asking Nick to contribute a short foreword to my book, Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park: An Insider’s Guide to a Pursuit of Passion. He not only obliged but gave me a tip about adjusting my working title for the book, which was invaluable. I have no doubt whatsoever that it added appreciably to sales of the work. Moreover, he offered an encomium that for me was invaluable: “This is a book anyone who knows or plans to visit the Smokies will cherish, but also a book that anyone who takes pleasure in fine writing about the outdoor world and especially fly fishing will admire greatly. I do.” His name carried great weight, and I have no doubt whatsoever that single sentence enhanced sales. That was an incredibly gracious gesture, given that it came from the guru of modern fly-fishing literature, yet it shouldn’t suggest that by some strange act of geographical transference a lifelong New Yorker had unaccountably decided to adopt a certified hillbilly from the North Carolina highlands as his fairhaired literary stepchild. Far from it, because this personal example of Nick’s generosity has been multiplied countless times over with other writers, struggling and highly successful alike, over the years. That’s just the essence of Nick Lyons—an enormously giving man who has somehow always found the time to help fellow laborers in the vineyards of sporting literature. I owe him a great debt of gratitude, something scores and perhaps even hundreds of others could say in equally heartfelt fashion.

An earlier rendition of this column, dating back seven or eight years, was devoted to an overview of Nick’s impressive list of angling publications, but it is the appearance of his latest work that occasions the present piece and engendered the remarks above. Fire in the Straw is not a full-fledged autobiography or an all-encompassing memoir. Instead, as its subtitle suggests, the work is a loosely linked, chronologically arranged collection of cameos focusing on important (and intensely interesting) interludes in the life of an octogenarian author/editor. Magnanimous as ever, Nick responded to a number of questions the work raised in my mind and that may well come to the forefront with other readers as they peruse his latest effort.

BOOKS

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BOOKS

We are blessed by this work, one that might in some way be viewed as a capstone to a wonderfully fruitful career, although I would hasten to add that I hope there are still books aplenty to come from a master of modern nonfiction.

Musings,MountainBoyhood:Memories,andMorefromtheUniversityofTennesseePress.Thebookisavailablethrough the Sporting Classics Store or Casada’s website, www.jimcasadaoutdoors.com. BY JIM CASADA

He reckons that the first vague rumblings of an exercise in autobiographical expression came to him some six decades ago, and the opening chapter in this work is a refined version of his muse being put in motion in a small room in Greenwich Village deep in yesteryear. From that point forward, we get interesting, incisive, sometimes poignant and invariably powerful glimpses of a literary icon in the making. There are all sorts of delightful side excursions. For Nick, as for noted novelist Pat Conroy, basketball consumed his innermost being, something seemingly alien to a fellow of short stature who you would never associate with athletic endeavor. He offers insight on the joy and despair to be found in the academic world—the pure pleasure of the actual act of teaching and sharing with questing young minds and the souldestroying gloom of dealing with callous, uncaring administrators exemplifying the Peter Principle or, more crudely, the truth inherent in the phrase “shit rises to the top.” Having traveled a similar road for almost exactly the same amount of time as Nick (upwards of a quarter century), empathy came easily in these parts of theYou’llbook.garner a lot from the author’s reading preferences and simply cataloging a list of the authors he mentions along the way would give anyone who devours fine books a lengthy guidepost for untold hours of armchair delight. Partnering nicely with thoughts on other authors, there is plenty of input on how Lyons has functioned as a writer and coverage of subjects of immense importance to him—not just fishing or teaching, but a wonderful chapter on his mother; a charming look back and wonderfully moving treatment of his lifelong love affair with his wife Mari, a talented and widely acclaimed artist; ruminations on the world of book publishing and much more. He shared with me the fact that he had had the book’s title, which comes from Thomas Lodge’s late 16th century book, Rosalynde, in mind for half a century. He feels every writer has “some fire in our straw” and that what is required is some type of “fan to bring it forth.” For him, the death of Mari, his beloved partner, mother of his four children and life mate, seems to have been something of a catalyst kindling the long smoldering flame. Eventually, in fits and starts following her passing, things seemed to come together and Nick realized “I had to get this lump of something out of my brain, where it had nibbled for more than 50 years. You have the result, for better or worse.” Rest assured that from this reader’s perspective it is decidedly for the better. The words from Thomas Lodge that inspired the title encapsulate the heart of the matter: “Fire cannot be hid in the straw, nor the nature of man so concealed but at last it will have his course.”

Certainly anyone who reads Fire in the Straw will come away enriched, enchanted by a style that is at once pithy and persuasive and enlightened. Along the way they will have been entertained and driven to the inescapable realization that this work is a masterpiece of its genre. ■

Longtime book columnist and Sporting Classics Editor-at-Large Jim Casada has recently published a memoir of his own. It is A Smoky

SPORTING CLASSICS • 151JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021

“They will go into the woods, not blindly, but with their fathers who know how to hunt and who teach them how to hunt, and then they in turn, will accompany their sons into the woods and teach a new generation how to hunt.”

— Ed Zern To Hell With Fishing, 1945 Submitted by Steve Warren, Hoopeston, IL

— John C. Phillips A Sportsman’s Second Scrapbook, 1933 Submitted by Rick Tucker, Sequim, WA

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“Thanks we ought to give, we shooting folk, for those thrills of expectation; for the packed memories that leap to consciousness at the jingle of the dog bell; for the sparkle of the frost on the alder leaves.”

QUOTES

— Havilah Babcock Jaybirds Go to Hell on Friday, 1965 Submitted by Matt Kallam, Viera, FL

“Grayson Chesser, Decoy Maker,” Field & Stream, 1984 Submitted by Ellen Worthmont, Burlington, VT “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”

— Michael M. Dewitt, Jr. Sporting Classics Daily, 2020 Submitted by Bob Erwin, Blaine, MN “The ability to tell a good story may be dying, but if it is, it’s because the ability to listen died first.”

“The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night, ‘Ya-honk’ he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation, The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen close, Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.”

— Walt Whitman Song of Myself, 1855 Submitted by Rourke Feinberg, Miller Place, NY

Ducks at Sunset, 1953 by Reveau Bassett (1897-1981), oil on canvas, 24 x 30 inches

— May Lamar and Rich Donnell Hunting The Southern Tradition, 1987 Submitted by Scotty Booth, Strong, AR “In my experience, and in that of every other hunter with whom I have ever discussed them, there is only one thing that will stop a charging buffalo; and that is death—either his or yours.”

— Henry David Thoreau, (1817-1862) Submitted by Kevin O’Rourke, Haymarket, VA

Send us your favorite quotes from sporting literature and receive one free digital subscription for every quote that is published. Include the author, title of book and date of publication. Email using subject line “Quotes” to editorial@sportingclassics.com

— George Reiger

“Fishermen are born honest, but they get over it.”

— John “Pondoro” Taylor African Rifles and Cartridges, 1948 Submitted by Charles Turner, Bend, OR “This is my Holy Land, my Temple, and you probably have one of your own. Be it freshwater or salt, turkey country or whitetail habitat, upland quail or high mountain rams, many of us have found these places to commune with nature, the spiritual world, and thus our own souls. If not, I suggest you find one soon.”

“Bird hunting is a social pastime, not a solitary adventure. It takes two to do it right; companionship is half the hunt.”

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nestled amid the natural beauty of 3,500 acres in the heart of Rhode Island, lies the most amenity rich, four-season private sporting club in the country. Featuring an array of activities for guests of all ages, all with the service you’ve come to expect from Ocean House Management’s collection of New England resorts. Whether you seek the thrilling or the serene, Preserve Sporting Club & Residences offers a combination of unspoiled nature and refined luxury. Experience a peaceful hike on 50 miles of scenic trails, test your skills at the Northeast’s premier shooting sports facilities or enjoy one of our special Continental Hunts. Pampered pleasures include more than 20 sporting amenities ranging from Double Barrel Kitchen to our 12,000-square-foot spa and wellness center (opening this winter) and access to Ocean House’s amenities just down the road.

Your Own Private Outdoor Estate

SPORTING CLASSICS • CVR4JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2021 Leisure Stays l Memberships l Residences l Meetings & Events l Sporting Shoppe PRESERVESPORTINGCLUB.COM 888.615.3386 DESTINATIONSERVICES@OHMCOLLECTION.COM preserve the tradition