A young mule deer buck walks westward in the open prairie. There is no cover for either of us. He had seen me earlier and wasn’t alarmed by my presence. Him and I, we walk together for almost an hour, hundreds of yards apart, occasionally stopping to take stock of each other. At this moment he accepts me as part of his world and it feels good. We come to a small hill that splits us up. I arrive at the other side first and sit behind a…
I don’t want to write about human shit. I really don’t. There are hundreds of other things I’d rather write about and should be writing about. But I feel compelled because the last couple of years, while hunting, I came across five piles of human shit right next to or directly on public land parking areas. Huge piles of people shit. Sometimes there were unnecessarily large wads of toilet paper on top of the piles. Sometimes I’d see long strands of toilet paper with brown streaks flying off…
It’s a funny story really. I was never that interested in hunting. I always thought it was something that the “boys” did. But then, one day, I was at a sporting goods store with my man. He was looking at guns (yawn) and talking with the salesmen about calibers, gauges, loads and other stuff I really couldn’t care less about. I was posting a selfie on Instagram and was waiting for the likes to start rolling in and someone ran into me while I was staring at my…
Somehow it’s almost hunting season again. And that means it is time for me to start preparing myself for the first morning of the season. Seriously, 4:00 a.m? What kind of bullshit hour is this? Is it night or day? Why can’t it make up its mind? Coffee. Coffee. Coffee. God, I love coffee. What would I do without it? Do climate change deniers realize what is happening to the coffee crop? They must not, because if they did, we’d already have a global carbon tax. God, I…
The greatest growing hunting demographic in the country is women. This has piqued the interest of journalists, at least one social scientist, game and fish departments around the country and of course, the outdoor recreation companies. As with most trends, people want to know why. Recent articles by National Geographic, The Globe and Mail and the Dallas Daily News report anecdotal stories about women who are getting into hunting and their reasons for doing so. Most cite a desire to know where their meat comes from and a strong…
In September of this year, the billionaire Wilks brothers, notorious for buying up hundreds of thousands of acres of ranch land in central and eastern Montana, purchased the 24,500 acre Diamond Ranch in Rosebud County in southeastern Montana. The Diamond Ranch is located west of the Tongue River and Rosebud Creek flows through it. It’s quite spectacular country, you can see some pictures of it here. The Billings Gazette reported in October of 2014 that the Wilks brothers own more than 341,845 acres in Montana.* From what I can tell, this is…
A trophy mule deer buck was bedded down at the base of a large formation of sandstone rocks. He was big. He was beautiful. He was relaxed. The distance was further than I prefer to shoot but I put up my gun, looked through the scope and watched him chew his cud for a few seconds. “Shoot! Shoot him!” “He’s too far, I need to get closer.” I crawled through the sage brush until I was out of sight of my hunting companion. I could still see the…
Last fall, I was a hunting failure. It’s not because I’m a bad shot or I because don’t know how to find the critters. It’s because of the Tongue River Railroad Company (owned by Burlington Northern Santa Fe, billionaire Forrest Mars and struggling coal company Arch Coal). Let me put a caveat in here. My season wasn’t a complete failure. If it wasn’t for a rancher friend on the Tongue River who took pity on me, it might have been a complete failure. I was able to get…