Vol. 126, No. 1 - 2021

Field & Stream

Field & Stream Magazine is the Foremost Magazine for American Sportsmen

Field & Stream1 min read
Field & Stream
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Colin Kearns DESIGN DIRECTOR Russ Smith EXECUTIVE EDITOR Dave Hurteau SENIOR EDITOR Matthew Every HUNTING EDITOR Will Brantley SHOOTING EDITOR John B. Snow ENGAGEMENT EDITOR Ryan Perry MANAGING EDITOR, DIGITAL EDITIONS Jean McKenna AR
Field & Stream3 min read
Breaking Away
IT'D BEEN A WHILE. So long that I’d almost forgotten that feeling. It hit as I was standing on the bank of a canal, holding a .223 and waiting for the bull alligator to break the surface for air. If all went to plan, this would be our third tagged ga
Field & Stream1 min read
Fisheye Lens
Every fly angler dreams of this moment: releasing a bonefish back into the crystal-clear flats of the Bahamas—before it’s time to return to the skiff bow and hunt for another. ■
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Ask Petzal
HAVE YOU EVER WORN A COWBOY HAT WHILE HUNTING? BE HONEST. —Ronald Sullivan Jr., San Antonio, Texas In November 1977, while driving from Cody, Wyo., to Billings, Mont., to go on an elk hunt, I hit an icy patch on Highway 72 and went off the road in sp
Field & Stream3 min read
Strange Brood
FLY ANGLERS in the eastern half of the U.S. are eagerly anticipating a hatch 17 years in the making: the Brood X cicada emergence. From around mid-May through June, billions of these chubby bugs will be singing in trees from Georgia to Pennsylvania t
Field & Stream2 min read
Buck Hunters Go Big
ONLY 20 YEARS AGO, half of all whitetail bucks tagged by hunters were just 1½ years old. Barely 1 in 5 was 3½ or older. Since then, the yearling take has steadily dropped while the mature buck kill has skyrocketed. New data from the National Deer Ass
Field & Stream5 min read
The True North
SO YOU REALLY, most sincerely, want to get away from it all? I have bad news for you, Bunkie. There’s a Florida family named Means who have made a hobby of finding the most remote spots in the U.S. Of the 33 states they’ve visited, the average remote
Field & Stream2 min read
The Holiday Getaway
“BUT EVERYBODY HUNTS on Thanksgiving,” I insist year after year in late November. Not true, says my wife. She’s from an Eastern suburb where no one hunts at all. She knows plenty of people who don’t hunt on Thanksgiving. She can name them—and my name
Field & Stream7 min read
Anywhere or Bust
MY FRIEND THOMAS’ INVITATION to join him on an April turkey hunt in Texas sounded almost like an apology. “Hey, man,” he said, “I know turkey isn’t your thing, and I understand if you don’t want to go. You’d have to fly to Little Rock, and then we’d
Field & Stream4 min read
Smoke On The Water
FOR SOME REASON, when I think of the trip, what I remember most is the smoke—first from the tailpipe of the lime-green Ford Pinto that belched a black cloud at every ignition and kept coughing until the speedometer hit 30. On top of the Pinto was a 1
Field & Stream2 min read
The Sand Hill
MY BUDDIES AND I take an end-of-turkey-season road trip to Nebraska every May. There’s a particular sand hill on the farm we hunt, and it’s where I usually spend my final day of the season. Nate and I found the spot on the last morning of the trip a
Field & Stream2 min read
The Swimming Hole
DRIVING THROUGH the winding hollow in the dark, I followed my friend Avery’s taillights just ahead. On either side of us were steep wooded slopes creating a canyon just wide enough for the ribbon of a road we were on and the small creek beside it. If
Field & Stream4 min read
Portals To The Past
ALL MY LIFE, the written word has provided a portal through which I can escape the humdrums and terrors of the age and lead the life of adventure to which I aspire. Many writers have provided doors for my escape, but none has been more influential th
Field & Stream3 min read
The Guilt-Free Zone
I DIDN’T KNOW HOW the kid got his pudgy hands on my little secret. I just knew I was dead meat. I was 12, and I’d torn some pages out of a buddy’s magazine and stuffed them into a soft glasses case that my brother Frank never used, then jammed that b
Field & Stream10 min read
Cheap Thrills
SOMETIMES A SQUIRREL WILL miscalculate the jump from one limb to another, scramble about the sky for just long enough to realize he’s not a bat, and hit the forest floor with a thud. Without exception, he’ll right himself, look both ways, and run, as
Field & Stream11 min read
This Is No Small Game
HERE’S WHAT I’VE SEEN in my first three hours of jackrabbit hunting in the Sonoran Desert’s middle of nowhere: Stalking through the mesquite and paloverde, shimmying past the occasional stout ocotillo, I have seen jackrabbits hauling jackrabbit ass.
Field & Stream4 min read
Ready, Set, Strip
YOU LIFT THE ROD. The guide screams. You know you’ve done a Very Bad Thing. “Not the trout set! For #@&*! sake, you never trout set!” I would rather live that classic old nightmare—standing in front of my high school homeroom class buck naked—than he
Field & Stream4 min read
An Uncomfortable Aoudad
I’M NO SHUFFLEBOARD PLAYER, and the odds of my learning to play inside a West Texas water-silo-turned-hunting-camp powered by solar panels seem slim. But the 22-foot, regulation-size shuffleboard table is here nonetheless, and my three aoudad hunting
Field & Stream4 min read
Hunting In The Time Of COVID
SOME GOBBLES are so faint, they sound like the briefest roar of a distant crowd. At least I thought it was a gobble. I cutt. The crowd roared. I reached for my cell phone. “Turkey just started gobbling,” I tapped out. “Tell dogs to hang on, please.”
Field & Stream4 min read
Have a Nice Trip
A MOUNTAIN CLIMBER I know, talking about peaks he no longer attempts, once told me, “Gravity wins in the end.” His words came back to me recently as I lay on my back on an icy path in the Poconos, wondering how much damage I’d done. The fall happened
Field & Stream1 min read
Outdoor Life
Alex Robinson Editor-in-Chief Russ Smith Design Director Jean McKenna Managing Editor, Digital Editions Senior Deputy Editor Natalie Krebs Deputy Editor Gerry Bethge Shooting Editor John B. Snow Associate Editor Joe Genzel Hunting Editor Andrew McKea
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A New Frontier
MANY OL READERS have grown up with this publication, and in a lot of hunting families, as in mine, the Outdoor Life tradition is passed down from generation to generation, like a beloved heirloom shotgun. You’ll find old issues stashed away in librar
Field & Stream7 min read
Tracking The Wolf Man
“STILL BEDDED,” I SAID to my buddy Frank Schultz while I eyed the band of Dall sheep rams we were after. I turned out of the wind and scooted back between the rocks that cradled a grassy spot atop the jagged ridgeline. We were pinned down, unable to
Field & Stream1 min read
The past
Up here we call old-timers “sourdoughs” as a nod to all those brave outdoorsmen who came to Alaska to try their luck in the wild with a rifle and a bag of flour. If you look back on Alaska’s hunting history, you’ll see two themes that transcend time:
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The Devil’s Country
THERE ARE PLENTY of mysterious tales about Thomas Bay in Southeast Alaska, which prospectors named “Devil’s Country” in the early 1900s, but the most prevalent is the legend of the Kóoshdaa Káa. Tlingit stories say the Kóoshdaa Káa is a shapeshifting
Field & Stream1 min read
The present
Many of us lower 48ers see Alaska as a wilderness playground. There’s no denying this dynamic in a state where one in eight jobs is tied to the tourism industry. As COVID restrictions lighten and outdoorsmen and -women get back to traveling, you can
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This Happened To Me!
Write Us! We publish true adventures. Send yours to THTM@OutdoorLife.com. ■
Field & Stream12 min read
Lost In The Gloom
THE FOG ROLLS UP THE MOUNTAIN, hiding the old-growth forest below us and smothering any hopes we might have had of spotting a blacktail buck. We knew we wouldn't see, let alone shoot, a deer today, but a little walk helps us escape the claustrophobia
Field & Stream9 min read
Waters Of Plenty
WE'RE PULLED OVER on a gravel bank in interior Alaska, peering down a series of Class IV rapids named the Toilet Bowl. There are five of us in three 30-year-old rafts. No one wants a swirlie. Only one of us, Mary Katherine Fields (everyone calls her
Field & Stream4 min read
Guns Of The Last Frontier
ONE RIFLE. That's all an Alaska sourdough needs. But not you. You need more. Because you aren’t up there 365 days a year, biding your time until a moose, caribou, ram, or griz walks past your cabin. As a hunter from the lower 48, you’ve invested time
Field & Stream2 min read
The Gateway Hunt
A big bull caribou, with his tall sweeping rack and snow-white mane, is one of the most iconic animals of the North. And in my opinion, caribou is the perfect big-game species for lower 48 hunters dreaming about their first Alaska adventure. Caribou
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The future
Tlingit people have been using wood hooks for centuries. They’re made from yew (the carved side) and yellow cedar (the barbed side). The wood creates the right buoyancy as they float off the bottom of the ocean, luring halibut. Each hook has a spirit
Field & Stream3 min read
A Rookie’s Fly-in Camp
THE LURE OF THE LAST FRONTIER struck me well before I learned to hunt. With Jon Krakauer pages in hand and a middle schooler’s fascination, I figured it must be where true outdoorsmen go to test themselves. Someday, I thought. Fifteen years later, wi
Field & Stream10 min read
The End Of The Earth
A SHOTGUN BLAST echoes dully down the mountainside, muffled by the snow-covered slope. Something white tumbles from the rocks at the summit and gathers speed like a snowball. My buddy Kali Parmley has already hoofed it half a mile straight up, and no
Field & Stream4 min read
A Bucket-list River Hunt
"WE COULD PROBABLY GET THERE," said Striker Overly, owner of Alaska Arctic Adventures. He was running his hands through his disheveled hair and laughing maniacally like the strung-out adrenaline junkie he is. “But the plane might flip over when we la
Field & Stream3 min read
The Future Past
MY TLINGIT NAME is Kootink. I was born in Ketchikan and raised just west of there on Prince of Wales Island, in Craig, a town of about 1,000, where my people have thrived since time immemorial. But I haven’t always lived there. When I went to college

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