Hunting

Hunting stories stay eternally ingrained in our minds. Photos help keep those memories alive past our lifetimes (and also make you stay a bit more honest about how big that buck really was). Whether it's from a trip long ago or a more recent hunt from this past season, it’s fun to look at an image...

If you take a peek inside the average hunter’s gun safe, you’ll find many of the same popular cartridges: .30-06 Springfield, .308 Win., .270 Win., .243 Win., .30-30 Win., .300 Win. Mag., and a few others. You don’t need me to sing the praises of those old-school cartridges. They’ve been hammering...

This fall, Nick Schmitz, of Grand Forks, North Dakota, killed an absolutely massive bighorn sheep that stands to set the new state record. The story of his hunt began when he drew one of the most coveted tags in North America: a North Dakota bighorn sheep tag, of which North Dakota Game and Fish...

I didn’t expect to kill a buck. Didn’t deserve to. Last year, by the second to last weekend of Montana’s month-long rifle season, I’d gone deer hunting a grand total of zero times. My focus had admittedly been elsewhere: it was my bird dog Gunney’s first season, I was deep in the grips of the fall...

If you’ve hunted elk in the backcountry, you likely know a couple things to be true: it’s fun as hell, and big bulls often like to die in the gnarliest, nastiest places imaginable. While there’s not much you can do about that, there are a few ways you can shorten your packout, and it all depends on...

There is no other time of the year that I look forward to more than duck season. Every day that it draws closer, I get more and more excited and soon begin dreaming about the smell of mud, the feel of cold water around my hips, and the sound of frantically blasting shotguns as soon as I close my...

I’ve always been a hunter with ADD. This made hunting from a stand nearly impossible, as I’d constantly fidget, twitch, and shift around like a puppy in a dog crate, until I’d inevitably give up and go for a walk to see what I could find in the woods. This would drive my hunting buddies crazy, who...

Shotgun recoil is much like the game “two for flinching” many of us played as kids. The game's premise was to fake like you were going to punch your buddy, they flinch, and receive two punches on the shoulder as a penalty. It may not initially hurt, but your shoulder would become sore if you played...

I’ve never been much of a duck caller. Despite having several duck calls which I constantly blow in the backyard (much to the annoyance of my neighbors) and after reading up on the subject and watching dozens of YouTube tutorials, it’s still taken me quite a few years to get the hang of it. Despite...

I don’t know what it says about me as a person, but my first colony of dermestid beetles was a surprise Christmas gift. I was in the middle of my third trapping season and had my hands full cleaning piles of furbearer skulls for my Etsy store. Apparently, I made it clear that I wanted some little...

The Gnome watched again as the sun set from his treestand—another day without spotting the elusive peryton. He was growing bored of sitting in a tree waiting for the creature to emerge. He’d sat up there for days, listening to squirrels bicker and crows laugh at him. But the Gnome knew his best...

I am continually amazed how the .22 Long Rifle has resisted replacement over the course of its astonishing 138-year history. No other cartridge has even come close, and there have been attempts. Most recently, in 2004, Hornady released what was touted at the time as the “heir apparent” to the old...