Gray's Sporting Journal May/June 2019

Gray’s Sporting Journal VOLUME FORTY-FOUR

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Features VOLUME FORTY-FOUR ISSUE 2 • MAY / JUNE 2019

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Hooterville

by O. Victor Miller The philosophizing can get deep at hunting camp, where it pays to watch your step.

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Close Encounters

16 Here, a Tiger’s Lair

by David Cannon

A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNAL

by E. Donnall Thomas Jr. Wild turkeys are part of early American lore and, among hunters, legendary to this day.

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Getting There Is Everything

by James Wu Leaving the city, driving beyond the traffic and snarl, and wading into the spring migration of stripers.

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by Andrew Griffiths

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Wherein an elegant slide leads to a wardrobe change that brings a measure of safety to the river.

Yard Bird by Russell Graves

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A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNAL

On Falling In

The Russian

by Dave Zoby Keep what you catch and live off wild salmon, while you can.

95 EXPEDITIONS

The Golden Kings of Bolivia

by Sekhar Bahadur A journey in a simpler past for golden dorado.

FRONT COVER: Under the Old Oak, by Peggy Watkins

Oil on canvas • 22 x 28 inches BACK COVER: Wood Shed Gobbler, by C. D. Clarke Watercolor • 18 x 24 inches

54 Fly Fishing Bonanza by Greg Vinci A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNAL

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Columns & Departments VOLUME FORTY-FOUR ISSUE 2 • MAY / JUNE 2019

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6 JOURNAL

76 ART

by Russ Lumpkin

by Brooke Chilvers

Every Least Thing He looked upon His work and called it good.

60 TRADITIONS The Lure of the Southern Seas

by Van Camper Heilner Edited by Will Ryan

Where fishing in the salt can rock your world.

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68 ANGLING

Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing

by Miles Nolte

The myth of big game fishing.

Louis Agassiz Fuertes The right man at the right time.

80 EATING

American Shad

by Martin Mallet

A tale of two coasts.

110 BOOKS Higher Ed

by Chris Camuto

112 POEM

keys, strings, and solos

by Matt Smythe

72 SHOOTING Single Minded

by Terry Wieland

Gems from Chicopee Falls.

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66 Gear Guide 92 People, Places & Equipment 104 The Listing

3/26/19 10:42 AM

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

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

Editorial Russ Lumpkin, Editor Wayne Knight, Art Director Terry Wieland, Shooting Editor Miles Nolte, Angling Editor Seth Fields, Digital Content Manager 770-696-7619 / info@flywaymedia.net

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

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

Advertising Sales Northeast ~ Scott Buchmayr 978-462-6335 / buchmayrscott@gmail.com Midwest / Southeast ~ Amos Crowley 216-378-9811 / amos@crowleymedia.us.com West ~ Scott J. Cherek 307-635-8899 / cherekgroup@bresan.net Stone Wallace Communications 512-799-1045 / jimkstone@gmail.com Write to the Editor

editor@grayssportingjournal.com C i r c u l at i o n ProCirc: 3191 Coral Way, Suite 510, Miami, FL Kolin Rankin, Consumer Marketing Director, ProCirc Mike Bernardin, Circulation Coordinator, ProCirc Retailers: To carry GSJ, call 646-307-7765.

Subscription Inquiries:

(Orders, address changes, problems)

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www.grayssportingjournal.com Email: grayssportingjournal@emailcustomerservice.com Back Issues:

706-823-3526

A Publication of MCC Magazines, LLC a division of Morris Communications Company, LLC 735 Broad St., Augusta, GA 30901

Donna Kessler, President Patty Tiberg, Vice President Scott Ferguson, Director of Circulation Donald Horton, Director of Manufacturing Karen Fralick, Director of Publishing Services Morris Communications Company, LLC William S. Morris III, Chairman William S. Morris IV, President & CEO ©2019 by MCC Magazines, LLC. All rights reserved.

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

Contributions in the form of manuscripts or photographs will be gladly considered for publication. A self-addressed, stamped envelope of the proper size must accompany each submission. Please write for editorial guidelines if submitting for the first time, and enclose a SASE; this is very important. We cannot guarantee against damage or loss of materials submitted, but we take great care in handling all submissions.

Address all correspondence to Gray’s Sporting Journal, P.O. Box 1207, Augusta, GA 30903-1207. For subscription inquiries or if you do not wish to have your name provided to qualified users of our mailing list, call 1-800-288-5892.

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

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Every Least Thing He looked upon His work and called it good.

by Russ Lumpkin

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t has been said that God is the original conservationist. Few people preach that message more fervently than farmer, author, and agitator Wendell Berry. Two decades ago, I read Berry’s What are People For?, which comprises more than 20 essays— among them, “God and Country,” where Berry asserts, “God made the world because He wanted it made. He thinks the world is good, and He loves it.”

Faulkner mined a similar vein in “Delta Autumn,” part of Go Down, Moses. “I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man—the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it.”

In The Crossing, Cormac McCarthy writes at length about God. Of creation, McCarthy says, “There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary to it. . . . Every least thing. . . . Nothing can be dispensed with.”

It’s sad to see how blithely we often treat the wonderment of creation. Much of it is poor stewardship, what Berry called “the most horrid blasphemy.”

I realize that much of what is needed for modern life must be mined, dug, or somehow compelled from the bowels of the earth through means ugly, dangerous, and toxic. But when we can draw a line, especially if it will obviate near certain widespread ecological disaster . . . well, by God, we should.

Of enduring wonder are the migrations of wildlife. Godwits fly nonstop from the Arctic to New Zealand. Millions of wildebeests cross Serengeti National Park and the Maasai Mara National Reserve, fording rivers infested with crocs. Knowing the peril, still they plunge in.

Sadly, this country’s most famous migration is long gone. These days, bison live in protected areas in small groups—much like the original inhabitants of the continent, who depended on them. But imagine North America in the 1700s, when 60 million bison thundered along migration routes that spanned the continental latitudes.

So much has been lost already.

Northern Dynasty is a Canadian company campaigning to dig Pebble Mine in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska. The company’s most recent proposal calls for a pit mine that would be approximately 6,800 feet long, 5,600 wide, and 1,970 feet deep. The tailings embankments—engineered to hold back a lake storing toxic materials in perpetuity—will measure up to 600 feet tall. It would all be constructed in one of the most earthquake-prone regions of the world. In fact, a 5.2 quake struck nearby King Salmon in 2016.

The area around Iliamna Lake is a crowded network of streams, creeks, and pothole lakes that are part of a water table that’s near the surface of the earth—perilously near should Pebble Mine come to fruition. According to Sarah O’Neal, a fishe ies PhD candidate who works for Trout Unlimited, “The groundwater table at much of the Pebble site is virtually continuous with the surface water.”

When asked if either the Kvichak or Nushagak Rivers are spring fed, O’Neal replied, “The answer is undoubtedly yes. All basins in this area receive extensive groundwater input.”

The pit will sit just north of Iliamna Lake, which drains directly into the Kvichak River. Generally, the Kvichak sustains runs of more than 4 million sockeye salmon. In 2018, according to the Alaska Department

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of Fish and Game, more than 62 million sockeyes entered the rivers and creeks that empty into Bristol Bay—the largest run on record since 1893.

There are many reasons to worry about the arrival of Pebble Mine, and among them is recent history.

The 2014 Mount Polley disaster in British Columbia spilled 33 million cubic yards of tailings into Polley Lake. The slurry then pushed down Hazeltine Creek and into Quesnel Lake, which supports a substantial run of sockeyes. The breach of the tailings pond at Mount Polley is considered the worst environmental disaster in Canadian history.

In Brazil, tailings-pond failures have made headlines with frightening regularity. In November 2015, a tailings-storage facility at the Mariana mining site ruptured. The resulting deluge of mud and toxic mine tailings destroyed the village of Bento Rodrigues, killing 19 people. In addition, more than 78 million cubic yards of iron waste fl wed into the Doce River. Seventeen days after the dam failed, the toxic mudfl ws exited the river’s mouth and polluted beaches on Brazil’s Atlantic coast. In January 2019, another tailings pond failed, this time at the Brumadinho site. More than 200 people have been confi med dead and another 102 are missing.

So before Pebble Mine gets a green light, let’s consider the totality of what’s at stake in southwestern Alaska: namely, the life-giving and sustaining elements that make habitation in the Bristol Bay region possible for beast and man.

First, consider the water. In many places, water from the surface is filte ed by the earth before it reaches the water table. But in this region of Bristol Bay, the groundwater and surface water often mingle on or just below the ground. Toxins that permeate the soil due to mine operations stand a signifi ant chance of entering the rivers and streams as runoff.

Further, any leaching, either two months after the mine enters operation or a thousand years hence, could enter rivers via discharge, seepage, and springs.

That surface waters, rivers, and streams could become polluted seems a foregone conclusion.

The wonder of the salmon migration is not just the great numbers or that it happens at all, but that they navigate the return to their natal waters by a sense of smell. The wildebeest migration is led by mature specimens that learned the routes as calves.

With the salmon, there are no wise old fish out front.

They sniff their way home—exactly once.

According to O’Neal, 2 to 20 drops of mine waste per billion (or 2 to 20 drops in an Olympic-size pool) can interfere with a salmon’s olfaction and thus its ability to navigate. A dam break on a 600-foot-deep lake of toxic soup would be catastrophic.

Second, contemplate the food chain. In this region, the entire chain falls apart if the salmon run is destroyed. When the salmon migrate, many species of wildlife—brown bears, black bears, vermin, rodents, and birds of all sorts—fatten up to survive the winter. Even streamside vegetation gets a signifi ant portion of its nitrogen from decaying salmon. Without salmon, the species that have come to rely upon them will cease to exist in a region that has long been their stronghold.

Also, we can’t overlook the human aspect. Natives have made homes here for centuries in settlements found up and down the rivers. These small villages— fi led with hardworking people who toil, fish love, and raise families—aren’t connected by any road system.

Those who live here can’t just pack up the Suburban and drive to the city. They depend on the salmon for survival, and so long as the watershed is protected and managed properly, the annual run of salmon and life itself can continue uninterrupted for ages.

An entire, established industry of commercial and sport fishing is also on the chopping block. All fi e species of Pacific salmon migrate and spawn in the rivers of Bristol Bay, generating $1.5 billion in revenue a year while providing about 20,000 jobs in Alaska and beyond. While the interests of commercial, sport, and subsistence groups are often at odds with one another, they all share a common cause in opposing Pebble Mine.

You and I may not agree on God and the origin of species. I stand with Berry, Faulkner, and McCarthy and believe God loves the earth. You may believe there’s nothing greater than nature and time. But I hope you and I can agree that the earth is wondrous— for hunters and anglers, naturalists and poets, Natives and settlers, adventurers and idle admirers, and wildlife and even every least thing.

The period of public comment on Pebble Mine ends June 30. Your input will be considered by those who will ultimately determine the fate of the Bristol Bay watershed. To let your opinion be known, visit savebristolbay.org and pebbleprojecteis.com. n

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Hooterville The philosophizing can get deep at hunting camp, where it pays to watch your step.

by O. Victor Miller

WHITETAIL HAVEN, BY BRENT COTTON COURTESY OF THE SPORTSMAN’S GALLERY, LTD.

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ooney, Taze, and me are sitting in the den of Mooney’s farmhouse-lodge, extrapolating Solunar tables and wild hogs. Mooney’s watching the Outdoor Channel, on mute night and day when anybody’s here, maybe when nobody ain’t. Trophy deer heads watching from walls, glass eyes fli kering endless tragic flaws from a deer’s perspective, punctuated by innumerable silent commercials hawking gadgetry made mostly in China.

I take an armchair by the hearth, but it’s too hot for a fi e. All the furniture is upholstered in camouflage There’s no woman’s touch at Hooterville.

Even the bedspreads are Mossy Oak. I’m pretty much keeping my mouth shut. At sundown I missed a white feral sow the size of a bear with Mooney’s rifl , shot her right through the heart and she scatted off through the planted pines like a borrowed Lincoln on a honeymoon straightaway, piglets bouncing along behind her like cans tied to the bumper. Tracking her through labyrinths of catclaws and honeysuckle into the swamp, I found not the least blood spoor and I lost my glasses.

I tell Taze I view the active feeding periods as great tides of lunacy moving across the world, sea, swamp, desert, and shopping mall.

Mooney checks the tables. “There’s a major at 1:45 a.m.,” he says.

“Not according to my calculations,” I say. “I make it later.”

For common ground, Taze and I agree all living

things—everything from sunfl wers to groundhogs, including plants and plankton—respond to the light and shadow of hours, days, seasons.

“When’d y’all starting hunting woodchucks?”

Mooney wants to know. To Mooney wild hogs are a nuisance, not game.

“It’s all about shadows,” Taze pontifi ates. “The reason things get active when the sun or moon’s at the zenith or at right angles. It’s the length of shadows that makes things jumpy, tadpoles to tiger sharks.”

Mooney thinks he knows a thing or two about a hog. “Mix you up some corn and water,” he says.

“Let it set awhile, then spread the mash you want to find the high range of a hog. You don’t bait none up, you can cook it off and get sloshed.”

Taze and Mooney concur that fermented mash will flat draw feral pork. Ask any bootlegger if it don’t.

“Or put it in a timer on shell corn in a feeder and make up your own feeding pattern.”

“Can you bait up hogs in deer season?”

“Sure you can, but I ain’t sure it’s legal.”

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In his wisdom or his cups, a ruminating Mooney says, “There’s two kinds of places: those that have hogs and those that will.”

De Soto brought the gene pool to south Georgia driving swineherds through here in the 16th century, a movable feast for soldiers with swinish appetites for pork and a lust for gold. The hogs probably brought more epidemic pestilence than the pockmarked Iberians, the combination essentially depopulating the new Eden of its native residents. The Spaniards fina ly left. The hogs thrived, staying on and mixing with new feral immigrants just to raise hell and havoc, running like backhoes through Mooney’s food plots and peanut fields Mooney’s pretty wife, Pam, an RN and a former student of mine, resists our camaraderie due to my professorially absent mind having degenerated into geriatric dementia, in her opinion. She absolutely forbade her sartorial spouse to set foot on the yacht I subsequently sank in the Caribbean. The year after that I got us stranded in a rare squall on the Flint River.

Pam thinks we’re both too old to hunt alone, so we meet at Hooterville, eat junk food, and take off in different directions, which I guess will work if something happens to me. If Mooney falls out, I won’t have no earthly idea where either one of us is.

At the tail end of deer seasons he lets me shoot a couple of does for the freezer off Pam’s private shooting house when she’s working. Once after field dressing and hanging the meat, we had to return for the rifle I’d left leaning against a tree. Another time, my left arm in a cast, he set me up close enough to kill two with a revolver. Mooney has tracked deer my arrows cleanly missed. I’ve snagged his scalp with popping bugs. Mutual tolerance testifies friendship.

“Antlers are nature’s way off cooling down a buck during the warm months,” Taze offers. “After the racks harden, the bucks fight with them and such, the cooler head prevailing, but all that’s secondary to diet and shadows.”

“What about the does?” I wonder. “How do they cool off?”

“They don’t get as hot,” says Taze.

“Well, your hogs are cooling down in the creek,” Mooney says, “but you can’t get back there right now without sinking to your nuts.”

“How about the runoff?”

From there the subject of deaf bird dogs is broached, how to work them with hand signals.

The problem is getting their attention. Taze says shock collars go off accidentally and send bad messages to deaf dogs holding a point. I’ve got a young Boykin I shoot in the ass with a BB gun to get his attention, but he won’t hold a point anyway, though sometimes I can stop him from eating the birds.

“You ever dust him off with a shotgun when it ain’t practical to yank out your Daisy?”

“Ever which one’s handiest,” I lie. The only time I ever plink Bailey is to call him off the riverbank when Sharp, the resident gator, goes after him. I’m scared a shock collar in the water will fry the dog.

“Don’t that make ’em gunshy?” Mooney says.

“Naw, it’s the noise makes them gun-shy. Noise don’t bother a deaf dog.”

Mooney’s got him a couple of new dogs that hear a heap better than Mooney does, an English cocker and a fancy poodle cross that looks like something he won in a weight-guessing game at the fair, his lovable golden retriever, Beth, having died.

“Why don’t you get you another dog?” Taze asks me.

Mooney looks at Taze like he’s just sprinkled cinnamon on his grits. My own jaw sags. Me and Mooney, deaf from a lifetime of shotguns, have a sentimental weakness for old dogs. We chew food for them after they lose their teeth, bury them tearfully beneath stone markers years after anybody else had them put down. Taze might as well suggest we upgrade family genetics by swapping out our homely kids or senile parents. At one time or another all our close friends and family have disappointed us, but none of our dogs have, although we’ve both had some sorry-ass dogs.

Dr. Andrew Mooney, Mooney’s daddy the

In his wisdom or his cups, a ruminating Mooney says, “There’s two kinds of places: those that have hogs and those that will.”

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orthodontist, had a standard poodle he used to fetch doves until Mooney’s mama broke that up due to sandspurs in the chenille. Dr. Mooney was Albany’s only orthodontist when I was coming along, as they say. My sister and I were both bucktoothed as beavers, but putting braces on boys just wasn’t done, and that set well enough with me. Dr. Mooney laid a smile on Sister to rival a ’58 Buick, if she’d shown it, which she didn’t, as I recall, for her entire adolescence. The morning of her wedding she yanked the last wire out in the bathroom mirror with a pair of needle-nose pliers.

Getting married in braces wasn’t done either.

Mama Bud, our grandmother who lived in Macon, Georgia, gave me an official Boy Scout bugle on the day Sister’s braces were installed, although I wasn’t musical, the idea being the bugle would eventually shove my overbite into an acceptable plumb. It worked, too. What’s left of my original incisors aren’t canted out much worse than Sister’s.

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might as well have a stick of deer jerky and a glass of buttermilk. Still, too early to hunt, but the mousetrap and Mooney’s groaning clock have murdered sleep. I watch mute expeditions of venery on TV with the glass-eyed wallfl wers, munching camp food a dietician wouldn’t step in. I plan to go out about an hour before dawn, walking in the moonlit fog to the rim of the runoff. When I hear or smell hogs, I’ll stalk in close and wait for shooting light.

The world is blue in the moonlit mist, incandescent. If there’s any movement of air, the fog doesn’t show it. I feel like I’m swimming underwater in a stagnant pond, guessing the direction of my scent.

You’d think with a snoot packed with mud a hog couldn’t smell, but they damn sure can. You can’t sneak up on a downwind sounder.

I stalk around like a ghost my own self in a lunar landscape, getting lost. I’ll squat right down and listen up, assuming a half lotus in palmettos. I hear no hogs nor smell any. At sunrise I stand up in wet, still air, easing around blindly until I stumble up on a ladder stand against a red oak.

I climb it to wait for the fog to lift. Almost before I settle in, a gaunt buck with more rack than body mass slinks sheepishly under me. He’s nearly invisible in the gray air, tuck-tailed and stinking from carousal. The rut has dulled his matted fur and, as they say, drawed him down considerable, caving in his haunches and puffing out his neck. His massive rack doesn’t seem to have cooled him off enough.

He’s been making the rounds before last call, and he’s wore slap out. We share an empathetic moment. The buck doesn’t give a damn if I shoot him or not, but Mooney does. He’ll fine me $500 for a buck that doesn’t make the Boone and Crockett. He’ll make me cape and mount it if it scores, which I can ill afford. Plus, the Airstream travel trailer I’ve been living in doesn’t cry out for glasseyed deer heads wobbling on concave walls. I don’t bother to put the scope on him or count blurred tines softened by my aging eyesight in the mist.

Continued on page 86

Taze and Mooney concur that fermented mash will flat draw feral pork. Ask any bootlegger if it don’t.

ull up with proverbs and bourbon, Mooney gets up to go to bed.

“The early bird gets the worm,” he yawns, “but the second rat gets the cheese.”

At 1:45 in the a.m., a mousetrap trips in the kitchen.

I’m awake. Feeling around for the glasses I lost trailing a white hog through labyrinthine tunnels of catclaws and honeysuckle, I slink around the walls feeling for a light switch, tripping another trap with a naked toe.

I used to have an alarm clock like Mooney’s digital, an electronically driven Rolodex of Arabic numerals that groans, squeaks, and slapjacks separate tin cards in every maddening increment of 60 seconds. One restless night some years ago I got enough of one just like it. I reached across a sleeping wife and shot it with the bedside .38. I don’t know what it did for her insomnia, but it broke us up from sleeping in the same room, eventually the same house. I was working more and hunting less in those days, and a lot more irritable because of it.

I dance on one foot, bitching. Since I’m up I

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Here,a TIGER’S LAIR Photography by

David Cannon

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Here, you might not catch a whopper, but if you catch anything at all from the thin margins of southern Appalachian streams, it will be beautiful—including the blooming rhododendrons.

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Here, brook trout generally survive only in the headwaters but on rare occasions make it beyond the falls and share habitat with other salmonids, including self-sustaining browns. On even rarer occasions, brookies and browns, fish of differing genera, procreate and yield the hybrid tiger trout—and you want to catch one.

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Here, in order to catch a tiger, you’ll need a knowledge of the streams that hold both browns and brookies—and your best bow cast. You may fish all day, even a lifetime, without catching a tiger. But there, as your fly drifts adjacent an undercut bank, you see movement, marbled skin, and a belly the color of the chanterelles you picked earlier. You see a rise, a take! When you bring the fish to hand, you know one thing—you have found the tiger’s lair. Yeah, that’s worth a cold one before the ride home .

For more information see page 92.

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Close Encounters Wild turkeys are part of early American lore and, among hunters, legendary to this day. by E. Donnall Thomas Jr.

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tom turkey responds to a hunter’s calling in one of two basic ways. The first comes as a flat-out, aggressive charge accompanied by furious gobbling and can leave the hunter face-to-face with one of the most challenging quarries in the woods in a matter of minutes. A skilled and fortunate hunter may witness this phenomenon once or twice over the course of a long spring season. Or not.

The second, and far more common, response is a long, laborious approach conducted as if the bird were picking its way through a minefield. The tom may remain nearly silent throughout, leaving the caller attached to the hunt by

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nothing but a thin tether of hope. Even when the tom answers his patient clucks and yelps, the hunter may listen in despair as a flo k of real hens lures the gobbler away and out of his life before he ever sees the bird. These are the times that try men’s souls.

They also define sp ing turkey hunting.

This morning, I hiked for an hour in the dark up to a mountain meadow that consistently holds turkeys by mid-April. My goal was to locate a gobbler still in his roost tree, which is better done an hour too early than a minute too late. The first booming gobble of the season rolled downhill from the rimrocks above the basin just as color began to suffuse the landscape. I offered one soft tree yelp in reply just to let the tom know he had potentially friendly company. Felled by wind during a recent winter storm, a fallen pine offered ideal natural cover.

Since the tom’s position sounded several hundred yards away through scattered timber, I could await developments without the discomfort of remaining absolutely motionless.

The sound of heavy wings straining against the air followed the bird’s second gobble just as muted shafts of sunlight began to spread across the meadow.

With the bird off the roost and on the ground, I yelped. He answered once and then shut up. The gobbler was not going to charge me. I settled in to wait, already anticipating a long, contemplative morning of the kind Thoreau might have enjoyed at Walden Pond.

A

fter years spent hunting turkeys in the most difficult way possible, several elements of the experience remain hard to explain. The first is the realization that enthusiasm for hunting wild turkeys has remarkably little to do with killing wild turkeys.

This is not to say that I don’t relish the satisfaction of walking up to a freshly killed gobbler, stroking its plumage, and inhaling the rich aroma of wild turkey. I haven’t gone all warm and fuzzy and Save the Whales. I enjoy facing challenges in the outdoors, and killing a mature gobbler is certainly that, especially when hunting with a longbow, an exercise in voluntary restraint that has now consumed me for several decades. Nonetheless, I do kill a turkey almost every year, a success rate that owes less to skill on my part than to residence in

a rural area with lots of turkeys and not many turkey hunters. Somehow, the seasons I end up eating tag soup prove almost as enjoyable as those when I bring home a bird. Almost.

Geography and the calendar are largely responsible. T. S. Eliot famously begins The Waste Land by declaring April to be the cruelest month. He obviously never spent a winter in Montana, where desperation to roam the outdoors again feels palpable by the end of March. Hiking the woods during the monthlong turkey season allows the hunter to appreciate spring’s arrival day by day. At first I may be post-holing my way through old corn snow, but by the time it all ends mid-May, the landscape will be lush, green, and welcoming. The lure of gobbling turkeys provides an ideal excuse to enjoy this transition of the seasons.

The process of spring turkey hunting can be just as rewarding as the ambience. Nothing is more

My goal was to locate a gobbler still in his roost tree, which is better done an hour too early than a minute too late. central to that process than calling a wary gobbler into close range. While I’ve called in game ranging in size from mallards to moose, none of those experiences proved more exciting than the call-andresponse dialogues established with gobbling turkeys. The importance of calling can be appreciated by contrasting spring turkey hunting, in which calling is everything, to hunting turkeys in the fall, when I have taken turkeys and felt proud of every one, but few of those experiences generated the shock and awe of a spring turkey hunt.

The second great mystery of turkey hunting reflects the questi n of how any creature with a brain the size of a cocktail onion can be so incredibly cagey. While a mature gobbler’s wariness has been

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TURKEY DRIVE, BY AIDEN LASSEL RIPLEY (1896–1969) COURTESY OF PETER L. VILLA FINE ART

legendary for as long as people have hunted them, I think this trait has little to do with “intelligence” by any generally accepted definiti n of the term.

Two factors alone—the birds’ suspicion and keen eyesight—explain most of the difficul y hunters face closing ranks with a wild turkey. Natural selection by centuries of exposure to predators ranging from coyotes and bobcats to human hunters tricked out in the latest camouflage has made turkeys what they are today. On isolated island ecosystems where wild turkeys have been introduced to habitat historically free of predators, they’re dumb as barnyard chickens, which is why friends in New Zealand and elsewhere around the Pacific can’t understand our passion for hunting them.

In my own case, part of that passion arises from the most basic motivation for hunting anything: delight in eating what you shoot. Regrettably, not everyone shares that opinion of wild turkey on the table, as is the case with a number of other delicious game species ranging from bears to geese. These biases usually result from an unfortunate encounter with a badly overcooked specimen. Cooking a wild bird the same way one would prepare a domestic turkey from the grocery store usually leads to culinary disaster. Since this isn’t a cooking column, I’m not going to hold forth on the subject other than to state that a wild turkey dinner should be delightful, especially when it includes fresh morel mushrooms gathered during the course of the hunt.

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W

hatever one’s opinion about the wild turkey as table fare, it is hard to name a game bird that has enjoyed a more prominent place in American lore, even though the relationship between lore and fact is sometimes tenuous.

Many Americans seldom think about turkeys except during Thanksgiving week, although there is limited evidence that the legendary event at Plymouth Colony in November 1621 actually involved eating turkey (or that the colonists called the event Thanksgiving or that it occurred in November). Only two written accounts survive, of which Edward Winslow’s reports that “Our harvest being gotten in, our Governor sent four men out fowling. . . .” However, they could have been “fowling” for grouse, ducks, or geese as well as turkeys.

The association of the autumn event with turkey dinner arose through the efforts of a mid-19thcentury magazine editor named Sarah Hale, who began a concerted endeavor to have the event turned into a national holiday. (She fina ly succeeded during Lincoln’s administration.) Hale took her cue from another colonist’s records, in which William Bradford wrote, with no specific reference to the Thanksgiving feast: “And besides waterfowl there was a great store of wild turkeys, of which we took many. . . .” Growing up, I never fretted much about Thanksgiving’s historical accuracy. The tradition provided a school holiday in the middle of hunting season. Who could ask for anything more?

The popular story about Benjamin Franklin proposing that the wild turkey rather than the bald eagle become our national bird is legend as well. Granted, Franklin did admire the turkey more as expressed in a letter to his daughter, in which he described the bald eagle as a “Bird of low moral Character” and the turkey as “. . . a much more respectable bird and withal a true original Native of America.” That, however, is as far as Franklin ever took the matter.

Historical deconstruction notwithstanding, some facts remain indisputable. The turkey is one of only two native New World birds to be successfully domesticated. (The other is the Muscovy duck.) It is the world’s largest gallinaceous game bird. The American wild turkey’s population recovery from near extirpation is one of the greatest wildlife success stories of our time. That’s enough hard fact for me.

H

ours have passed pleasantly since first auditory contact with the gobbler, despite the absence of turkeys from the meadow. Other avian species are streaming by on their annual northbound migration—geese and cranes at altitude, warblers and waxwings at eye level. Somewhere in the woods behind me, a ruffed grouse has started to drum.

Fresh pasquefl wers dot the meadow in front of my makeshift blind, lavender pixels that seem to be erupting right before my eyes. For years I’ve thought of them as “turkey fl wers” because their appearance seems to coincide with the elevation level the turkeys occupy as they follow the receding snow line up the mountainsides every spring. Right now, it would be nice to translate this observation into the sight of an inbound tom.

Over the course of the morning, I have heard three gobbles since the tom hit the ground, one spontaneous and two in response to my calls. While I have no reason to believe he has left the basin, the sun has climbed above the tops of the ponderosas since I last heard from him. The time has come to shake the dice.

Turkey calls come in many forms—box calls, slates, wing-bones—but I prefer a mouth diaphragm because it leaves both hands free for my bow. Overly loud and frequent calling is usually unwise but having reached the point of nothingto-lose, I cut loose with a series of excited yelps and clucks followed by a cackle. The gobbler answers immediately from the woods along the far side of the meadow. Round Two has fina ly begun.

To borrow a metaphor from Steven Spielberg’s 1977 sci-fi cinema classic, hearing a gobbler in the woods represents a close encounter of the first kind.

Repeated answers from an approaching bird represent the second, but it’s the third—indisputable visual contact—that changes the whole context of the hunt. As gobbles from the newly aroused tom echo back from the rimrock at progressively shorter intervals, I train my eyes against the far edge of the trees and wait. The sound of a bugling bull elk could not demand my attention more.

Although Eastern wild turkeys have been introduced at various sites around Montana, almost all the birds I have killed here were Merriam’s. Named Continued on page 85

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Getting There Is Everything Leaving the city, driving beyond the traffic and snarl, and wading into the spring migration of stripers.

BEAVERTAIL ANGLER, BY LUTHER HALL

by James Wu

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NANTUCKET STRIPER, BY CHET RENESON

They were

starting out the spring season and had an hour-and-fortyfi e-minute drive from Manhattan to Connecticut and to a tidal mouth full of stripers feeding on alewives to the spawn. Josh was in the maintenance department at an art museum. They’d fished together for years, and Dean, though older, a high school teacher, probably owed him more stripers than any other fishing friend.

Josh was about to turn 39, had a kid, and another on the way, and he knew the fishing grounds and the migration well.

Dean hadn’t seen him since November, when they’d hit an Election Day blitz at Jones Beach, with stripers to 20 pounds busting on peanut bunker 10 feet in the surf and humpback whales breaching on adults 500 yards out in the Atlantic. The off-season in the Northeast lasts four months. But man doesn’t hibernate, obligations and worries don’t fade, so winter was more restive than restful. Spring fishin didn’t feel like a fresh start, but an anxious return after an absence.

Now they were sitting in neck-to-neck traffic on I-95 East on a Friday in April, a warming spring tide nearing the new moon. Dean was driving his dented and beat-up Honda. Something, of course, was happening. The snarl of metal was congealing into a blocked artery, and the collective drivers quickly backed up for miles. The oncoming vein into New York whistled by.

They were going to miss the tide.

State troopers in stiff Connecticut tan and gray were nudging them single file into a rest area, and Dean couldn’t believe it, but stayed calm, as they looped around the truck lane in the back, circling in a giant eddy along white concrete and black asphalt. Twenty long minutes deteriorated into 45, and Dean pushed the radio solenoids tensely as Josh tried to talk about geopolitics, Eurasia, and the standing of the United States. Josh, like most excellent anglers, was highly intelligent, but the majority of his reading time as an adult had been absorbed by the web.

Dean shook his head. “Let’s not talk about politics.

Okay?” He didn’t want to hear it.

They blocked and tackled a bit about kids, alcoholic fathers, and bowhunting while they continued to creep through the detour, speculating on cause and effect and the movement of animals. When they reached the on-ramp, there were more state troopers and other men setting up orange pylons and fla es crackling red sparks.

“This sucks,” said Dean with a creased gray face.

Dry winds out of the Northwest were beginning to rip streaks of blue through a pale sky. Behind them, more tan and gray hung like a curtain around the bleak woods in the hills surrounding the rest area.

Yellow slivers of sun were breaking through.

“Don’t worry, Dean. We’re through. We want to be in position as the tide gets going out.” He looked at his watch. “It’s eleven thirty now. We’ve got an hour and a half before the tide gets moving. It’s all about getting into position for the tide. The water will heat up sitting on the mudflats As it starts to go out, at the right current speed, we’ll swing flies right into them. It’s going to be good.”

“Yep.” “That’s why I said we have to leave so early,” said Josh. “Remember?”

“Yeah. You know, striper fishing is not remote,” said Dean.

“It’s right here. That’s what gives us so much opportunity. I learned the most by fishin , fly fis ing, right in my backyard, in the city. You wouldn’t think so. But that’s the only way to learn prey behavior. Catch the fish in front of you, day after day. If I lived in Montana, I’d be a trout bum.”

“You would?”

“Or I’d go after carp on the fl ,” said Josh. “But I have kids now. So that changes things. Maybe I should have moved out West long ago.”

“Maybe you wouldn’t have kids.”

“I probably would,” he said after a pause.

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“We’ve got over twenty million people in the metro area,” said Dean. “And the striper coast is probably the most highly populated area of the country. Getting there is everything in fishin .”

“But knowing where and when is more.”

“Traffic is the worst part of fishing in the Northeast.”

“You always say that.”

“I drive.” Josh brilliantly didn’t have a car, though he had the money.

“You should get a boat. Maybe we should get one together.”

“I can’t afford a boat.”

“I can’t either really, but if we didn’t have such high taxes in New York, I could—” “What? “You don’t even pay taxes.”

“I do now.”

“But you didn’t pay taxes for years,” Dean said.

“So what?”

“So what?! How do you think we pay for highway maintenance? We couldn’t get to the water if the roads weren’t maintained. And getting there is everything.”

“It’s not like I have much,” said Josh. “With my job now, I have to pay taxes, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“You should be able to afford a boat with all the taxes you never paid.”

“Maybe I’ll charge you for the fish I’ve put you on.”

With that, Dean pressed his toe to the gas and weaved impatiently around other drivers. He drove 30 more minutes, crossed the Housatonic, a dull glaze, and exited 95, threaded back on US 1 through town, and out to the mouth at the wildlife management area. He turned through the residential neighborhood, the sun streaming in larger patches now, and they made it to the parking lot with about 15 minutes to spare.

After getting out and standing in the parking lot, Dean was tightly knotted from the long drive.

“I’m going to need a few minutes to shift gears and refocus mentally,” he said while stretching.

“Don’t rush,” said Josh, walking around the back of the car, leaning over, and retrieving waders and rods and backpacks from the trunk. “Predators move deliberately.”

“Fishing is a kind of work,” said Dean.

“Yeah, it is.”

“That was the commute. Not exactly relaxing.”

“Don’t worry. The sun has been doing its work, too. We may just walk on to fish.

There were several other parties getting ready to

The Whistler must have turned right in front of the fish’s face as it was going into the dangle, because the fish grabbed it and hooked itself, and the line slapped the rod so hard that his friend 20 feet away snapped his neck to look. . . . . fish and a few coming off and leaving. Josh chatted nonchalantly with them on the versatility of floa ing line versus intermediate and took the incoming reports. They rigged scuffed 10 and 11 weights, booted up, strapped on baskets, and fi led their bags for the session. The sun was out now, but hazy.

“You really don’t need that much stuff,” said Josh.

“I haven’t had a chance to reorganize from last fall.”

“I can’t believe those guys are leaving,” Josh said quietly. “This is the best time to start.”

“Maybe they’ve got work.”

“It’s one forty-fi e. You gotta work around your schedule.”

“That’s what it’s all about.”

“Or take a personal day. If you want to be successful in salt water consistently, it’s all about timing. Sure, you have to work, but stripers move with the tide. And big fish you get them where they are and when they’re feeding. You have to study these things.”

“Right.” Dean bent over to retie a salt-stiffened boot. When he stood up, Josh was fully suited, sunglasses on, straightening his stripping basket and pack as if for inspection.

“Well, I’m ready,” said Josh.

“You go ahead.” Dean was still tired from the drive.

“I need another fi e minutes to get my bag together.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

“Thanks.”

It was a 20-minute walk on the outermost residential street along the marsh; yellow reeds carpeted it spinning clockwise in a grand circle through the muck flats They crested the dune, saw the murky blue with the dull sheen on it and the dark flat draining in between.

They panted and sweated in faded waders under the gear load and got into position quickly to fish the inside tongue of current streaming from the marsh.

The glacial gash that was Long Island Sound drew the tidal force that had scooped out the large inside marsh and shaped the little cape of densely packed sand where they walked and sent flies into Continued on page 91

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H

Yard Bird Photography by Russell B. Graves

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H Hunting turkeys in your own backyard isn’t as easy as it sounds. You watch them roost at night and fly down the next morning. You know their routine. Nothing to it. But opening day, you expect the gobblers to go one way and they go another—and the hens outnumber the toms.

You’re ready, but in such cases, calling is often futile.

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H By late afternoon, as the sun sinks in the sky, you still haven’t connected. But it’s your backyard, and you know about a deep draw and its high banks that let you cut the distance between you and the toms. Though the harems aren’t so prevalent, the Rio Grande gobblers are still interested. A couple soft yelps, and soon you’re enjoying home-field advantage.

For more information see page 92.

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NEW FLY, BY ADRIANO MANOCCHIA

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On Falling In Wherein an elegant slide leads to a wardrobe change that brings a measure of safety to the river. by Andrew Griffiths

May / June 2019 ¡ 43

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I

t felt like a full-blooded splat. Not what we used to call a belly flop when we were kids, but more of a back flo , if such a thing exists. A stumble, a pirouette, a cartoonlike flailing of the arms, most probably a howl of awful anticipation, and then the act itself— the fall, the final , the plunge into the raging torrent of the rushing river. It’s funny how the mind makes up movies from its own memories, constantly refining them, until we are happy with it, and then we fix it and file it as just Something That Happened.

But my mate John didn’t see it like that. He’d watched it from the other side of the river. As we waded upstream, we had reached one of those points where decisions had to be made. John had elected to perform the bankside crawl, threading his rod through the tangle of brambles and sapling ash, while I had decided to wade, hugging in to the left bank, dismissing concerns even though we could see things were getting hazardous.

It was more of a slide than a fall, he said. “A graceful slide,” were his words, I believe.

As I stood on the bankside, catching my breath, feeling the weight of water sloshing around inside my chest waders and coming halfway up my leg, I sensed John was trying not to make a fuss, perhaps trying to downplay the fall to spare my ego. And perhaps those choking noises were him trying to hold back his concern, trying to hold back an overreaction, and not guffaws of laughter.

“Are you okay?” he asked in the end—a little too low in his priorities, I thought.

“Fine,” I said, trying to give the impression that these brushes with danger were just another bit of a day in the wilderness for a practiced outdoorsman like me, while not wanting to suggest that falling in, actually falling in, for Christ’s sake, was the kind of thing I make a habit of doing.

I tried to console myself. Downstream I knew this river well, and it was not easy wading, a mix of boulders and the ruins of walls and mill buildings that had fallen in over time, as the river ran in and out of urban zones and through English industrial history.

Today, however, we had thrown the rods in the back of the car, climbed in, and driven farther up to fishin

territory that was new to us. I remember thinking, How much worse could this upstream wading be?

Well, I found out. This was the first time I have ever fallen in a river. I have fished this particular river getting on for 15 years, and there have been many close calls. The riverbed is treacherous in places, real ankle-breaking territory, as we call it round these parts. There have been stumbles, slips, slides, down onto a knee, up against a wall, clutching at bankside vegetation and tearing hands on thorns, and one most memorable when fishing for grayling in winter, chest deep, and deciding to make my way back downstream, turning my back on the fl w (I know), taking a step, then going into a forward moonwalk that carried me way too far on the deceptive power of a river when the water is high.

Hey, as I was carried off there, out of contact and out of control, it had me worried for a moment or two before I came back down to land. I was stupid wading in those conditions, but I was invincible, right? It made me really careful for most of the rest of that winter season’s fishin , did that.

But this today was a kind of arrogance, I suppose. The river was heading out of open countryside and toward a built-up zone. There had been building works done here and the riverbanks has been caged with wire mesh to stop them collapsing. Up ahead there was a bridge where the new bypass crossed (I say new in the sense of the last 20 years or so—new for England, a lot younger than me) and from under this bridge, where the river was squeezed, it threw out a tongue of current that cut the pool we were aiming for now.

John hadn’t taken the easy option. That wire mesh that caged in the bank had bedded in over the years and made a great mantrap beneath the grass and brambles that if they had a mind, could easily snarl up a wading boot. That woodland made me feel there was something of a dark malevolence about it, the sort that helps you understand where the original folktales come from. I think it has to do with the ivy. Anyway, I didn’t like the look of it, which is why I had stayed in the river.

I’ve been doing this for a while now and I am developing bad habits on old legs. I broke my wading staff early on in the season and cut off a piece of ash as a temporary replacement. It was short, light,

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flimsy even, with a V I had left in at the top. Just below the V, there was a scar in the wood and below that a nodule where I had cut off a branch and scraped at the bowl with a pocket knife to smooth it, and it was getting stained darker now with grease and wearing smoother each time with my thumb resting on it and worrying at it with my nail. It had started to feel like a fit. I tied on a piece of old climbing rope and clipped it to a loop on my vest.

I thought it looked great and it was comfortable, so it had That woodland stayed with me, and made me feel there I hadn’t quite gotten around to a replacewas something ment, even though I knew it wasn’t long of a dark malevoenough really and wouldn’t take my lence about it, the weight if it were ever sort that helps you called upon to do so.

The flawed wading staff entered my understand where mind when I realized that the pool was the original folkgetting deep. I was tales come from. edging my way along a precarious shelf of rocks up against the bank with slow, tentative steps, feeling for the next hold, and that stick not being long enough to test.

But it looked such a damned good pool. My rod in my left hand, the flow up ahead, the water getting deeper, the whole thing shaded by the tree canopy . . . If that scene could speak, and I think it could, and if you listened carefully from back where those old folktales come from, it was whispering trout.

As a fly fisher, you know, I was focused on all the wonderful promise of it, my pulse quickening as I anticipated the slow, lugubrious take of a big trout, that moment’s pause and slight resistance as it realized something wasn’t right, then that clatter of the reel and electric shock in the hand as it bolted for cover, probably somewhere in the wall of that far bank. Yes, I was sufficiently presumptuous as to be already planning the fight. But then . . .

“An elegant slide,” John had said. Yes, elegant.

Those were his exact words. I can’t really remember the moment. I just remember there was solid ground; then there wasn’t. Then a resignation that the water was approaching and I was going in it. I remember my head going under, or feeling as though it had, then bobbing up again, and then realizing that I had better orient myself pretty damned quickly.

Priorities kick in at a time like this. There was nothing in my left hand; the rod was missing. It was a handmade split cane with a CFO II reel and silk line—I really didn’t want to lose that.

In what couldn’t have been more than a split second, I had searched the river and had a hold of it again. Then I remember one of those moments that get drawn out like a string of spaghetti to an improbable length. I remember floating downstream, looking up through the green canopy of trees to the blue sky beyond and feeling a tremendous sense of freedom in the flow of that river. It was a beatific moment; there was probably harp music playing somewhere in the background.

Then I became aware of the water rushing into my chest waders and that it was starting to pull me down. I felt panic preparing its surge, saw a rock jutting out of the bank, and thought I’d better grab hold of that. It was time to get out now—it’s possible to have too many of these endorphin-induced reveries.

I think what happened is that I had stood on a rock that wasn’t as solid as I had thought. And when I had shifted my weight, it had pivoted and tipped me in the river. I don’t think there is much I could have done to prevent it, other than not be so damned stupid as to be there in the first place.

W

hen I met up with John, the first thing I noticed was his life jacket. He always wears one, like a yoke around his neck, even in an ankle-deep riffle. I laugh at him about it and tell him that he has an overdeveloped sense of health and safety, probably as a result of his time spent working in the Health Service as a nurse. To be fair to him, he didn’t stress it, he didn’t say anything at all, but he did stick out his chest that little bit more, and it was there, this jacket round his neck, he was gloating visually, so he didn’t need to actually say anything. He can be very eloquent like that.

Continued on page 86

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BEGIN, BY EMAUS MICIU NICOLAEVICI

Russian THE

KEEP WHAT YOU CATCH AND LIVE OFF WILD SALMON, WHILE YOU CAN.

BY DAVE ZOBY

Fog billows off Cook Inlet as I head north on the Sterling Highway.

I pass the village of Ninilchik, where the Russian Orthodox church perched on a hill looks like a lighthouse built during an extreme budget crisis. I’m going fly fishing for sockeye salmon on the Russian River. A diesel truck towing a seiner gnaws up the highway. He pulls out in front of me on purpose, it seems. He’s a commercial fisherma from one of the Russian communities; Old Believers they call them.

The heavy bow, the inscrutable pilothouse, the corked nets coiled on a giant drum—this vessel is ready for the opener. When he suddenly 48 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

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brakes to turn, I mash my brakes to keep from colliding with his steel hull. The bearded man driving the truck glares at me. I remind myself that fishin , for some people, is life or death. I get it.

I’d spent the early summer working on a condo I bought in Homer. I bought it online, trying to get closer to great Alaska fishin . If you have the hunch I’m a financial idiot, you’re onto something. The condo is only a few yards from the Homer Brewery, where I’d spent too much time reading while various handymen charged exhorbitant rates to spackle, wire, or plumb my condo into livable condition and where beautiful and unattainable girls from the Russian Village would sweep in, down a porter each, and snap selfies beside the stuffed brown bear.

That’s about how summer’s been going.

At Ninilchik I stop for coffee at the Buzz Café.

I give my dogs a treat but keep them in the camper shell because of the highway and the moose. Sure enough, a cow moose and her calf emerge behind

the café in chest-high pushki and devil’s club.

Back on the road, my mind drifts to 1988, where I’m seated in a class called Organizational Communications. Dr. Abernathy, fit and white bearded, sits on the lip of a desk talking about his days in the Peace Corps in French Guiana. His legs swing.

The word is that he’s been passed over for tenure once again. He hardly even broaches the subject of communications, organizational or otherwise. Out of thin air he tells all of us to read “The Death of Ivan Ilyich.” It’s nowhere on the syllabus. He talks about a fer-de-lance he once saw in a tree over a chicken coop. He looks up at the institutional lighting in the classroom, and we all look up, too, almost expecting to see it there.

“Living in a true democracy allows one to change,” he says. Seeming to lose his thoughts, he says class is ending prematurely today, and if any of us want to go downtown to his usual coffee spot, we are welcome to tag along—his treat. There are

DREAM AND REALITY, BY EMAUS MICIU NICOLAEVICI

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only seven of us; the others dropped the class weeks back. His perpetually early-ending classes allow me to walk freely about Blacksburg, to stop in at the moldering independent bookstore, to mosey along the empty parade grounds with no particular destination in mind. Some of us meet him at the café only to sit in the weak sunshine of winter in the Allegheny Mountains. When he pays the bill, he mutters softly: “I am a cage, in search of a bird.” I’m almost sure that’s what he says.

I

f Abernathy was right about change—and I’ve been banking on his wisdom since my college days—why then have I lived my life with rigid predictability? For example, it’s the middle of June and I’m driving up the Kenai Peninsula. I’m headed to the Pink Salmon parking lot, preferably the same slot I’ve parked in over the last few years. Ritualistically, I’ll use the same fetid public outhouse, wash my hands in the same trickle of questionable water. I’ll pull on my damp waders, march to a predetermined pinch-point where the red salmon gather in good numbers every June. I already know what my first cast will look like, how I’ll mend my line. Here we are in the freest society in the world, and I live like an iron cutout.

Abernathy, I think as I string up my 9-weight and attach the cruel pencil weight, would be sorely disappointed in how I turned out.

I dawdle along the padded boardwalk along the river. I read the signage about bears and fishing regulations. There are people already waist deep in the obvious pools. I see sleek silver bodies of sockeyes beached and strung up between anglers. Threadbare salmon carcasses tumble downstream. Seagulls and ravens in equal number pick at the pillaged bodies of formerly beautiful fish Men crouch over them.

It’s loud: the bird cries, the rushing water, and human conversations. Gangs of anglers hog the best pools. I keep walking, thinking about democracy and what keeps going wrong in my life.

To my utter surprise, no one is fishing at the rock where I always begin. There are wisps of heavy monofilament in the limbs above, a few boot prints, some blood on the rocks. I can see the slate blue blur in the fast water: salmon. They are packed in

so tight I cannot see individuals, just a vague blue movement that a newbie might mistake for rocks.

On my first cast a perfect fish somersaults out of the water. He is hooked fairly. (Snagging is not permitted on the Russian. These fish don’t take flies in the traditional sense. The method used to catch them is to “floss them by sinking large flies to the bottom of the stream and trying to steer the fly to their open mouths. The monofilament gets caught in their teeth. When they bolt, they hook themselves.

It sounds impossibly ridiculous. But the veterans from Soldotna and Anchorage can catch these fis one after another, legally, as long as your definiti n is somewhat negotiable.)

My first fish is a hard-fighting buck that runs downstream and beaches itself. I dive upon it with my pocketknife, hoping not to damage my waders.

What I want to do is get my fingers in its gills. It’s not easy. We wrestle. It’s personal. Its tail thrums against my chest. It slips away, almost reaching the river. Finally, I force it to high ground and subdue it. I bleed it with a slash to the gills. The color of the fish the blue-silver that dreams them to me all winter, fades immediately. Its gaze goes blank as I

If Abernathy was right about change—and I’ve been banking on his wisdom since my college days—why then have I lived my life with rigid predictability? put it on the stringer. Fishing the Russian is a brutal endgame for those of us who want to eat wild salmon we catch ourselves. The catch-and-release culture will not take hold here. On the Russian you keep what you catch. Otherwise, you can leave it to the gill netters, I suppose. But have you ever met those guys?

No one comes along the trail, and I quickly wrestle and kill four salmon. I’ve invented a method wherein you pin the fish with your chest, and turtlewalk up the bank on your elbows. Bleed them. Do it quickly, I advise others. Keep your fly rod out of the scrum or it will be broken. If you’re not out of May / June 2019 · 51

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breath, a bit conflicted and covered in viscera, you have yet mastered the Zoby Method.

This year, the early-run fish are small, about six to eight pounds each. The run is strong and the limit has been raised to six. I can take two more.

I wonder if I have the strength to haul six dressed

Most of the action is on the Kenai by now. The Russian is more or less left to trout guys, or guys like me, who worry perpetually about the coming winter, guys who can’t tell when they’ve had enough. sockeyes up the terraced stairway to the parking lot. The next few fish I hook are hooked illegally.

I try to shake them off, but they are wild and unruly. They dance across the river, crash into rocks, rattle their gill plates midair. Even though I plan to release them, I still have to subdue them on the shoreline to remove my fl . I wrestle them in the riparian vegetation. Many of these salmon have various flies already impaled in their sides. I remove these. I get them back in the water in the best shape possible. They pulse upstream, seemingly unfazed.

Another group arrives at the pinch.

By midmorning the magic is gone. I can no longer floss them in the style so popular in Soldotna.

I only foul-hook them. I have an audience—three thin boys from Nikolaevsk. They smoke cigarettes and speak in their native tongue. They call them Old Believers, but look how quickly they have accepted breathable waders and caffeine drinks. I wonder if they are criticizing me. Still, I have four salmon. It’s a Pyrrhic victory, as I’ve lost my knife during one of the fights My cell phone is dazed and the screen is cracked. Slimed beyond hope, my jacket needs to be professionally sanitized. I’m covered in silver scales, salmon blood, and roe. My hands bleed. I wonder how my tribe of catch-and-release friends from Wyoming would view my state of dishevelment. The sun is up and the pods of fish are skittish. They sequester themselves in groups of four or fi e and hug

the opposite bank in the shade. But the young men spot them and begin to move in.

I dress my fish but leave them whole. I wrap them in a plastic bag. I put the roe in a baggie for later. I begin my slog back to the truck. People are stirred up along the trail. A black bear has been on the river.

He’s snatched someone’s sockeye from a stringer.

The seagulls are so plugged with fresh salmon they can only sit on gravel bars and look at each other.

Jolly trout fishe men bounce up the trail with their fragile fly rods and wide eyes. The trout are taking drys. The fly fishe men can’t figu e out why anyone would bother with salmon. One guy begins a dissertation on size 10 green drakes. But I know this guy—he notices the bulging backpack on my shoulders and my desire to keep moving. He’s thinking of pencil weights and bucktails. At the truck, I ice the fish and let my dogs terrorize the public parking area.

I drive back to Homer, where I find my friend David Ferreira in his yard working on his boat. The engine block split, and he’s taking the whole shebang out with a remarkable pulley system he invented. I tell him I’ve been on the Russian, but with my clothes covered in slime and four sockeyes on ice, it’s obvious.

“I’m half Russian,” he says. I know this is a prelude to a joke he tells at least once a week. “—the bottom half.” I don’t really get it, but it’s growing on me. A professional meatcutter, David sets up a plastic table and gathers his knives. He flies through the four fish We decide we’ll smoke them. Actually, David will smoke them in his ingenious smoker that once lived a happy life as a fridge. He rolls the smoker out of the shed and begins a brine. I depart with my dogs. They need a big beach walk.

It’s raining now and the scent of salmon is not just on my jacket; it’s on the wind. The drift fleet is heading out into Cook Inlet for the opener. I hear the low thrum of engines. I see seiners escorted by birds.

Q

uoting, more or less, from Tolstoy, Professor Abernathy used to say that boredom is simply the desire for desires. “Are you going to piss your life away acquiring things?” he said, often apropos of Continued on page 87

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JOIN TODAY. PROTECT TOMORROW.

BTT is a membership-based organization,

and our members are our lifeblood. Since our founding in 1998, we have grown to include concerned anglers from over 20 countries, researchers from throughout the world, and guides committed to working with BTT in order to educate anglers and gather data while on the water. The generous support of our members is critical to our mission: Conserve and restore bonefish, tarpon and permit fisheries and habitats through research, stewardship, education and advocacy.

We have celebrated many accomplishments, but there is still much more work to do.

Please help us in our mission by joining and urging your friends, guides, lodges, and fishing clubs to join. Please go to www.btt.org and click “Join BTT” to become a member today.

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Fly Fishing Bonanza

Photography by Greg Vinci

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Y

ou remember the Cartwrights, don’t you? Does the Ponderosa ring a bell? Well, if Ben and the boys had been fly anglers instead of cattlemen, they’d still have been right at home.The eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada touches their back door, and the mountains have plenty of lakes and many, many miles of rivers—almost all of them teeming with trout, including Lahontan cutthroat.You can’t catch Lahontans just anywhere.

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A

nd there’s gold in these hills—California golden trout, that is.You can’t catch them in just any old stream either. When you consider the angling opportunities plus the scenery and the wildlife. . .Well, there’s your bonanza.

For more information, see page 92.

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GSJ

TRADITIONS

EDITED BY WILL RYAN

Lure

by Van Campen Heilner (From American Angler, October 1919)

BUSTING BAIT, BY DAVID DUNHAM

Where fishing in the salt can rock your world.

The

Southern Seas of the

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A

man leaned over the counter of a big sporting goods house contemplating with a peculiar glitter in his eyes the long cases of rods and reels spread out before his gaze. “Might as well throw a cast-net in, too,” he remarked as he produced his wallet, “You never can tell when you’ll have to go and catch the bait yourself. How much do I owe you?”

The clerk made a few rapid calculations. “Three hundred and seventy-two dollars exactly, sir,” he announced, smiling half to himself as he thought what that would mean to him. The Man paid the bill cheerfully, and with a “Send it up to the hotel right away, will you please?” departed.

Outside the snow whirled up and down the street or drifted off the eaves of the tall buildings and came sifting down on the heads of the passersby. The Man pulled up his coat collar and shivered as an icy gust struck him. Pedestrians hurried past with lowered heads, a snowplow went slowly by, making hard work of clearing the tracks in the great storm. The roar of the city seemed muffled to his ears, breaking forth at intervals as when a door is opened into a church and you hear the organ, then but faintly when it is closed.

He fina ly reached his hotel. A bluefaced door keeper admitted him, stamping his feet in an effort to restore circulation. Entering his room he shook the snow from his coat and sat down by the clicking radiator to peruse the evening paper. “city in grip of great blizzard—no relief in sight,” he read, and then smiled faintly. What did he care? To-morrow, the fates being propitious, he was going to leave all this behind, be like the birds as it were, and migrate. Far to the southward lay a land of perpetual summertime, a land of fl wers, of sparkling seas, a land of game and fish Fish; that was it, fish Nothing else but that could cause him to forsake his business, especially at that critical time, and take a train for some unknown coral island two thousand miles away. That was the reason for his three hundred dollar expenditure on what to his wife appeared “poles and twine” that she herself “could make better than that.” But “after all, he might as well get it out of his system.”

The next day he started, and two days after that he arrived. His train was ten or twelve hours late, as

is usually the cheerful habit of southbound trains and his patience was sorely tried, but the soft breezes and the warm sun which greeted him when he stepped onto the platform soon placated his ruffle temper and he actually smiled once more, a smile of conquests to be undertaken.

He was back once more, back to his beloved Florida, the land of the cocoanut and outstretched palm, and he was supremely contented. To-morrow he would be out on the reef, and once there, well, Father Neptune himself only knew. With that land of ice and snow more like some blurred dream he betook himself to bed, lulled to slumber by the wind through the palms, that rustling sound like the noise of a summer shower so dear to the thoughts of every Southern venturer.

To-morrow came, in a moment, it seemed to him, and once more he settled back in his chair, his pipe between his teeth and his rod gripped fi mly between his hands. The land dropped gradually below the horizon and suddenly looking over the side of the boat, he perceived they were on the reef.

He needn’t have looked to have become aware of that fact. A great smashing strike stiffened him in his seat and he braced back while his reel whined the siren song of a well hooked fish—a great “gray wolf ” of the sea, the barracuda.

Game to the last the fish was brought alongside and lifted aboard. As it lay there its jaws opening and closing spasmodically with a snap, showing its big ivory fangs, he saw why it was called a wolf. Its shape caused him to think of days he had spent in Canadian waters in quest of the “maskinonge,” and how he had cried out in protest when his guide had shot the fish with a rifle But here was his chance to square accounts, and though this nomad of the seas outclassed that musky that had been shot, he photographed him and slipped him back into the water.

With a fli k of his tail he was gone, but the Man was not sorry; he had paid his debt to the waters.

His next victim was an amberjack, that cousin to the California yellowtail and a noble upholder of that worthy’s fighting reputation. There is no waste space on a ‘jack’—all speed and they know how to use it.

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them. But they make excellent chowder and for that he could forgive them their other faults.

Occasionally a muttonfish or snapper would rise from the crystal depths and gulp down his whirling piece of mullet. Oftentimes they never reached the boat—a long gray shape would rush to the surface, there would be a swirl, an eddy of bloody foam, and the shark would swim away in further search of food.

The Gulf Stream, river of mystery, is never far off the Florida reefs and a short run brought the Man and his boatman into the dark blue waters of that mighty current, where lurks that greatest and most spectacular of fishes the sailfish A near relative of the swordfish, he possesses all the powerful resisting qualities of the former combined with his wonderful jumping ability.

A sailfish was seen to jump several feet clear of the surface about a mile off, and the boat turned in that direction. Shortly after, the Boatman spied the forked tail of the fish cruising near the surface and the bait was trolled past him. The Man felt a sharp tap on the line; he immediately threw off the brakes and allowed about fi ty feet to run off the reel. Then he struck, and a great spotted purple sail showed above the surface, as in a smother of spray, the sailfish appeared, to give battle. Back and forth he rushed across the surface, jumping, twisting, whirling, shaking, his sail now close to his back, now spread like some gorgeous fan.

“I am the king of the Gulf Stream,” he seemed to say, “How dare you invade my domain.”

But the Man played the game carefully, cautiously, and foot by foot was bringing him nearer his fate. The fish seemed to realize it and redoubled his efforts to escape, but this last wild splurge seemed to spend his strength and he suffered himself to be brought to boat, but not without one final struggle. Today he hangs over the Man’s desk, his long beak projecting from between a pair of eyes which flash forth defianc , “You may have conquered my strength, but not my spirit.”

Perhaps it was a dolphin that seized his bait; those marvelous kaleidoscopes of the sea which are a treat, and a rare one at that, to catch; perhaps it was a great wandering wahoo, that speed demon that can run circles around the fastest boat, and which forms with the dolphin the two rarest game fishes ne meets.

Perhaps it was a Spanish mackerel, beloved by the epicure or perhaps it was, who knows what; that

day was so full of fish for the Man that he lost track of what he really did catch. The wonderful reefs with their strange formations and beautiful colors, the queer birds, the soft warm air, all made one feel at peace with everything in the world.

As they neared the shore, the Man, on looking back, saw a long, slender form shoot high into the air behind his bait and descending, not with an awkward splash, but, with a neat “chug,” nearly jerk the rod from his hands. And then ensued a pretty battle. Wild cunning against cool judgment until the former began to weaken. A kingfish doesn’t fight his best until he sees the boat. The Man knew this and consequently was prepared for the sudden dash of the apparently beaten fish But the whiplike rod and the slender line were too much even for this renowned fighte , and he succumbed. Worn out by the day’s exertions the Man sought his bed at the disgraceful hour of 9 o’clock and was soon asleep, a satisfied smile linge ing on his countenance.

Some of the days he spent on the flats angling for that true Florida prize of molten silver, the gamey little bonefish some days chasing with the harpoon the great sawfish or whipray, and then one night beneath the bejeweled dome of a Southern sky he sallied forth in quest of tarpon. He had caught tarpon in the daytime in the passes and rivers of the West Coast—they were always there, but oh! what a difference to seek the monarch of the fishes in the whispering breeze of a summer night, when a great tropical moon sheds its soft radiance on the scene and adds to the beauty and mystery of it all!

It was then that he caught the great Jewfish more of a curiosity than a game fish—the valiant crevalle, spunkiest of the fin y tribe, ten and twelvepound snappers which often become so annoying while tarpon fishing that one is forced to change his fishing grounds. A heavy strike and a form leaped clear of the water. “A tarpon” was his first thought, but no, it was the mackerel shark, one of the strongest swimmers and gamest fighters that exist Suddenly he braced back in his chair, his muscles cracked, his rod bent nearly double, while from his blurred reel came a hissing sound that set his blood tingling in every vein. Down in the lane of shimmering moonlight a great white form went hurtling into the air, shaking the sparkling drops from its flanks jaws wide open, flinging its huge head from

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side to side like a dog worrying a rat, falling into the water with a crash that started miniature waves rolling in every direction.

Tis the Silver King, clad in his plates of gleaming mail, the dearest wish of an angler’s heart realized, ultima thule of his angling career!

Why try to put into words the glorious battle of the tarpon, the fight that sweeps the hunter from his feet; jump, jump, jump, and surge, surge, surge, a struggle that once undergone can never be forgotten.

And when the great fish was brought alongside the boat, white and ghostlike in the moonlight, and looking down through the translucent depths the Man could make out the dimensions of his captive, he whistled softly to himself; it was a record fish The world seemed beautiful. Warm Southern wind fanned his cheek, from the islands nearby by came the heavy scent of tropical vegetation, and here in the cool waters by his boat lay one of the gamiest fish of the Southern Seas, the tarpon. Then he thought, “Why had not this fish as much right to life as he? It certainly was not edible, he had a perfect specimen mounted, it had given him all the sport of which it was capable and now, beaten and fatigued, lay at his mercy.” He gazed up at the great yellow moon, the palms silhouetted against the distant skyline, the moonbeamed track on the waters, and his mind was made up. He reached down quickly and slipped the hook from the helpless fis ’s jaws. Slowly the great form sank from view until even the phosphorescent gleam of its wake was gone. Then turning to his dumbfounded boatman, who watched the release with open-mouthed astonishment.

“All right, Charley,” he said, “let’s get another.” n

I

n today’s world you can visit a website and be chasing Florida tarpon tomorrow. The trip is no different from any other four-day fishing jaunt, given the ease of modern travel. But one hundred years ago when this article appeared, such a trip remained a fantasy—unless you were “the Man” and independently wealthy with plenty of time on your hands and a deep desire for fishin . Which, not surprisingly, pretty much describes the author himself.

Van Campen Heilner was the only child of Samuel and Adelaide Heilner, and the only heir to the family’s coal mining fortune. Born in 1899, he maintained an undistinguished record in school and eventually landed

in the Lake Placid–Florida School, which former instructor Robert Maynard Hutchins (later president of the University of Chicago) called “a semipenal institution for rich juvenile delinquents. The requirements were three.

You had to be a boy. You had to have been fi ed out of three other schools. And your parents had to be willing to put up $3,000 for one last shot.” This particular school may have been more suited to young Heilner, but then, as historian George Reiger observes, it was not the classrooms that “provided Heilner with . . . direction in life, but the surf gang down at Corson’s Inlet.” Like other Philadelphians of their social class, the Heilners summered on the nearby Jersey Shore. And like other youth, beneath the rum and gambling, Heilner found true love—fishin .

He wasted no time in making his avocation a vocation. He started out on a lifelong path of exploring the world—and writing about it. Along with a couple of school chums, he piloted a boat to Venezuela. Upon his return, he began to contribute stories to the outdoor press. Before he was done, he would publish innumerable articles and seven books. He sat down to write this piece sometime just before his 20th birthday.

Almost certainly “The Lure of the Southern Seas” derives from Heilner’s time in Long Key, Florida, where the famed angler Zane Grey wintered. Grey served as president of the Long Key Fishing Club from 1917 to 1920 and had pioneered ways to catch sailfish When he was only 16, Heilner met Grey in Florida, and Grey became a mentor for a time. In fact, the opening picture in Heilner’s wonderful book Salt Water Fishing (1937) shows Heilner as a wispy teenager walking beside the renowned deep-sea angler and author of Wild West tales. (Grey wrote the foreword for the book, though it is not always clear who is being congratulated: “I take great pleasure and pride in praising Van Campen Heilner’s new book Salt Water Fishing. It is his best. It should be in the select library of all sea anglers.

It is a development I always hoped to see in Van. And a fulfi lment of my ambition for him and my tireless criticism in those old Long Key Days.” If nothing else, the comments indicate Grey gave the young Heilner writing advice.)

Perhaps Heilner imagined Grey as “The Man.” “The Lure of the Southern Seas” also suggests that this particular teenage author had an older soul, as the saying goes. He was clearly capable of finding a story in his own experience, imagining how someone else might experience it, and telling the tale with a comfortable authority—in all, offering an infatuation with the natural world that Continued on page 93

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GRAY’S GEAR & LIFESTYLE

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other’s Day is fast approaching, and with it, your annual last-minute scramble to find the perfect tribute to the woman who gave you the greatest gift of all. That’s why we asked custom jeweler Darren K Moore, whose work has been featured at the Kentucky Derby Museum and Keeneland, to create signature pieces just for Gray’s, designed specifi ally for women who enjoy the outdoor sporting lifestyle. Call him directly at (877)-238-2546 to inquire about the works you see pictured here, or check out www.darrenkmoore.com, where you can explore a variety of options. Pricing varies according to style, but quail and waterfowl pendants begin at $795.

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hether you feel compelled to celebrate your dog’s accomplishments or need a bit of post-hunt libation to better tolerate its shortcomings, the Mud River Wine & Spirits Tote ($120) is the perfect addition to your day afield Also ideal for picnics, outdoor events, or packing what you need for a neighborhood party, this nylon bag with leather accents and a comfortable shoulder harness is lightweight, pleasant to carry, and spacious enough to hold up to four bottles of your favorite elixirs. An outside zipper pocket provides ample room for cocktail accoutrements, a corkscrew, or concert tickets. www.boytharness.com

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he YETI Lowlands Blanket ($200) is one of those rare products that first had us unsure as to how and when we might employ it, yet proved to be far more useful than we could have anticipated. The one-of-a-kind, highly-engineered ground cover is ideal for shore lunches, star-gazing, or afternoons in the park with your canine companion. On one side is a waterproof utility layer that’s impervious to soaked earth or rough terrain. On the other you’ll find a soft, yet rugged, fabric that repels sand, dirt, and dog hair. In between sits insulation and padding­—all of which combine to create a 55-by-78-inch barrier to the elements that is high on durability and grows increasingly comfortable with each machine wash. An easilypackable carry bag is included for convenient transport and tight storage. www.yeti.com

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f you appreciate fine craftsmanship with a heaping dose of style and originality, look no further than Reserve Belt. Over 5,000 hand-loomed glass beads go into the making of each belt ($495), which depicts your choice of more than 20 different fish or birds. The unique combination of high-quality leather and custom beadwork is first drafted on paper before a prototype is created to determine precisely where each individual bead should go in your chosen size and design. Every belt is hand-made, and no two are alike—resulting in a piece of wearable artwork that is exclusive to you.

Perfect to accompany jeans, khakis, or even more formal attire, these belts are made to be worn rather than simply admired. www.reservebelt.com

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ounded in 2012, Stio has made quite a name for itself in the Jackson, Wyoming, ski and outdoor community with a product line that’s managed to successfully straddle the threshold between rugged and hip. Now, it’s delving into the fly fishing world by transforming its hugely-popular windand water-resistant snap shirt, the Eddy Drift, into the ideal garment for casual weekend float trips. Fishing-specifi features such as oversized chest pockets for fly boxes and accessories, rust-free TPU buttons, a 50+ UPF rating, and easy-rolling tab sleeves transition an already excellent shirt into a must-have garment for any fly fishe man who wants to look good on the water or about town. $139. www.stio.com

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ightweight, well-balanced, gorgeous, and Italian. A mid-1950s Sophia Loren? Not exactly, but the new Fabarm Elos D2 ($2,695) is a joy to shoot, easy on the eyes, and an ideal choice if your passions are quail and woodcock as opposed to, say, Academy Award-winning Roman sex goddesses. The Elos D2 boasts an oil-finished walnut stock, a 28-inch inch barrel, and an action composed of Ergal 55, a high-strength aluminum alloy that pairs with barrels that are slightly thinner than previous Elos models to create a lighter carry for long days afoot. But that doesn’t come at the expense of strength and performance, as the barrels are proofed to the highest pressures possible (1630 BAR) by the Italian National Proof house, ensuring compatibility with a large variety of ammunition, including steel shot. Available in 12, 20, and 28 gauge. To learn more, visit www.fabarmusa.com.

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ANGLING

BRIAN GROSSENBACHER

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Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing Clothing The myth of big game fishing.

by Miles Nolte

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Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.

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—David Quammen

ishing, most of us will admit, does not qualify as an extreme sport. No matter how many quick-cuts and heavy bass drops modern fishing film splice together, angling remains more Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzle than American Gladiator. Without question, fishing requires a certain willingness to tolerate discomfort, be it chafing wind, spitting rain, swarms of voracious insects, or temperatures a leather belt’s width above freezing or below boiling. But the ability to ignore corporeal irritations isn’t the same as possible death by dismemberment.

That said, we—as an extension of general outdoor sporting culture—cling to fantasies of ourselves as brave champions vanquishing foes in piscatorial combat. How else could I, and legions of fish writers before me, have gotten away with tales peppered by overwrought tropes like massive, huge, enormous, and leviathan when describing creatures whose mass might total 2 percent of the average American?

I think the answer lies in self-deception. Like big game hunters, a good swath of anglers skew toward a fetish for “dangerous” quarry. This is, by and large, a myth. Unless your brand of masochism involves spear fishing in tiger shark–infested waters or wrestling “green” billfish n slippery decks, the fish ou’re catching probably don’t pose any real threat to your bodily function, so long as you don’t consume the wrong types of them raw. Even then, parasites and salmonella don’t strike the same chord of bravery as facing a real possibility of becoming prey.

Despite all that, a confession: I, like many of you, am drawn to apex predators—the wide-bodied, long-toothed, submarine prowlers with indiscriminate diets and fi kle temperaments. Perch and pompano are both delicious (not to mention great fun to catch), but neither has ever flashed across my eyelids, tail-kicking me away from sleep. I’ve fli ted with numerous piscivorous affairs in my life, but we only get one first Muskies were my inaugural foray into the self-deception of “big game” fishin .

Muskies do, on rare occasions, sample human appendages, usually when those appendages are adorned with shiny jewelry and dangling from summertime docks. State resource agencies don’t keep fish attack records, but muskies seem to chomp humans just slightly less often than otters. When was the last time you heard an otter described as ferocious?

Facts aside, we are fascinated by Esox masquinongy at least partially because of the persistent myth of their rapacious attitudes. A muskie attack represents one of the only instances where an injury on par with a sidewalk stumble draws coverage from newspapers and television stations. Someone was bitten, attacked, by the primary freshwater predator in North America. We are captivated, not by any sense of actual danger but because of muskies’ mythic status. Who among us is brave enough to wrestle such a creature?

The first muskie I ever saw curled out from a plywood wall, its barred body frozen in the instant before its final miscalculated ambush. I was probably fi e or six years old. Every muskie mount I’ve seen since re-creates this rarefied moment of attack. No one mounts muskies to accurately reflect how they spend the majority of their time, sulking casually beside a log or weed edge, underbite pouting, and fin lightly undulating. Where’s the glory in that?

The mouth snatched at me, specifi ally the teeth. I would learn later about the efficien y of those battalions of daggered cartilage, how they angle inward to prevent prey from escaping, how their sharp, serrated edges run from tip to base. But at the time, I knew nothing of evolutionary biology. I was just a kid, gaping at a fish, posed on a wall, with a mouth of gaping menace.

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y the age of 10, I wanted to catch a muskie almost as badly as I wanted to make the All-Star baseball team. Birthdays, I requested the expensive magnum tackle: Suicks, Mepps Musky Killers, Eddie Baits, Cisco Kids, Husky Jerks. I kept shaggy paperbacks of Tony Rizzo’s Summer Muskie and Rizzo Tales under the bathroom sink. Tony soaked me in stories

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about hooking something so powerful it could bend open the split rings that attach treble hooks to baits.

Were I a proper fish writer, this is the part where I’d weave an epic tale. I’d reenact my first muskie encounter with melodramatic panache. I’d pontificate on its power and fearfulness, gush about how it nearly overwhelmed my young self, and how I dug beneath my adolescent fear and discovered a masculine strength previously unknown, allowing me to bring the thrashing creature to heel.

That would be the proper way to climax this second act of the article. Inconveniently, that’s not what happened.

My first muskie might have stretched a liar’s tape to 16 inches. As I cranked it back to the boat without the drag slipping a single bleat, there was no elation, no recognition of a momentous achievement transpiring. I thought I’d snagged an aquatic weed. After unceremoniously dragging it in, I did pause to admire the fis ’s turquoise striping.

Though in basic color and morphology, it looked like a miniature version of the freshwater savages I’d seen contorted into skin-mount animas, it lacked the gravitas. Nothing about that fish tickled any adrenaline or conjured any fear. I easily contained its thrashing—scrawny, weak, and helpless against 12-pound monofilament—and then I let it slip from my hand into the warmth of the August lake and resumed casting the shallow-lipped crankbait along the weedy drop-off where big smallmouths sometimes fed. The whole thing felt unbearably light and deeply anticlimactic. I’d feel something similar a few years later when, after wordlessly walking my late-teenage girlfriend to her car one Halloween night, I stared hard at myself in the mirror for evidence of metamorphosis into manhood.

I caught that fish 30 years ago. In the decades since, I’ve collected a handful of more appropriate muskie stories. There was the time a muskie swallowed a nine-inch jerkbait and bit through the wire leader. One moment I was retrieving a chunk of wooden baitfish in erratic jerks, and then nothing, dead slack line. Seconds later, a green head the size of a young beaver thrashed the lake, leaving the tooth-pocked balsa lure bobbing on the surface and me quaking in adrenaline detox.

There was another time when, after days of fruitless flogging and retrieving, I forgot to add a

figu e-eight at the end of a cast. As I lifted the crankbait, a muskie followed, crossing the surface tension barrier and levitating half a rod’s length in front of me. I remember its eyeball at the same height as my own. In my fun house mirror memory, we examined each other for a full minute in suspended gravity.

On one of my first trips fly fishing for muskies, I shared the boat with two North Woods masters of feather, fur, and E. masquinongy: Brad Bowen and Chris Willen. Willen, now one of the bestrespected muskie guides in the United States and a member of the Loomis pro-staff, was barely into his 20s and deep into the throes of his first season chasing muskies on a fly rod. After a slow morning, a fish pushing four feet inhaled Willen’s fly and immediately came out of the water. He fought it well and quickly brought the fish boatside. The muskie’s mouth opened and birthed the fly into the clarity of afternoon lake water. Before I could fully register the loss, Willen was airborne, diving over the gunwale, arms extended like a wide receiver laying out at the goal line. He came up dripping and empty handed.

“That was the biggest fish I hooked all season,” he explained. “I had to try.” That was as close as I’ve seen fishing c me to an extreme sport.

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ou might notice a dearth of muskies caught in the preceding anecdotes. Though I’ll admit to having more muskie-less days than successful ones, I have slicked my hands in their uniquely scented slime on a respectable number of occasions. (They smell vaguely of fresh thyme, as do grayling.) But I’ve never caught a muskie without feeling at least slightly, though always silently, disappointed. One might argue that I haven’t caught one big enough, and it’s true that I’ve never cradled one of the 50-plus-inch giants. I suspect, however, that even if I do so, mixed with the elation of success and reverence for such a rare creature, a smear of melancholy will linger. The fish we fear and covet, the ones that match the hyperbole and fantasy in which we wrap them, don’t swim in anything except cerebrospinal fluid n Dear readers, this will be my final column as the Angling Editor at Gray’s Sporting Journal. Though my career now takes me in new directions, writing for you these past seven years has been a pleasure and an honor.

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SHOOTING

Single Minded

Gems from Chicopee Falls.

TERRY WIELAND

by Terry Wieland

The Stevens Model 51 Schützen, built on a No. 44 action (lower) and the Model 47, built on the later 44 1/2 action.

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ne hesitates to dive right in and start writing about Joshua Stevens, or Stevens guns, for fear readers might be tempted to turn the page, having little interest in boys’ guns or cheap single-shots or bargain-basement pumps.

If we started with the name Ballard, or Maynard perhaps, or Browning, they would keep reading because Ballard, Maynard, and Browning are all associated with high quality.

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This assumption does Stevens—the J. Stevens Arms & Tool Co., as it then was—a grave injustice.

From 1894 to 1914, the peak of the single-shot era, the Stevens factory in Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts, produced some of the finest single-shot match rifles every made. Its name was associated with Harry Pope, the most famous barrel-maker and one of the finest target shots in the country, and it can claim to have originated the most widely used and popular cartridge in history: the .22 Long Rifle Interested now? Read on. ’Tis a fascinating tale replete with mystery, skulduggery, bizarre chance, and plain bad luck. The wonder of it is that Stevens is still in business, still producing guns, 155 years after its founding, when other, bigger names have bitten the dust. Granted, Stevens today is an economy-brand subsidiary of a larger company, which itself is part of a conglomerate, but so what? They’re still here, and that’s almost a miracle.

Right off the bat, we should say that hard facts about Stevens rifles—models production figu es, serial numbers, introduction dates, and all the arcane minutiae so dear to the hearts of gun collectors—simply does not exist. Here’s why. In 1864, Joshua Stevens, a machinist, went into business with a number of partners to produce a single-shot cartridge rifle of his own design. By 1904, it had grown to be, according to its own claims, the largest maker of sporting arms in the world, and it was putting Chicopee Falls on the map.

Come 1914, and the outbreak of the Great War, the owners sold the Stevens company to Westinghouse so the latter would have the arms-making capability to partake in the mouth-watering bonanza of war production. After the armistice, the Defense Department initiated an investigation into profiteering, at which point all the Stevens company records mysteriously went up in flames Stevens was acquired by Savage Arms, and has been a subsidiary of Savage ever since.

Even with the records, however, any detailed history of Stevens rifles could propel one into an asylum. Its method of naming and numbering models, if it had a method, is described by one expert of my acquaintance as “absolutely incomprehensible.” There is no rhyme or reason to it. Model numbers were adopted out of sequence and serial numbers applied whimsically at best. Numbers and

names were reused for something totally different.

The company always offered a plethora of options, and would do virtually anything within reason on special order. For example, one expensive model offered three different barrel lengths, four different stocks, six sight combinations, three trigger arrangements, and half a dozen different lever designs, all multiplied by a dozen or more chamberings. We won’t even discuss engraving.

Between 1864 and 1894, Stevens had made mostly simple single-shot rifles of solid but unspectacular quality, in a variety of break-action or moving-block designs. In 1894, however, it unveiled a new action, the No. 44, which can best be described as a “rocking” block. (Incidentally, there was a Model 44 rifle and the No. 44 action. Typical Stevens.) Since Stevens had no interest in the big-bore, long-range target or buffalo gun market, the 44 action did not need to be super strong, but it was still stronger than the renowned Ballard and eminently suitable for black-powder cartridges.

Unfortunately, the days of black powder were numbered, and by the turn of the century, smokeless was in the ascendant. This allowed smaller, higher-pressure, cartridges. With its target rifle making a solid name, Stevens was determined to compete with the best. First, it bought out Harry Pope’s business and signed him to a fi e-year contract (at an astonishing $5,000 annually) to raise its barrel-making to his standards, and allow the company to make his signature shooting accoutrements.

Whether Pope persuaded, advised, or participated in what happened next is unknown. Whichever, around 1904 (the exact date is vague) Stevens introduced a new and much stronger action called the No. 44½. Although outwardly it resembled the 44 like a wayward twin, it was a true falling block, strong enough to take any cartridge then available and then some, beautifully made, and offering some features not found on its main rival, the Winchester High Wall.

James J. Grant, who wrote fi e books about single-shot rifles between 1947 and 1992, and was recognized as our foremost expert on the subject, wrote that he believed, in some ways, the Stevens 44½ was the finest single-shot action ever made in the United States. It was smooth as glass, beautifully fitted and finished furnished with stocks of

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wonderful walnut, and offered in high-dollar Schützen and sporting rifles to ival any.

Unfortunately, it came along just as the Schützen era was drawing to a close. The Great War ended civilian production, and anti-German feeling put an end to Schützen matches. There was more to it, of course, but that’s it in a nutshell.

For those not familiar with the game, Schützen competition consists of long matches, shooting offhand, at targets 200 or 220 yards (40 rods) away.

Usually, they are hundred-shot matches lasting all day. Rifles are elaborate and highly specialized, suited to this sport and this sport only, much as a trap gun is useless for anything except shooting trap. These rifles have long hooked buttplates; perch-belly buttstocks that rest against the chest; palm rests under the forend; long, heavy barrels; and some of the fi est tang aperture sights and globe front sights ever made. A typical Schützen rifle in .32-40 or .3855 (two favorite cartridges) will weigh 13 or 14 pounds.

When Stevens ceased all civilian production in 1916, that was the end of the No. 44½ action. When production resumed in the 1920s, the company still had tooling to make the older 44, and that was the action on which it based much of its production for the next quarter century. The last Stevens rifle built on that action was shipped from the factory in 1946.

Why Stevens never built the 44½ again is a mystery that will never be solved. Probably, Savage Arms had other plans, and anyway, until the 1930s, when precision varmint shooting became the rage, there was little demand for expensive single-shots. When the .22 Hornet was introduced, Stevens tried making some rifles on the No. 44 action, but it could not take Hornet pressures and was discontinued.

The only real original source of information on Stevens rifles today is the company catalogs, but they are as infuriatingly inconsistent as the model numbers. Catalogs were sometimes reissued with the same dates but added or removed models at whim. Two collectors might both possess #52 (1902), for example, and one claims to find a certain model in it while the other insists it ain’t

there. Both could well be right.

Worse, the company’s most expensive models after 1894 were the #46 through #54 (with a couple of numbers missing). After the 44½ action was introduced, the same model numbers were retained, with the same options, but using the newer, stronger action. With the actions open, it’s easy to tell them apart, but closed, to the unpracticed eye, it is not. One indication is the number of pins or screws visible from the side, with the 44 having an extra one high up, on which the breechblock pivots. The sliding 44½ breechblock doesn’t need that. However, even this is not absolute, because on some later 44½s they used a pin in the same spot as a base for an optional ejector.

Anyone wishing to pursue the history of Stevens can do no better than to obtain all fi e of James J. Grant’s books, as well as Frank de Haas’s Single Shot Rifles and Actions (1969). Phil Sharpe (The Rifle in America) is useful but not gospel on this subject. You need all fi e of Grant’s books because the Stevens story is begun in the first one, then carried on through each of the following as more information came to light and Grant expanded his knowledge and corrected some early misinformation. How he did not end up in an asylum is beyond me.

Still, there is no denying the quality of the high-end Stevens rifles produced between 1894 and 1914. Putting a proper Schützen rifle to your shoulder is a revelation, like the first time you shoot a Purdey. Not for nothing did shooters like Grant, de Haas, John T. Amber (Gun Digest), Robert Petersen, and Ned Roberts become enamored of fin single-shot rifles Like single-malt Scotch or single-source French roast, they become an addiction you have no desire to kick. n

Why Stevens never

built the 44½ again is a mystery that will never be solved.

The Stevens .22 Hornet was not around long, but it was long enough for Wieland’s father to develop a desire for it. Fortunately, perhaps, he never acquired one, but the desire lingered, as such desires will. Had a Stevens Hornet come along in the 1960s, he would have snapped it up. Some things you never outgrow.

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ART

Louis Agassiz Fuertes The right man at the right time.

By Brooke Chilvers

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WILD TURKEY, COURTESY OF COPLEY FINE ART AUCTIONS

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ew connoisseurs of bird art dispute that French-born John James Audubon (1785–1851) is the all-time Big Daddy of American ornithological art. Those who do, argue that Ithaca native Louis Agassiz Fuertes (1874–1927) is the greater artist of the two, his birds perhaps less dramatic than his predecessor’s but more three-dimensional and alive.

Admittedly, there were few contenders in the 90 years between Audubon and Fuertes, except perhaps Ernest Thompson Seton (1860–1946), though he was more author than artist.

Among those weighing in for Fuertes were his two timely mentors who coached and championed the gifted and willing youth: Dr. Frank Chapman (1864–1945), curator of birds at the American Museum of Natural History; and Dr. Elliott May / June 2019 · 77

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Coues (1842–1899), esteemed ornithologist, army surgeon, founding member (1883) of the American Ornithologists’ Union, and author of the groundbreaking Key to North American Birds (1872).

Other than zoological illustrators, such as the exceptional Jacques Barraband (1767–1809), whose tropical birds were commissioned by Napoléon Bonaparte himself, no living-wage profession called ornithological artist existed until Coues told Fuertes to go out and create a market for bird paintings, suggesting he first produce “a very handsome volume of colored plates and thus secure for you a permanent reputation.”

By the time Fuertes was killed in his vehicle at a railroad crossing in Unadilla, New York, while driving home from a visit with Chapman, he’d been America’s most famous bird painter for 30 years.

Prior to the Peterson Field Guide generation, it’s Fuertes’s carefully composed multi-species color plates of similar or related birds that are imprinted in the minds of backyard ornitholigists. In his short lifetime, he created at least 700 color plates and 400 monochrome illustrations for numerous ornithological works, such as E. H. Eaton’s two-volume Birds of New York (1910–1914), the encyclopedic Birds of America (1917), and National Geographic’s Book of Birds (1918).

Fuertes made thousands of paintings and drawings of birds for technical and children’s books, field guides, magazines of every kind, publications by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and private commissions for his oil paintings. He even produced 90 images of song and game birds for Church & Dwight, publishers of the collectible trading cards then found in packages of products such as baking soda.

Louis was the youngest of six children of a Puerto Rico–born professor of civil engineering at Cornell University; his mother, Mary Stone Perry, was a talented musician. Louis’s father named him after the respected Swiss naturalist and Harvard professor, Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–1873).

Yet the talented young artist received no particular encouragement from his parents or teachers, when he started training himself in art and ornithology right out of an original double-elephant folio (a book with pages 50 inches tall) of Audubon’s Birds of America that graced the Ithaca Public Library and Alexander Wilson’s nine-volume American

Ornithology in the Cornell University Library.

“My greatest delight as a child and for many years were the only works on American birds of which I had any knowledge. . . . I am very sure they were the most potent influence that was ever exerted on my youthful longings to do justice to the singular beauty of birds,” wrote Fuertes.

In 1890, the teenager sent off to the Smithsonian Institute his depiction of a red crossbill, which earned him praise for its accuracy. At 17, he was inducted into the prestigious American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU) as its youngest-ever member.

Fuertes accompanied his parents to Paris in the summer of 1892, where he sketched in the city’s signature botanical garden: Jardin des plantes. In the fall, he attended school in Zurich, where he discovered English bird painter John Gould (1804–1881) and German natural history artist Joseph Wolf (1820–1899), who today is credited as a founder of the now popular genre of wildlife art.

As his father’s son at Cornell, Fuertes had the good fortune to meet zoologist Burt G. Wilder (1841–1925), who arranged the young artist’s firs picture exhibition at the Christian Association, botanist Liberty Hyde Baily (1858–1954), and insect artist Anna Botsford Comstock (1854-75), whose influence is apparent in Fuertes’s bird portraits’ “applicable” butterflies leaves, and berries.

In 1893, Louis entered Cornell to study architecture, joining the exclusive Sphinx Head Society and the glee club. But his trajectory was permanently redirected when another singer’s uncle was none other than the larger-than-life Coues, who quickly took Fuertes under his wing.

“I don’t suppose no young man ever had a better opening; it remains with yourself to prove that I have not said too much about you,” Coues wrote to Louis.

Always pushing Louis to aim for perfection in every detail, Coues advised him in selecting viewing angles, typical bird poses, and characteristic behaviors, insisting on an absolute minimum of diverting details. “What we want is the bird, with the least possible scenery, stage setting, framework or background of any description.”

At his first AOU meeting in 1896 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the very Harvard museum founded by the naturalist he’d been named after, Louis fortuitously met one of America’s

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CANVASBACKS, COURTESY OF COPLEY FINE ART AUCTIONS.

greatest living artists, Abbott Thayer (1849–1921).

The bird-crazy, Beaux Arts–educated painter, and masterly teacher wrote to his new apprentice, “I want to get hold of you and swiftly develop your powers. . . . Your talent makes me itch to train it, the more because it runs to my beloved birds.” A controversial theorist on “protective coloration,” Thayer argued that the showy plumage of male birds was intended to attract predators away from females and nestlings.

He encouraged Fuertes to emphasize the camouflaging att ibutes of the landscape in his portraits.

A need for Fuertes’s talent would launch his career even before graduation, starting with numerous pen-and-ink drawings for Florence A. Merriam’s A-Birding on a Bronco (1896). When in 1897 Coues himself needed an illustrator for his own book with Mabel Osgood Wright, Citizen Bird, Louis produced 111 more.

Providentially, Fuertes also met Frank Chapman at the AOU. Eventually, the two would journey more than 60,000 miles together, “in the snows of the Canadian Rockies and the mud of Mexican lagoons,” doing field research and collecting specimens for the innovative wildlife habitat dioramas in the American Museum of Natural History, including the pink fl -

mingo colony Fuertes painted in 1905.

In 1899, Fuertes, the self-described “bird portrait painter” with an “itching foot” at the mere sight of a map, joined the Harriman Alaska Expedition, cruising 4,327 miles, from Sitka and Glacier Bay to the Aleutian Islands and to Plover Bay on the Bering Sea in Siberia. Also along as field researchers were naturalist John Muir and photographer Edward Curtis.

In 1901, Fuertes spent fi e months with the U.S. Biological Survey in Judge Roy Bean country—Big Bend, Northern Mexico, and the Chisos Mountains, where Fuertes and Chapman lived off flou , sugar, bacon, and coffee. By comparison the Alaska expedition, financed by railroad magnate Edward Harriman, had been luxurious. Undaunted, Fuertes wrote, “I have done more painting and drawing on this trip than ever before.”

When he sailed to Jamaica in 1904 with his young bride, Madge Sumner, Louis’s avid shooting and skinning of birds on their honeymoon made her determined to stay home for the rest of their marriage; and she did.

Always ready, Fuertes partook in expeditions to Continued on page 84 May / June 2019 · 79

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EATING

American Shad A tale of two coasts.

A

by Martin Mallet

merican shad occupy an odd position in our culinary landscape. It is simultaneously prized and undervalued. Despite its auspicious Latin name (Alosa sapidissima, “the savory herring”), the often-repeated joke is that our largest shad is the Rodney Dangerfield of fish: it gets no respect. But this wasn’t always the case.

In its native range, shad was historically one of the most important fish. Running in massive numbers from Florida to Newfoundland, shad was not only a staple for early settlers but the most valuable fishery of its day. According to some reports, the Delaware River produced up to 20 million pounds of shad in the 1890s. Flora and fauna were both named after the savory herring, which now stand as relics to their once central cultural positions. For example, plants like shadbush, whose flowers mark

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the beginning of the shad run, as well as an entire class of mayflies that are called shad flies, not trout flies. Unfortunately, shad did not escape the sadly familiar narrative of many of the early bonanza fisheries. Overfishing, pollution, and habitat degradation have conspired to reduce shad numbers, with the 2013 moratorium on commercial and recreational harvesting the result of more than a century of decline.

On the Pacific side, where shad were introduced in 1871, the story could not have been more different. Shad took to the nutrient-rich waters and relatively unencumbered rivers of the West Coast like the proverbial fish to water. Commercially, shad always played second fiddle to salmon and were not particularly valued as food fish either, so their numbers were left to increase exponentially. Shad now NORTH RIVER SHAD, BY WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE COURTESY OF FRIENDS OF AMERICAN ART COLLECTION, THE ART INSITUTE OF CHICAGO

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range from Mexico to Russia, with the irony that where they are still remembered and prized on the East Coast they are rare, and where they are abundant they are relatively unappreciated.

As a sport fish shad enjoy the reputation of a solid fighte , putting up a fight far outside its weight class. It has been called the “poor man’s salmon” and even the “freshwater tarpon.” While everyone seems to agree that it is delicious, shad has one major disadvantage: the bones. Shad have an absurd number of bones. They have so many that several indigenous legends refer to shad as an unhappy porcupine that was turned inside out and transformed into a fish There are several rows of bones, some of which are straight pin bones and others that are Y-shaped, all on the same fi let. Producing a boneless shad fi let is part of the fishe ’s arcanum, a lost art possessed by few.

Fortunately, you don’t actually need to de-bone the fish to enjoy it. I’ve selected a few recipes that sidestep the need to start with a boneless fi let. If you do decide to try it, make sure you have several fish to practice on or take Hank Shaw’s advice and make boneless shad fi let fingers which are much easier to extract.

SOUSED SHAD One way to get rid of the small bones is to pickle the fish which will dissolve them. As its herring parentage would suggest, shad is very well suited to pickling: its fi m and dense mild flesh taking well to seasoning. This recipe is a mild, sweet pickle, akin to soused or Dutch-style herring. Pickled shad is great for a little extra breakfast protein or as a casual starter.

1½ pounds shad fi lets, skinned Salt 1 pint white wine vinegar 1 teaspoon whole juniper berries 1 teaspoon whole coriander seeds ½ teaspoon whole allspice berries 1 dried red chile ½ teaspoon dried mustard seeds 2 or 3 fresh bay leaves 2 tablespoons brown sugar 2 tablespoons white sugar 1 Spanish onion, thinly sliced or minced

Cut the shad fi lets into 1½-inch pieces. Lay them into a shallow glass container and sprinkle liberally with salt on all sides. Cover the container with plastic wrap and leave it in the fridge overnight, turning the fi lets once to ensure even seasoning.

Meanwhile, prepare the pickling liquid. In a small saucepan, combine the vinegar, juniper, coriander, allspice, chile, mustard seeds, bay leaves, and sugars. Bring to a boil, and remove from the heat. Let the liquid steep for 15 minutes; then chill and reserve it. Once the fi lets have finished brining, transfer them to clean glass jars and layer the shad with the onion. Cover the fish and onion layers with the pickling liquid, seal the jars, and let it marinate for at least 3 days before eating.

SHAD ROE BOTTARGA Shad roe is a delicacy, and is most commonly eaten simply dredged in flour and pan-fried. Bottarga is another preparation, a cured and dried roe that can be used to enhance a number of dishes, from seafood pasta to pizza. Commercial varieties are usually made with gray mullet roe, but it can be made with almost any species with small dense roe. Modernist Cuisine even has a version with sea urchin roe. I’ve done a cooked roe version with lobster, which is great for adding a bit of color to a seafood chowder. Shad, with their copious and dense roe, are a great candidate for making bottarga.

Shad roe, intact and rinsed well Salt brine, to make the brine and to cure the roe Olive oil Make enough 10 percent salt brine (approximately 2 teaspoons per quart) to cover the roe. Soak the roe in the brine overnight. Pat the roe dry, and transfer them to a small dish. Drizzle the shad roe with a little olive oil, and let them sit in the refrigerator for 2 to 3 hours, turning once or twice. The olive oil will provide some protection and help ensure the roe do not dry out too much.

Cover the bottom of a nonreactive dish with salt, and lay the roes on top. (If you have multiple pieces, make sure they don’t overlap.) Cover them completely with salt, and leave them in the refrigerator for 2 to 3 days, until fi m. If the salt dissolves May / June 2019 · 81

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or becomes too moist, discard and change the salt.

The roe will firm up substantially during this phase.

Rinse with cold water and pat dry. Wrap the roe carefully with cheesecloth, and hang in the fridge for at least two weeks, and up to several months, depending on desired firmness. A roe dried for less time will have a softer consistency, suitable for slicing and garnish, but you can dry it to a hard consistency for grating as well. The finished bottarga will keep for several weeks.

SHAD BALL SOUP Another way to avoid shad bones is to mince the meat. Shad fillets can be milled or sieved, pressing through the flesh while keeping out the bones. You can also cook the fillets and gently flake out the bones.

For fish balls, it’s essential to start with the raw meat, to either push the fillets through a food mill to strain out the bones or scrape away the meat between the rows of bones with a spoon; bothwill work well. This recipe, from California seafood specialist Jay Barlow, appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in 1998.

Serves 4 Fish Balls 1 pound shad fillets 1 egg white 2 tablespoons minced green onion or shallot 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger 2 tablespoons Chinese rice wine or dry sherry 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon cornstarch 1 tablespoon bacon or ham fat or rendered chicken fat Noodle Soup 1 stalk lemongrass 2 scallions, divided into white and green parts 2 thick slices fresh ginger 1 teaspoon oil 2 teaspoons sugar

2 tablespoons fish sauce 2 star anise pods ¼ pound thin rice noodles 12 mint or basil leaves 4 lemon or lime wedges Hot sauce, to taste Extract the meat from the shad fillets by scraping it off with a spoon into a food processor. Add the egg white, green onion, fresh ginger, rice wine, salt, cornstarch, and fat and process to a paste. Cover and refrigerate for at least an hour.

Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil over high heat, and reduce the heat to maintain a simmer. Form the fish paste into 1-inch balls, and poach for 2 to 3 minutes; the balls will sink at first and float when they are ready. Remove and drain.

The fish balls can be made up to 3 days in advance, and also freeze well.

To prepare the soup, bruise the lemongrass, scallion white parts, and ginger with a pestle or by lightly crushing with the bottom of a pot. Heat the oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the crushed lemongrass, scallions, and ginger and cook for 2 to 3 minutes, until fragrant. Sprinkle with the sugar and continue to cook until the sugar begins to caramelize.

Remove the pan from the heat and carefully add the water or stock. Add the fish sauce and star anise, and bring to a simmer. Simmer for 25 minutes.

Meanwhile, soften the rice noodles by covering them with hot water and letting them stand until soft, about 15 to 20 minutes. Drain and rinse.

Strain the broth and taste for seasoning. Divide the noodles into 4 large bowls, top with the fish balls. Divide the hot broth over the bowls and garnish with sliced scallion greens, basil leaves, lemon, and hot sauce to taste. n Martin Mallet has had limited success fly fishing for shad in the Miramichi, but that may have little to do with its abundance.

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Art Continued from page 79 Florida, Saskatchewan, the Yucatán, the Bahamas, and Colombia. His final field trip was to Abyssinia, with the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History in 1926, where he met 34-yearold Emperor Haile Selassie. The three-month safari with the curator of zoology Wilfred Hudson Osgood (1875–1947), 36 pack mules, and dozens of staff, made camp 40 times as they traveled from Addis Ababa through the wildlife wonders of Arusi, Bale, Sidamo, and Galla provinces.

Despite losing all his gear, Fuertes hunted, prepared, labeled, and packed some 1,000 bird skins, and completed 100 color studies, including his iconic life-sized portraits of gelada baboon, Abyssinian wolf, colobus monkey, and mountain nyala, which were published posthumously in Album of Abyssinian Birds and Mammals (1930)— surely his finest wo k.

Although Fuertes was gifted with

photographic recall, he also trained his skills of observation, memorizing in his encyclopedic mind’s eye the tints and textures of flesh y avian anatomy that disappear with death. “Color, pattern, form, contour, minute details of structure, all are absorbed and assimilated so completely that they become part of himself, and they can be reproduced at any future time with amazing accuracy,” wrote Chapman. Out of North America’s 800 avian species, Fuertes shot and studied more than 600; his personal collection consisted of more than 3,500 birds skins.

Fuertes’s legacy includes hundreds of delightful letters. Those addressed to the bird artist who would follow in his path, George Miksch Sutton (1898– 1982), offer insight into his work process. The gifted draftsman advised, “The greatest lesson I ever learned was the cheerful destruction of a false start.

Don’t ever go ahead on a picture till the drawing satisfies ou fully.”

He also explained to Sutton the difference between local color—the exact

tone and color of a given part of the bird when seen irrespective of any modifying influences—and shadow color, for example, when the white of a bird’s belly mirrors adjacent colors, such as from greenery. “Think of light as a white powder, sprinkled on the top surfaces of your birds. That is almost exactly the effect it has on local color.”

A dedicated artist who could shut out everything when working, Fuertes was also known for being an especially congenial fellow. In his 18-page obituary in The Auk, Chapman wrote, “No one could resist the charm of his enthusiasm, his ready wit, and whole-souled genuineness. . . .”

The good fortune of opportune mentors is part of Fuertes’s success.

Yet surely his greatest accomplishment, as Chapman described it, is this: “He brought only happiness into the world.

Every memory of him is joyous.” n Despite all the pleasure she found in Fuertes’s work, Brooke Chilvers still loves Audubon best of all.

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Close Encounters Continued from page 28 for the noted biologist C. Hart Merriam, these western turkeys are regarded by some as the easiest of our fi e wild turkey subspecies to hunt. If true at all—and I remain unconvinced—their alleged naïveté likely has less to do with lack of wariness than with a limited turkey-hunting tradition in their native range.

However, many also consider the Merriam’s our most beautiful wild turkey.

I agree, and I’ve spent time with them all—Osceola, Rio Grande, and Gould’s in addition to Eastern and Merriam’s. It’s the pale tips of both the outer and inner tail feathers that demand the eyes’ attention when a tom is in full strut, and those two juxtaposed white semicircles are often the first part of the bird a hunter sees when a tom is approaching from a distance.

Such is the case this morning. My first response to the sight of the bird picking his way out of the pines and into the meadow is, as usual, a question: How can anything so small make

a sound as thunderous as a gobble? The bird has arrived in full strut—tail feathers fanned with a draftsman’s precision, wingtips dragging the ground, erect body feathers doubling the size of his silhouette, naked head aglow in a flu tuating tricolor of red, white, and blue.

Like most acts of courtship, this one is simultaneously magnificent and ridiculous, but as always, this close encounter of the third kind leaves me mesmerized.

As the tom starts across the meadow on a vector toward my position, the game becomes mine to win or lose. With the bird’s radar locked on to my hen decoy, I reduce my calling to an occasional soft cluck or purr. As the gobbler approaches step by measured step, my only responsibility is to hold perfectly still, which may be the most difficult part of the hunt.

Then the bird is in range—longbow range, no less—but I still need him to do one more thing, and he does it. When he pivots in full strut 10 yards away, his extended tail feathers eclipse his vision briefl , allowing me to draw my bow and release the arrow undetected. The

stricken bird collapses in plain sight 50 yards away in the meadow, surrounded by a bouquet of purple pasquefl wers.

Moments later, I’m cutting notches in my turkey tag and running my hands across tail feathers that will eventually produce a season’s worth of hopper imitations at my fly tying bench. This is my close encounter of the fourth kind.

The only way to improve upon the morning would be to find a patch of newly erupted morels to serve with the bird after it’s hung for a day or two.

That’s why I choose a route down the mountain that takes me through several aspen groves, while keeping my eyes trained upon the ground. The calendar may claim that Thanksgiving still lies seven months away, but I’ve already found one of my own. n Don Thomas and his wife, Lori, are still based in Montana and likely always will be. However, they are thinking of swapping their current Arizona winter home for a place with fewer scorpions and more bonefish Their bird dogs remain skeptical.

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Hooterville

On Falling In

Continued from page 14 When the fog lifts enough for me to find my way back to the truck, I return to Hooterville. The house dogs and hunters have gone, Mooney in town playing golf. Taze left last night, on the cusp of some hypothetical shadow. The cheese in the sprung trap has been eaten by the second mouse.

I sink into a camouflage armchair and disappear, the TV still broadcasting silent outdoor expeditions. In a sequence run backwards, an arrow reverses from the heart of a whitetail buck in slow motion back to the archer’s nock.

The deer getting up front first like a cow, walking backwards. n

Continued on page 46 Later, I was telling another mate about it. “Wear a belt,” he said. “Always wear a belt—it stops the water fi ling your legs, or slows it.”

Yeah, yeah, I thought, but where do you stop? You stop at my mate Pete, that’s where. “An extra belt around your chest can be a lifesaver,” he told me sagely, after I had recounted my story. I’m sure it can, but then I pictured myself going down to the river in a wading suit where I am trussed up like a chicken and waiting for the life belt to go off. It might keep the water out, but it must keep out a whole lot of the fun, too. I guess I just like to live dangerously. But I nod along to these helpful suggestions, just pleased that someone cares.

And one belt around the waist was not too much, and something that I would, in future, wear, I promised myself. Naturally I didn’t for a long time.

But one thing has convinced me that I must. A few days before I fell in, coincidentally, I had dropped my mobile phone and cracked its screen. That day I fell in, I had been using my phone to take a few shots for a story. After my elegant slide, the water had seeped through the cracks, and everything on the phone was lost irretrievably.

We went back to shoot the pictures again, and I needed to be in some of them. I am always more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it, and when I saw the results, I realized why. My waders were flapping about, sagging, and I looked as if I were carrying an extra three stone of beer drinking when I haven’t touched a drop of the stuff for more than fi e years.

I now have got a belt around my waist, and I will wear it religiously. You discover your priorities at a time like this. n

O. Victor Miller is at once a genteel southern gentleman, an irreverent rabblerouser, and an ever-curious scholar. His tales of outdoor adventure are a heady concoction, written these days from his family home on the banks of the Flint River in his native south Georgia.

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Andrew Griffiths is a writer and journalist based in England’s Peak District. He writes about angling and the environment for UK newspapers and magazines, and loves to fly fish the small rivers of Derbyshire for wild brown trout.

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The Russian Continued from page 52 nothing. We met in the overly chlorinated vapors near the campus pool.

My eyes wept. Abernathy excused himself to swim laps. He wore goggles that made him look like an enormous insect. He wore a Speedo with no shame. We weren’t sure class was over or not. He churned the laps. We sat in the bleachers with our notepads. I was the last to leave.

It’s early July and the Russian River is on my mind. In my condo, I read the salmon counts and wonder if it’s time to head back up the peninsula. At the farmers’ market, I gorge on cabbage rolls and blini. This year the Russian continues to pump out sockeyes. I’m secretly proud of the river. Nearly everyone I run into in Homer has been up for a few salmon. It’s incredible that this little, clear river provides so much recreation—so much food—for so many. But it’s the slipperiest river you’ll ever fish I advise newcomers to just sit down in the river and get it over with.

The rocks are pyramid-shaped and I fall at least once every outing. A guy at Ulmer’s Hardware tries to sell me a fly that he swears by. I’ve come to the conclusion over the years that it’s not the fly that catches sockeyes but strong fluo ocarbon that they can’t see. I buy another roll of it and am staggered by the price. I load up on pencil weights and more flies that lo k like bucktails.

This time I kennel the dogs at Wuffda Kennels in Anchor Point. I’m camping at the Russian, and dogs are not overly welcome. I stop in Soldotna at the Fred Meyer for snacks and enough ice to keep a limit of salmon fi m.

I park again at the Pink Salmon lot.

The frenetic pace of mid-June is gone.

Only a few trout fishe men stand around and talk about flies and bears. A family comes up the path. They walked all the way to the falls and saw three black bears dipping for salmon carcasses.

I have to decide whether to take my light fly rod for trout or my heavy salmon outfit I stew on it. I want fresh meat. I know the trout fishing is out of this world, but I want fi lets. I want to

live on wild salmon, while it’s still possible, by my own hands and a bottle of imported virgin olive oil. There will be garlic and shishito peppers involved. So, after a mental standoff, I take only the 9-weight salmon rod. Taking two rods never works out, for reasons one must gain by experience.

My intel is flawed the sockeye run has petered. I see anglers by the dozen standing in the tried-and-true pools, casting to nothing. There are no salmon. There are trout lurking all around, as if on pause, waiting for someone to clean a sockeye so they can zoom in for scraps. By marching upstream for an hour, I find a few rattled salmon in a pool. Their bodies are scarred by near fatal brushes with gill nets. There are flies in their bellies, pinned in their tails.

Some of the fish are covered in white fungus. A woman in rubber boots is casting at them with what looks like a halibut rod rigged with a Russian River fl . Her son urges her on. She suddenly slips and her boots founder. She drags herself ashore, and then they depart soggily, unhappily.

I knew I should have brought my 5-weight. But the walk to the parking lot doesn’t sound inspiring. I rig my salmon rod with an indicator and a flesh fl . The trout come from all over to inspect the fl . The big trout turn it down. Some little fish pick at the fl , but are too small to take the hook. In forty-fi e minutes of casting, I catch one six-inch fish While I’m unhooking it, I feel the presence of another being. At first I think a bear has crept up on me. I turn and come face-to-face with a towering man, fit bedecked in high-end waders. He’s a walking catalog for the best fly fishing fashion on the market. He’s sipping a bottle of homemade kombucha. He has a pencil weight on his leader, but unlike so many folks you encounter on the Russian, this character has no urgency about him. He has the demeanor of someone who practices yoga. Maybe he’s undercover fish and game “What did you get him on?” he says of the trout. I tell him it’s a flesh fly I tied in the early 2000s. Bush-era. Justin introduces himself, smiling wildly, as if

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he’s already on to me. We start talking about fishing and salmon. Justin is a guide in Argentina, and this is his introduction to the Russian. He’s been wandering the banks for hours, interviewing people. He’s seen people snagging fis deliberately. He’s smiling still, describing brutal things, illegal things.

I point out the trout. At first he doesn’t see them. I pick up a thoroughly ravished sockeye carcass and start tossing decaying bits of flesh spine and skin in the pool. The trout rush in for a meal.

There are large trout in there, too, big fish ver 20 inches.

I say, “Anywhere you stop, you’ll fin lots of big trout.”

“I see,” he says. “What do you consider big?” He reminds me that he’s from Patagonia and a 20-inch fish doesn’t raise eyebrows there. I change the subject. I continue to chum the trout.

“Locally, this is called ‘juicing the hole.’” The trout are in a feeding frenzy.

I cast in my flesh fly and hook a 10-incher that has no chance against the 9-weight. I skid it across the surface of the river. Justin and I continue to talk. Our conversation turns to the culture of catch-and-release. He’s been questioning it lately, arguing with himself. He’s been reading Hafiz I catch a not-so-bad sockeye and demonstrate the turtle-walk up into the watermelon berries. I kill the fish and ask him if he wants one of the fi lets.

Not only does he want the fi let for his wife, who is sleeping with his one-yearold back in a Mercedes Leisure Van, but he also wants the eggs. And the skin.

“She’s Russian, and she doesn’t like to waste things,” he says. The carcass and the skin will become soup. He promises me that the roe will go to good use. I hand over the skins. Privately I wanted to juice the hole with them. Maybe it’s better that I don’t have them, I think to myself. I walk back up to the parking lot with my new friend, who walks with such long strides he’s hard to keep up with. He’s talking now about Neruda, and then back to the pitfalls of catch-and-release. The ideas are coming so fast. He says something in Spanish that I don’t quite catch.

After he leaves, it takes me an hour to

realize that half of that stuff he said was just bull.

At 4 a.m. Justin raps on my camper shell. Armed with a half dozen Russian River flies and one can of Mace, we wander miles up the river before the rest of the anglers stir. Even the trout afici nados aren’t up yet. Justin wants to walk the whole river, all the way to the falls. In years of fishing the Russian, I’ve hardly left the comforts of the boardwalk. Good thing Justin is fluent in many topics. He goes on and on about fishing ethics, real and imagined. He talks about bird dogs and famous people who turned out to be pretty fair when he got them in a boat and put a fly rod in their hands. He’s a fellow writer. He’s a subscriber of fatalism, but fatalism seems to fit a salmon stream, especially when the run has peaked and can only fade from here.

We come to a place where two enormous spruce trees have fallen over the river. There are 30 fresh sockeyes finning below the branches, and a few more coming up through the braids.

Together, as we talk about our favorite authors, we achieve our limit. I’ve forgotten my fi let knife. I didn’t bring bug dope or snacks. World traveler, wine snob, purveyor of fine shotguns and high-test bird dogs, I’ve beclowned myself yet again by forgetting all the essentials, including water. Justin says it’s no big deal. He shares everything he has.

On a flat rock, he fi lets the sockeye. He’s good at it, almost in David Ferreira’s league. I ziplock the bright red slabs of meat. When we’re done, we head back up the trail, me trying to keep up, him going on and on about Patagonia and a wealthy client who left a bad, irony taste in his mouth that he still can’t quite shake.

T

hat fog off Cook Inlet in late summer, man, it’s like the impenetrable breath of giants. Or maybe not. What would you call it? It obscures the brightly painted houses in the Russian villages. It rolls over the commercial fleet erasing them and their veil of seabirds.

What I admire about the Old Believ-

ers is how they looked all over the world for a suitable place to live and settled on Alaska. They carried with them their traditions, but no fear of pulling up stakes and starting over—they’ll leave again if they feel like it. You know those Russian fishe men who brave the winedark seas to hack something resembling a livelihood from the brooding waters?

Hard men who say farewell to their wives unsure if they’ll ever return? Bill Mixer is not one of them.

Bill and I drive up the Kenai Peninsula. Already, he has complained about the coffee I brought along. He says it’s weak. He says he can see the bottom of his cup. He stares into his cup, missing the glorious scenery zooming by. Maybe he’s slipping a bit. Bill has come up all this way to help me paint my condo. No one else offered. Tonight, he’s going to sleep in my tent while I sleep in the confines of my amper shell.

Bill has just finished teaching a fl casting course in the Lower 48. He says he’s willing to spring for an early lunch.

He’s bedecked with new gear, de rigueur waterproof satchels, and reels that seem jewelry. All the new gear rankles me, but I try to hide it, lest it come off as jealousy.

He wants to go to a place called Mykel’s he has found on TripAdvisor. He’s working his phone like mad. I advise him to eat a piroshki from the cooler so we can get to the river.

“Catching these salmon in the mouth is like throwing a ham sandwich at a kid on a bicycle,” I tell him. “There are real physics involved. There’s technique.”

“I think I can figu e it out,” he says.

Secretly, I am excited to watch him cast a quarter-ounce pencil weight on a $900 rod.

W

e have loose plans to meet Justin. I’ve arranged a campsite in the Rainbow Lot, and sent him all the information. Last I heard, he was headed off for a weeklong float somewhere in the Interior of Alaska. He wrote to me that he was in the wilderness living off raw sockeye and salmon skin soup. That was two weeks ago.

But Justin’s not lost in Alaska; he’s parked already in my campsite, the Lei-

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sure Van burbling with the sounds of its onboard air conditioner and, perhaps, a shower going. Justin emerges carrying a pot of salmon skin soup. I’m happy to see him and I say so. He shushes me. His daughter and wife are sleeping. So we have a quiet meal of soup and sashimi from a red salmon he caught an hour earlier. He’s low on wasabi. After putting up the tent for Bill, we decide to hit the river. Justin says he’ll catch up.

Bill pulls on his waders with a dignity suggestive of czars and well-attended opera patrons. To add some panache, he lights a Dominican cigar and says something cheery about it being insect repellent. The Pink Salmon parking lot is nearly empty. We begin our journey upstream. The gulls are gone. In their place are ravens, which croak and chortle on the exposed gravel bars. They are plump with salmon. The river shines with salmon oil. Stripped carcasses, like combs and clothespins, litter the banks.

The smell of rot isn’t repulsive—it’s hopeful. Bill, seeing a salmon river for the first time, is at a loss for words. Or

perhaps the cigar has robbed him of the ability to speak.

Justin, with his long strides, overtakes us as the boardwalk ends. We walk along the mossy, impossibly slick rocks. My studded wading shoes grind and slip. There are only a few fish in the popular pools; only a couple anglers hurl pencil weights. Most of the action is on the Kenai by now. The Russian is more or less left to trout guys, or guys like me, who worry perpetually about the coming winter, guys who can’t tell when they’ve had enough.

Bill struggles with the pencil weight.

To my delight, his casting is awkward and faltering. He tries the double haul that has made him famous, that makes a living. The weight knocks him on the forehead. Thankfully, it’s only a glancing blow. He can’t see the salmon, though I can see them plainly. I hook and land several. Justin helps Bill get his rig right. He sits down, and the two of them softly go over the basics. I was worried Justin and Bill wouldn’t jibe together, but it’s working out.

A black bear with a busted shoulder comes down the bank and dips a salmon carcass from an eddy. The bear is limping horribly. He’ll never make it through winter. No one thinks to photograph this bear. We watch him ghost back into the chest-high watermelon berry and devil’s club without ceremony. Suddenly, I feel so far from home.

A

bernathy, that lonesome poet– professor of Blacksburg, a balding hero in track shoes, used to say that the Hindus warned severely about getting what you wanted. When you fina ly manipulate your way to your goals, he said, an English muffin in his hands, an Americano going cold on a small table, you’ll be bereft. I shouldn’t have skipped so many classes. By then I was the sole student in Organizational Communications.

Abernathy was swimming so often that semester that his hair, what remained, had gone to straw, a sickish green hue.

Was it even a class anymore? His threeyear contract was about to expire, and he

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was getting the most he could out of the facilities and his gratis towel service.

And where is Abernathy now that we need him most? I heard through friends that he landed on his feet as a headmaster at a boys’ school in Kosovo.

Bill and Justin talk about exclusive lodges and fish camps in countries with no free press, no voting. There is almost always a long van ride from the airport to the lodge where you pass by squalor and sadness. The only modern buildings are prisons and detention centers. You talk about gear; you talk about the best fish you ever caught.

Bill catches several sockeyes and is going for more. I didn’t think he had the will to master the Zoby Method. I was wrong, as usual. Justin has become Bill’s mentor. Justin juices the hole while Bill catches trout at will. They are on the subject of Kamchatka as I slip upstream and away. Beneath a wreck of spruce branches, I find three bright sockeyes.

They are untouched by hooks, perfect in their insouciance. They stare upstream with a composure I rarely see in people.

They’ve dodged the masses to get here.

They’ve swerved around the acres of gill nets belonging to Old Believers, hoop nets and pencil weights of the hoi polloi. I don’t need more sockeyes. Why not just leave them alone?

The water is quick enough, there’s enough space between the quivering boughs of the drowned tree that I floss one on my first cast. The fish races downstream. I follow along, tuning my reel like a radio dial. I crawl out on a rock outcropping and try to land the fish. I know better, but I do it nonetheless. There are carcasses everywhere. The floor of the Russian is loaded with signs of ruin and triumph. Bill hoots to urge me on as I crawl out on the last of the rocks.

When my studded boots fail and I find myself going into the river, still tied to a sockeye, and the flawed philoso-

phy that has brought me to this point, I don’t fight it. In the spirit of Nabokov and Tolstoy, authors Abernathy pushed on me in 1989, I go underwater and stay there. The oily current sweeps over me. I see Bill and Justin through a pane of river water; they look like cartoons.

Justin is grinning. Bill looks mildly concerned. My waders fill. The Russian covers me like the glare of a commercial fisherman, the ones I saw all summer, weary, red-eyed, bearded men with distant things on their minds, like when to pull the nets, whether to head out in dirty weather. Will the prices be high enough to cover costs? Will the tides and wind chase me off? Should I give up this whole racket when the season finally ends? n Dave Zoby is a freelance writer who splits his time between Wyoming and Alaska. He keeps a lively fishing blog at davezoby.com, and his book Fish Like You Mean It is available in bookstores in Homer, Alaska, and Casper, Wyoming, as well as from online booksellers.

A New Book Coming This Fall

www.eldridgehardie.com or 303.756.5662 for information or ordering 90 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

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Getting There Continued from page 34 the drain before it turned and shot out to the sound. The river split in two, one branch circling through that marsh before coming out around the cape and then rejoining the main body. And there was the focal point of tide and shore, where several currents collided and dug the hole where, for about 15 minutes or 10 or perhaps less, the turbulence might draw a big fish that would take a fly.

Josh was an expert at slow jigging the fl and was immediately into school bass lined up under the tongues of current. What’s big? A 24-inch striper is about six pounds in the spring. They rotated casts through the strike zone. He was outfishing Dean three to one, as usual, and Dean had to get out of his way and let him fish th ough.

As the ebb hastened, they waded farther out into the stream and caught stacked schoolies for 20 minutes, the riffle darkening a shade or so of navy in the larger mass of warming water, which was running at optimum speed.

“This is it,” said Josh.

Dean stared into the riffle in front of him. He noted in the back of his mind the bumps of the little oyster bars downstream and farther the busy whirlpool where the tongue collided with the main current 80 feet down.

Working in close, Josh was hooking, fightin , and releasing striper after striper. They fought hard, using their broad bodies and wide tails, and bent the rod all the way, jarring his arm and shoulder.

He wasn’t letting them run.

Dean was fishing a fi e-inch Whistler, dusky cream with sparse turns of red, drifting higher and farther than Josh’s deep minnow.

“Step and swing. Take a couple of steps, and swing. You should get a hit— right here.” Josh stepped through with yet another striper on, lifting the rod to a steady 45 degrees, stripping line.

Dean moved into the prime casting position. He cast across, made a giant mend, then a lesser one to lay out a massive wet fly swing on the bumpy rapid and then began to feed line straight into the drift, automatically measuring the distance. It was a good cast and he just kept giving line, judging the movement

of the fl , all the way down to the depression, about 80 feet out.

Distance and range in this kind of fishing are a matter of timing, waiting, and remembering—you can’t see the end of the line, the leader, let alone the fl , but you know how fast it’s drifting, how deep, how much slack, from the memory of previous casts, such that, at the exact moment and position, which you cannot see because you’re 85 feet behind, not overhead looking down like a bird, a drone, or God, but at the exact moment you tighten up, the head of the line swings and the feathers of the fly flutte , taste of red on the collar with bead-chain eyes whistling against the thick salt water.

It must have turned right in front of the fis ’s face as it was going into the dangle, because the fish grabbed it and hooked itself, and the line slapped the rod so hard that his friend 20 feet away snapped his neck to look, and the cork creased and bent so deeply the reel seat shook.

“That’s a big bass!” said Josh.

The water 80 feet out heaved and churned as the striper turned against

the pressure and headed for the exit, and it was Dean’s turn to be rattled as the reel spun and the orange backing shot out.

In three seconds, the fish was about 160 feet out and going.

“I don’t know if I can turn this fish, said Dean, stupefied not in control of the fish at a l.

The rod was pointed low in the general direction of the moving fish tip twitching violently, so he lifted the butt to a slim angle—it wouldn’t go high—and tightened the drag, slowly, one notch, then another—hadn’t he lost a sudden fish in the East River in the city last year by spinning the drag knob in panic as a striper bolted?

Nothing teaches you to handle big fis except firsthand experience—you have to personally walk through a series of errors before you learn how to counter them. In this situation, a big striper running out with the full sound tide, you don’t want to let the fish just go on light drag. If you do, you might as well leave it to thin luck.

The fish stopped running, and Dean struck hard with low opposite side pressure and that turned the fis ’s head; he

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held the angle and pulled the butt against gravity and mass. But the other being straining on the far end didn’t come.

“You better move up shore,” said Josh, behind him, a few feet away.

He shadowed him over, watching quietly as Dean backed up against the current, full side pressure, reeling and gaining a little; the low rod jerked erratically as the fish turned broadside, repeatedly making the cork crack and groan, but the flex of the rod along with the stretch of the line and mono conspired with the 2/0 hook against that fish alewife-stuffed egg-laden spring cow, and it was moving with him now.

He stumbled and looked backwards anxiously but managed to reach the shore all the while holding the bass under full tension. He held it for fi e or six minutes. The bass made another run for freedom, impressive under heavy drag, then tired, and Dean turned it again, pumped and gained. He was breathing heavily as he dragged it in on the bend of the rod, almost as exhausted as the fis lying on its side in an inch of water, mo-

tionless on muddy pebbles glowing tannic on the dark sod, lavender tail, gravid belly, passive eyes dilated, subdued.

“That’s a pretty large fish, said Josh.

“I was wondering if you were going to break that rod.”

“I almost did. I had a lot of pressure on it.”

“What else could you do? Let it run around in the channel? It probably would have stopped eventually, but you’d still have to fight it. It’s not just going to swim up and throw itself at your feet.”

“I wouldn’t have gotten that fis without you,” said Dean.

“I didn’t do anything.”

“It’s a matter of timing. To be in position. Look. That junction where those two currents come together is flattene out now. It’s gone.”

“It’s a fi e-minute window,” he said.

“If that. You got the big fish of the tide.” n James Wu no longer counts the reasons for living in New York City, but for 25 years, fly fishing for stripers and albies has kept him focused on what matters.

People, Places, & Equipment Here, a Tiger’s Lair (Page 16) Several years ago, David Cannon left the staff of Gray’s Sporting Journal and has since become a globe-trotting photographer. He spent a day in the mountains of North Georgia fishing with Carter Morris (cmorrisprivate@gmail.com), a long-time Appalachian fly fishing guide. See more of David’s fine work at david cannonphotography.com.

Yard Bird (Page 36) Russell Graves opened his literal backyard near Childress, Texas, and its resident flo ks of Rio Grande wild turkeys to his friend Brandon Butler, who needed only a Rio to give him a Royal Slam (all fi e subspecies of wild turkey in North America). It took a couple days, but Brandon achieved his goal.

See more of Russell’s work at russellgraves.com.

Fly Fishing Bonanza (Page 54) Greg Vinci is a photographer and author, and social media director for Kiene’s Fly Shop in Rosemont, California. His day job gives him easy access to and great knowledge of the nearly 700 miles of trout streams in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. See more of his work at california-flyfishi .com.

”Box Seat”

Oil

20” x 24”

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

Charleston, SC

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Traditions Continued from page 64 feels fresh and inviting. The Man remains a nameless Joe without the proverbial Me. There is a boatman, but only in the sense that there is a clerk and a doorman, as well.

The Man seeks spiritual rebirth in the waters, as “the land dropped gradually below the horizon. . . .” We become him, and allow ourselves to be reborn from our time with the sea, really the main character in the piece.

The Man releases the “wolf ” of the sea in his commitment to “square accounts” and “pa[y] his debt to the water.” He fishes the right way and reaps the psychological benefits When the Man catches a record tarpon, he realizes that the fish belongs to the sea and is so grateful that he lets the fish live. In a sense, Heilner tries to do for the game fish of the sea what Grinnell and Roosevelt and others did a generation earlier for the wild game of land.

That is, celebrate the pursuit of live ones rather than the accumulation of dead ones. It is worth noting that the efforts of Heilner—and Grey as well—were both years ahead of the firs stirrings of catch-and-release on trout streams.

Heilner was not simply farsighted and talented but ambitious as well. He knew enough to write “place” in a way that made people want to go there (and advertisers want to be part of the promotion). A year after this piece appeared, Heilner wrote (with Frank Stick) The Call of the Surf (1920), the firs book ever devoted to shore fishing in salt water. He followed that with a second book, Adventures in Angling (1922). In 1920, the year after this article appeared, he reached out to other authors, as revealed by a letter to This Side of Paradise author F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Heilner began working with John Treadwell Nichols, a well-known ichthyologist, and parlayed his success and contacts into an associate editor position with Field & Stream.

Later that decade, Heilner went big-time and began writing about his exploits for a general audience. In 1927, Heilner organized an expedition to Alaska to obtain the skins and skeletons of brown bears for the American Museum of Natural History. He wrote a before and several “after” articles in the New York Times about the expedition (complete with pictures of Heilner standing next to a 1,400-pound bear he had shot and fina ly killed “at a distance of about fi teen feet.”) A few months later, in April, Heilner mounted another expedition.

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Again, the drill with the New York Times of an announcement and description of the trip, and a return feature article. This time he traveled to the Bahamas to swim with the sharks “with no more protection than a bathing suit” to show the public they were harmless (except for great whites).

And that became his outdoor life—writer, photographer, filmmake , editor, field representative for the American Museum of Natural History. He was a fishe ies and mammal explorer, going to Bimini, Peru, Alaska, and Cuba, findingnew species and confi ming the existence of others, a world traveler and angler of all the seas, from the shores off Jersey to Santa Catalina Island’s Tuna Club of Avalon. He loved to duck hunt and did so every chance he got. He made numerous films (check out “Striper Time” on YouTube) and wrote countless articles about his adventures. He owned a home in Bimini, the first American to do so. You have to believe he liked his job.

His two most important books appeared in the late 1930s—Salt Water Fishing (1937) and A Book on Duck Shooting (1939). Both were definiti e works, and unlike “The Lure of the Southern Seas,” fi led

with social experiences suggesting that Heilner was a beloved companion who made friends wherever he went. He was skilled in deep-sea fishin , at home with the most famous big game anglers in the world, and a founder of the IGFA. He also loved nothing more than to pull on his waders, grab a slicker, and go surf fishingfor channel bass or hunting for black ducks, and then giving us the importance and beauty of both. From his writings, you sense that Heilner mostly wanted to wade the same lonely shores as the rest of us.

With a craggy visage, he definite y looked the part, as though he could have been Bogie’s elder brother. He was not exactly a Marlboro man, but he did gaze out, flin y-eyed, from Camel ads, as if sizing up a storm on the horizon. In 1939 Life magazine ran a pictorial of one of his duck hunting trips and opined, “Nearly every US sportsman is familiar with the weather-beaten face of Van Campen Heilner. It beams out of the retrograveur sections where Heilner is usually standing beside a huge fish caught in Mexican, South American, or West India waters.

It can be seen in cigarette advertisements, movie shorts, on the jackets of bright, expen-

sive books. Wherever it appears, Heilner is called the world’s best authority on hunting and fishin .” One photo shows him stuffed into the blind with three young women, who “amuse him by singing limericks.” He was as “Hollywood” as outdoor writers ever get.

There were awards and honorary societies, literally around the world, but Salt Water Fishing and A Book on Duck Hunting were his final two books. A new edition of Salt Water appeared in 1953, with a foreword from Hemingway this time. (Grey died in 1939.) The world changed after World War II, and Heilner remained a part of the outdoor writing community, though the number of his contributions declined. As George Reiger observes, he continued his involvement with the natural world (he joined Yale’s Peabody Museum expedition to the Tierra del Fuego and the Strait of Magellan, for instance), but he appeared to have had less interest in angling.

Perhaps the despoiling of his old surf haunts had an effect—that is Reiger’s surmise.

He died in Madrid in 1970. His obituary in the New York Times called him “Zane Grey Protégé.” But Heilner was much more than that. If anything, he wanted others to feel what he felt from the surf, to recognize that it represented the ultimate sporting challenge and immersive experience. As he wrote, “surf fishing . . . is a one-man game from start to finish You are the one and only factor. Here you are and there he is. If he runs out all the line, you can’t pick up the oars or start the engine and follow him. . . .You must find your quarry yourself . . . you must become proficien in the art of casting so you may reach him; and you must bring him through a line of foaming breakers and singing tides until at last, whipped to a standstill, he lies gasping on the wet sands at your very feet. Then you must let him go because he deserves it.”

In the end, he was a philosopher, really— an early, persuasive advocate of the wildest waters. He could travel the world, catch the largest fish in the ocean, and not make his writing about himself but about the power of the sea. Like the Man in “The Lure of the Southern Seas,” if you let that power come to you and treat it with respect, it might just show you how to live your life.

Will Ryan teaches expository writing at Hampshire College—and heads straight to Chappaquiddick Island for a week of striped bass fishing as so n as school lets out.

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The Gray’s Guide to Sporting Travel EXPEDITIONS ////

The Golden Kings of

Bolivia

A journey to a simpler past for golden dorado.

by Sekhar Bahadur

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SEKHAR BAHADUR

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T

he V-shaped bow wave from a pack of marauding golden dorado was 50 feet in front of me and coming on fast. I could just about make out the fish themselves. After a couple of heart-pounding false casts, I managed to drop my red and black Andino Deceiver in front of the nose of the lead fish, and all hell broke loose. The dorado attacked my fly with a mighty splash, and I remembered to strip-set hard, twice. The 20-pound fish went airborne, its black-speckled golden sides and shiny gill plates sparkling in the sun, propelled aloft by a powerful orange tail with a dark stripe down the middle.

After a spirited tussle involving more head-shaking leaps and a few powerful runs toward cover, I brought the fish to hand, and after extracting my mangled fly from its powerful jaws and razor-sharp teeth, I released my first dorado.

The dorado of Bolivia travel up the Mamoré River in the Amazon basin to the tributaries near Tsimane’s Pluma Lodge. We fished freestone rivers where the Amazon rain forest meets the foothills of the Andes. The Itirizama is a small, rocky, fast-flowing, and usually clear stream emerging from just visible hills, which slows and widens after it meets the Pluma just upstream from

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The author says he’s seen hundreds of photos of DJ (pictured here) with fish and smiling, but this smile is a first. Previous page: Hardy with a stunning dorado.

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the lodge. Downstream from the lodge, the Pluma joins the Sécure, a slower river with lots of sunken tree cover, and then becomes a wider, gently flowing river with islands and flats. All these waters are bordered by dense vegetation, with almost no sign of human presence except for the lodge.

The golden predators are usually in hot pursuit of sábalo, shadlike baitfish that migrate upstream to spawn in huge numbers. Sábalo somewhat confusingly share the name given to tarpon in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and we saw many of them that must have weighed a couple of pounds or more.

Massive schools of sábalo with their distinctive black tails congregate in the river, and when the dorado attack, the baitfish flee in splashy terror and create what looks like a saltwater blitz.

In addition to their brute strength and aerobatic leaps, dorado have the attitude of pit bulls, and catching and landing these fabled fish on the fly is among the most demanding freshwater-angling experiences around. One reason is that there are challenges other than a formidable fish. The weather is hot and humid, and long hikes over sunbaked, beach ball–shaped rocks and through tough, slippery, uneven and obstacle-strewn jungle paths are commonplace. The wading gives no respite, as the smooth rocks are greased with slimy algae, requiring studded-felt boots, wading sticks, and great

care. Wading quite a few times turned into swimming, sometimes to retrieve flies stuck on cover. We used 40-pound or heavier straight fluorocarbon leaders with wire bite tippets, so a quick tug to snap off a hopelessly marooned fly was not always a practical option. As in some saltwater fishing, long accurate deliveries of very large flies to moving fish were often required.

At other times, when rains in the mountains upstream discolored the rivers, we had to blind-cast into murky water—the marketing phrase “gin-clear freestone waters” contains some hype.

When we couldn’t see the fish, we cast

Sekhar enjoyed the dorado and all the other species of fish that took the fly—among them this yatorana he caught in the Itirizama River. Above: DJ with a pacu he pulled from the Lower Sécure River.

to cover, seams, and confluences while managing line—all that plus wading in deep and fast currents proved a handful for even the most experienced anglers.

Outwitting spooky trout in crystal clear spring creeks on sunny days may arguably require more finesse, but rarely does one need to cast 70 feet just to be in the game. Specialized overweight jungle fly lines with heavy front tapers to turn over big flies are helpful. And next time I’ll also take a stripping basket and not attempt to tame dorado with any outfit lighter than a 9-weight. Penetrating the hard bony mouths of the fish requires a timely, powerful, and low tarponlike strip strike, often more than one, and they then need to be vigorously prevented from heading for tangly cover with a good rod and reel with drag locked down tight. A golden dorado is a worthy adversary and a hard-earned prize indeed.

W

hile somewhat overshadowed by their glamorous golden brethren, other species of hard-fighting game fish filled the rivers. They include the omnivorous fruit-eating pacu, dubbed the freshwater permit for its finickiness and shape, which it uses to great effect in the current when hooked; the yatorana, an aggressive smaller, sharp-toothed relative of the golden dorado; and the spectacular surubí or striped catfish. Pacu are often targeted with flies that resemble the small

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

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

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

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

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

‘Life is worth enjoying; come visit us.’

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

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

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

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

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

P O B OX 17 ISA BE L , S OU T H DA KO TA 576 33 L OD G E 6 0 5 -4 6 6 -2 4 52 / M A R K 6 0 5 -8 5 0 -3 8 9 9 F I R E S T E E L C R E E K L OD G E .C OM T I M BE R L A K E L OD G E .C OM

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round fruits they eat, but they will sometimes take streamers left to drift.

But the fish are just icing on the cake.

The rivers we fished are in the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory that is home to the Tsimané, Yuracaré, and Moxeño–Trinitario ethnic groups. It is beautiful, very sparsely populated, untouched, and well protected.

The local people watch over their lands and waters vigilantly, and the Bolivian authorities have little patience with trespassers, poachers, and the like, sometimes rooting them out with tough, anti-narcotics troops accustomed to locating jungle drug labs and dealing with whomever they find there. Our guides shared a cautionary tale about would-be fishermen from abroad who bribed a local guide to take them on an illegal expedition—ending in arrests and imprisonments.

The first slice of the cake is the journey into a simpler past. Anglers fly on small single-engine planes into a tightly situated jungle airstrip in a 90-minute journey from Santa Cruz, a fast-growing and prosperous city with several restaurants that would hold their own against those of any of the world’s capitals. The Saturday arrivals and departures at the Oromomo village airstrip on the lower Sécure River are major events for the villagers, who turned up in force. Bread is not available in the village, so the planes bring large plastic bags of rolls for the

village children. The children scarf them down and when the planes start up and begin to taxi, the children stand behind them in order to enjoy the cooling breeze of the prop wash.

T

he village has received considerable funds through its partnership in the fly fishing operations, and while it remains basic, we did see quite a bit of new infrastructure investment, which we understand includes a small airplane for medical emergencies. Smiles and seemingly good health were in good supply.

After landing and gathering our gear, we then traveled for nearly an hour upstream from the village to the Pluma Lodge in wooden dugout canoes.

The second added benefit was the spectacular scenery and abundant wildlife. We saw several jaguar prints and a tapir. Beautiful butterflies and birds were all around us, including the blackand-yellow crested oropendola with its distinctive xylophone-like pinging call.

We sent birdsong recordings with deciphering requests to our mad-keen birder friend and fishing buddy Michael, who after hearing them while walking down London’s Oxford Street, was even more disappointed he couldn’t make this trip.

A birdsong version of the Shazam app that can identify the feathered creatures that make beautiful sounds may

or may not be commercially feasible, but it would definitely have come in handy.

A

s I think back on our trip, however, the local people themselves are easily the most memorable aspect. Each group of two anglers fished with an Argentinian professional guide and two indigenous boatmen. The boatmen are assigned to the lodge’s fishing program on a two-week rotating basis by the village’s reputedly formidable elected mayoress (whom we saw running a no-nonsense village meeting). The boatmen grew up on the rivers and know every inch of them and the surrounding forests. The professional guides wisely listened very closely to them. Their skill and strength in navigating rapids in our low-sided vessels were nothing short of miraculous. The boatmen knew the names of every plant and animal we came across, and while caiman evoked no particular reaction from them, a particularly dangerous poisonous caterpillar above a jungle path most certainly did.

The boatmen enjoy eating sábalo and would hunt the baitfish with simple handmade bows and arrows. Not only did we never see them miss a shot, but they also hit just above the midline of the sábalo, a few inches behind the gill plate—every time. We also were told they have deep respect for dorado, historically for driving

A flotilla of dugouts navigated by master boatmen ferried the author and his angling partners between the village of Oromomo and Tsimane Lodge.

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After 33 years as a premier shooting preserve,

RIVER BEND could now be yours.

In the 1980s, Ralph Brendle set out to create a sportsman’s lodge for upland bird hunters and sporting clays shooters in the beautiful foothills of South Carolina. Today, it’s still going full-blast! Just minutes from I-85 and I-26, and equidistant between Charlotte, Greenville and Asheville, River Bend is only 15 minutes from the new Tryon International Equestrian Center.

The 524-acre sportsman’s resort features duck, quail, pheasant and chukar hunting. Deer and turkey are plentiful as well. The lodge itself is one of the finest examples of classic rustic luxury in the Carolinas. The 6,000 square-foot building has a gorgeous stone fireplace along with two dining rooms, a commercial-sized kitchen, locker rooms and a steam room.

A pro shop, pool room and bar provide relaxing space for after dark entertainment, and comfortable cottages are just walking distance from the lodge.

There’s much more - you’ve got to see it for yourself!

THIS SITE HAS GREAT POTENTIAL FOR MULTIPLE USES.

To learn more or to plan a visit, contact: JEREMY WOOD, SC NC Realty, LLC • 864-436-1768 • jeremywoodrealtor@gmail.com ALICE COX, Keller Williams Realty • 864-266-2816 • alicecox@kw.com

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sĂĄbalo into the shallows within range of their arrows, and now their appreciation of dorado is augmented by the tourism revenue the game fish gene ates.

These small, fit men—coca leaves frequently in cheek, carrying their few belongings in small simple woven satchels slung over their shoulders—had a quiet stoic dignity that left a lasting impression. I noticed one of our boatmen had a deep open gash on his toe. Fortunately, our surgeon friend Dr. Joe was on hand to take care of him, but I am sure if I had not said anything he would have carried on without a murmur of protest. We brought waterproof watches as gifts for the boatmen and lodge staff, and they were a big hit. On our last day I was heartbroken to see our wounded but recovering friend, who had worked so hard for us all week, sadly tapping his bare wrist as we were pushing off—we thought we had taken care of everyone but had inadvertently not done so. Fortunately, an impromptu one-off payment in lieu of merchandise seemed to do the trick, but it just underscored how

much we take for granted.

Meeting these incredibly humble, hardworking, and accomplished persons made us all a bit ashamed of many of our first-wo ld worries and concerns and being able to tame a few beautiful golden dorado in such special surroundings made us feel even more fortunate.

We hope this special sanctuary and its people remain undisturbed. n Sekhar Bahadur lives in London and Greenwich, Connecticut. He holds advanced fly casting–instructor qualifi ations from Fly Fishers International and the Game Angling Instructors’ Association.

If You Go

Sekhar and his friends traveled with Untamed Angling (untamedangling. com), which operates the Tsimane Lodge and arranges round-trip transportation to and from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, which is fairly well served by direct international flights

Before you go, make sure your inoculations are up to date, and consider antimalarial precautions. You might also want to hit the gym before you go or otherwise work on your stamina for hiking long distances, wading strong currents, and fighting big fish Further, you will need to pack the following: s tropical saltwater fishing lothing; s sun and insect protection; s full wading boots with felt soles and metal studs; s wading stick and stripping basket; s 9- or 10-weight rods with specialized floating and intermediate sinking jungle fly lines s solid, saltwater reels with good drag systems; and s decent gratuities for your guides.

"MBTLB T 'JOFTU 'JTIJOH -PEHF #SJTUPM #BZ "MBTLB JOGP!UJLDIJL DPN XXX UJLDIJLMPEHF DPN

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When ights leave the village airstrip, local children gather behind the plane to experience the breeze created by the prop.

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Alaska Alaska Sportsman’s Lodge PO Box 231985, Anchorage, AK 99523 (888)826-7376 E-Mail: bkraft@alaskasportsmanslodge.com Strategically located on the Kvichak River in the heart of the Bristol Bay fishing paradise.

This river is the only connection between Lake Iliamna and the ocean. Each year, millions of salmon use the Kvichak to travel to their spawning grounds. This provides an enormous food source for the native rainbow trout, which grow in excess of 20 lbs. Because of our location, we don’t need to spend countless hours flying to the fishing spots. www.fishasl.com Alaska Wilderness Outfitting Company PO Box 1516, Soldotna, AK 99574 (907)424-5552 Experience incredible fishing, remote wilderness, and some of Alaska’s most spectacular beauty. Guided and self-guided trips to the pristine waters of Prince William Sound,

the wild lakes and rivers of the Wrangell Mountains and the untamed wilderness of the North Gulf Coast. All trips are remote fly-in destinations that include fully outfitted self-guided trips in our one-of-akind outpost cabins and floating cabins as well as a full-service lodge on the Tsiu River. We accommodate groups of any size and offer discounts for large groups. www.alaskawilderness.com

We offer two different fly fishing adventure trips located in remote areas of the Alaska Peninsula. On the Pacific side is a sophisticated camp that offers extreme isolation, a unique coastal fishery, breathtaking scenery, day hike options, and helicopter fly-outs.

On the Bristol Bay side is a no-frills camp offering an affordable option for die-hard fishermen after BIG fish in a small stream. www.epicaaa.com

Angler’s Paradise Lodge 4125 Aircraft Drive, Anchorage, AK 99502 (907)243-5448 E-mail: pete@katmailand.com Since 1950, we have offered the world’s finest freshwater sport fishing. All lodges have superb fishing within walking distance and are in close proximity to the finest salmon, rainbow, char, and grayling rivers in Alaska. www.katmailand.com

Great Alaska Adventure Lodge Kenai Peninsula, HC01 Box 218 Sterling, AK 99672 (800)544-2261 E-mail: greatalaska@greatalaska.com Visit our world-class resort, featuring record-size Chinook, halibut, and rainbow trout. Deluxe lodge, fly outs, wilderness bear viewing, and fly fishing camps. We also offer fly fishing for IGFA record salmon (specifications upon request). Contact Laurence or Kent John. www.greatalaska.com

EPIC Angling & Adventure (512)656-2736

A and inspiring adventure awaits youyou A luxurious and inspiring adventure awaits you A luxurious luxurious and inspiring adventure awaits Discover the pinnacle of sport

• Largest salmon run in the world

salmon run inrun theinworld • Largest salmon the world Discover the pinnacle of sport Discover the pinnacle of sport • Largest • Alaska’s designated trophy fishing in the heart of Alaska’s • Alaska’s designated trophy • Alaska’s designated trophy fishing in theinheart of Alaska’s fishing the heart of Alaska’s Rainbow Trout area world-renowned Bristol Bay area, Trout Trout area area Rainbow world-renowned Bristol Bay area, world-renowned Bristol Bay area, Rainbow • Fly outs throughout the pristine with unparalleled remote lodge • Fly outs throughout the pristine • Fly outs throughout the pristine wilderness withcomfort, unparalleled remote lodgelodge with unparalleled remote a dedicated wilderness wilderness • Katmai National Park comfort, a dedicated comfort, a dedicated professional staff, and a • Katmai National Parkbath • Katmai Park • Cabins withNational private professional staff,to and aand a professional staff, commitment providing • Cabins with private bath • Cabins with private • A staff dedicated towardsbath commitment toAlaska providing commitment to providing spectacular experiences perfection • A staff towards • Adedicated staff dedicated towards spectacular experiences spectacular experiences each day.Alaska YouAlaska will fish clear perfection perfection eachstreams day. day.

You will clear each Youfish will fish clear teeming with large rainbow Trout and massive streams teeming with largelarge streams teeming with salmon runs measured in rainbow Trout and massive rainbow Trout and massive visit www.fishasl.com the millions. salmon runs measured in in salmon runs measured or call us toll free at 888.826.7376 visit www.fishasl.com visit www.fishasl.com the millions. the millions. or callorus tollusfree 888.826.7376 call tollat free at 888.826.7376 104 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

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Stoney River Lodge PO Box 62, Sleetmute, AK 99668 (907)526-5211 E-mail: Stoneyriverlodge22@gmail.com Owned and operated by Curly and Betty Warren, Alaska Master Guide License #111. Built in 1984 as a prime base of operation for guided top quality hunting adventures. Grizzly, moose, sheep, caribou and black bear, as well as daily fly-out sport fishing adventures. Lodge offers custom designed trips. We cater to people that wish to enjoy rugged Alaska outdoor activities incorporated with a well-appointed full service lodge operated by 30 year plus Master Guide and experienced staff. www.stoneyriverlodge.com Tikchik Narrows Lodge (907)243-8450 E-mail: info@tikchik.com World-class fly-in/fly-out sport fishing lodge hidden amid spectacular 1.5 millionacre wilderness park in pristine western Bristol Bay. Daily fly-out fishing for salmon, trout, char, grayling, and pike. Extraordinary service, accommodations, gourmet meals, and experienced guides. Owned and operated for nearly 30 years by Bud Hodson. www.tikchiklodge.com

Unalakleet River Lodge (800)995-1978 E-mail: appel@unalakleet.com Unalakleet River Lodge is a remote luxury fishing destination in the northwestern bush of Alaska. We have been sharing the natural beauty of the Unalakleet River and the surrounding Nulato Hills with our guests since 1998. We offer our clients Salmon fishing in the wilderness of Alaska with all the amenities and comforts of a full resort.The Unalakleet is recognized as a National Wild and Scenic River and is home to large runs of King Salmon, Chum Salmon, Pink Salmon, Silver or Coho Salmon, Dolly Varden, Arctic Char, and a native population of Arctic Grayling. The Unalakleet River offers 140 miles of prime Salmon fishing isolated from the pressures of road systems and fly out operations. www.unalakleet.com

A rge ntina Argentina’s Best Hunting (225)754-4368 E-mail: contact@argentinasbesthunting.com The perfect blend between hunting, fishing, gourmet dining, and luxury accommodations. Look no further if your goal is to experience the best that Argentina has to offer, as we have a wide variety of species, lodges, and

regions at our fingertips. To learn more, visit www.argentinasbesthunting.com South Parana Outfitters (804)693-3774 E-mail: wingsargentina@gmail.com World class wingshooting in a classic Argentine setting! Argentina, in comparison to other countries, has the advantage of having no restrictions when it comes to the hunting of doves, due to the threat that they represent to agriculture. However, Entre Rios is known for its prolific fauna, its great care for the environment, and its deep respect for the law.

We can proudly say that conservation is at the foundation of our company. All of our guides are bilingual and it is their job to accompany you during the hunt and they will take into account your personalized tastes and interests.

Duck hunting season goes from May through August. Dove is available for hunting all year long. Combination shoots and customized package shoots are available. www.southparanaoutfitters.com

Be lize Belize River Lodge (888)275-4843 E-mail: info@belizeriverlodge.com Belize River Lodge rests quietly on the lush,

ARGENTINA GRAND SLAM WINGSHOOTING

WWW.SOUTHPARANAOUTFITTERS.COM

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

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

British Columbia Legacy Lodge (877)347-4534 E-mail: info@legacylodge.com Wonderfully remote yet easily accessible, Legacy Lodge offers a premier sport fishing experience found nowhere else in the world.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your Gateway to the North Maine Woods”

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

COLORADO ROCKIES

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

GR BAR RANCH, Paonia, CO www.grbarranch.com 800-523-6832 106 · Gray’s Sporting Journal · www.grayssportingjournal.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kans as Ravenwood Lodge (800)656-2454

E-mail: ravenhpsc@aol.com Contact Kenneth Corbet for reservations.

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

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

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

MONTANA

Wilderness Fishing Adventures Experience the best kept fly fishing secret in the lower 48 states – the wild & scenic rivers in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. Remarkable dry fly fishing on remote rivers with wild native trout populations.

Join us this summer for a unique and extraordinary fishing adventure!

406-946-4167 www.alazyh.com

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

Ne w M e x i c o Land of Enchantment Guides (505)629-5688 or (505)927-5356 E-mail: trout@loeflyfishing.com Offering single-day guided fly fishing trips and all inclusive, multi-day packages on

the best rivers, streams, lakes, and private ranches in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Excellent year-round fishing.

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

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

North Dakota Dakota Hills Hunting Lodge HC56, Box 90, Oral, SD 57766 (605)424-2500 or (800)622-3603 E-mail: dakhills@gwtc.net Contact Tom Lauing. We offer some of the finest world-class wingshooting available, with an abundance of pheasant, Hungar-

Gray’s Sporting Journal

ian partridge, chukar partridge, sharptail grouse, snipe, dove, and bobwhite quail. Allinclusive package includes first- lass lodging along the Cheyenne River, all beverages, three Western-cuisine meals per day, open bar, ammunition, clays, license, 21-bird limit, processing, and airport pickup. www.dakhills.gwtc.net

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

by Francisco Rosich in 1986. Its exclusive purpose is hunting game trophies throughout Spain. Hunt Trip Spain has hunting concessions all over the country for the broad range of magnificent game animals available in Spain: 4 subspecies of Spanish Ibex (Beceite, Gredos, Southeastern & Ronda), Spanish Red Stag, Moufl n Sheep, Fallow Deer, Pyrenean and Cantabrian Chamois, Feral Goat, Wild Boar, Roe Deer and Barbary Sheep. Outstanding hunts for Red-Legged Partridges, driven or upland hunts are also available. HUNT TRIP SPAIN has served International hunters for more than 20 years.

Come, let us transform your visit to Spain into an unforgettable adventure. www.hunttripspain.com

Harry Murray’s Fly Fishing Schools

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

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

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

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

Free catalog for schools and fly shop

More information at www.murraysflyshop.com.

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

PRINT SUBSCRIBERS Add Digital for Only $1!

See “subscriber services” at www.grayssportingjournal.com for additional details.

Gray’s Sporting Properties

Advertise your sporting property, ranch or farm in Gray’s Sporting Journal Please contact Mike Floyd mike.floyd@morris.com

The finest in sporting fare, from field to tablet.

Visit www.grayssportingjournal.com for details.

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Utah Falcon’s Ledge (435)454-3737 E-mail: info@falconsledge.com One of the great western fly-fishin and wingshooting lodges. Cast to trophy trout on clear tail-waters, mountain freestone streams, private stillwaters, and enjoy a day floating the famous Green or Provo Rivers.

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

Virginia Chincoteague Hunting & Fishing Center (888)231-4868 Virginia’s Eastern Shore has one of the largest, most diverse populations of waterfowl in North America. Hunt puddlers, divers, sea ducks, mergansers, Atlantic brant, Canada, and snow geese all in the same day with over a 30-bird limit. We also offer rail hunting in September and October. www.duckguide.com

(540)984-4212 E-mail: info@murrayflyship.com Located in the Shenandoah Valley, 90 miles west of Washington, DC. Over 300 rods by Scott, Winston, Orvis, and St. Croix. More than 50,000 flies in stock. Harry Murray conducts 20 fly fishing schools for trout and bass. Complete guide services. Free mailorder catalog. www.murraysflyshop.com Primland 2000 Busted Rock Road Meadows of Dan, VA 24120 (866)960-7746 Join us for a rare opportunity to visit Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains and experience driven pheasant shoots comparable to the best in the U.K. From pegs in a deep valley you’ll aim your double gun at the wild flur y of game birds as they appear from the towering ridges above. Upland birds is also a signature activity with spacious grounds and hard-flushing birds. Primland is the ultimate retreat for world-class golf, refined dining and outdoor activities in an environment of rare natural beauty. www.primland.com

Y ukon T e rritory Tincup Wilderness Lodge (604)484- 4418 or +41 43 455 0101 E-Mail: info@tincup-lodge.com

Murray’s Fly Shop PO Box 156, 121 Main Streeet Edinburg, VA 22824

Situated on the shores of Tincup Lake close to the Kluane National Park in Canada’s Yukon Territory, surrounded by mile up upon mile of unspoiled natural landscape, Tincup Wilderness Lodge enjoys a truly unique location. The surrounding Ruby Range provides views of breathtaking beauty from dawn to dusk. The Lodge can be reached only by floatplane. In order to ensure our undisturbed privacy in a family environment, we limit bookings to a maximum of 8-10 guests per week. This level of occupancy also enables us to welcome groups, giving all members plenty of scope to pursue their various interests and activities. www.tincup-lodge.com

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

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GSJ

BOOKS

Higher Ed

by Christopher Camuto

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lthough you won’t find faculty parking lots packed with pickup trucks bristling with gun racks or encounter glassy-eyed whitetails staring from the walls of professors’ offices, you can always find a few hunters tucked away in academia. A commitment to blood sport and an appreciation of firearms don’t blend easily with academic life in our times, but the life of the mind and a hunting life are not mutually exclusive. Douglas Higbee and David Bruzina give this subculture a voice in Hunting and the Ivory Tower: Essays by Scholars Who Hunt (University of South Carolina Press, hardbound, 216 pages, $34.99).

Some selections are narratives in a familiar vein.

Jeremy Lloyd recounts taking up hunting in adulthood to reconnect himself with his roots in western Pennsylvania, “becoming a conscious predatory member of the eastern deciduous forest once or twice a year.” J. B Weir also traces the self-conscious process of becoming a hunter in middle age. Although hunting the family farm in Massachusetts seems like “fumbling” and “tinkering,” he is not satisfied with “solely living in a world of ideas” and finds hunting “nourishing in a way that academia is not.” David Bruzina takes his ideas into the woods along with his .22, managing to relate, without a whiff of pretension, his unabashed obsession with squirrel hunting to Davis Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Petrarchan sonnet, “Whoso list to hunt” along with other, less surprising points of reference.

Some of the contributors bring hunting vividly into the curriculum. At the University of Alberta, Lee Foote’s students butcher deer, spend a day on a trap line skinning the day’s take in beaver, mink, and muskrat. They study prehistoric hunting practices and Native American hunting traditions

and work a deer check station at a military base, giving them a chance to rub shoulders with men and women who hunt as a matter of course. They work their way toward ethical, psychological, and philosophical issues that cross all sorts of wires in the circuitry of how the past is related to the pres-

Hunting is not for everyone, and that’s a big reason why I do it.

Douglas Higbee, “Hunting and the Ivory Tower” ent, culture to nature, life to death. The mere title of Foote’s essay, “The Knife, the Deer, and the Student: Academic Transformations,” should be inspiring to any teacher who knows how important direct contact with nature is to the deep ecology of our self-understanding.

Some of these profs keep themselves connected to nature with the field work that underwrites their scholarship. When not in the classroom at the College of Charleston, Jersey-girl Annette Watson earns her bones studying ethnography in Athabaskan hunting camps on the Koyukuk River. As a geographer she knows that every culture grows in place amid food resources that must be hunted to have a culture at all. Her work reminds her that hunting is not atavistic but foundational and an ongoing part of true sustainability. Contributors range around both high-culture and pop-culture enclaves of hunting in our times: Alison Acton gives fox hunting a try while Philip Mason assesses Duck Dynasty. Richard Swinney participates in a vigorous recreation of medieval boar hunting which

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sheds light both on medieval culture and his own deep-seated attachment to blood sport up close and personal. He finds fun and enlightenment in “medieval par force hunting: the pursuit of game with horses, dogs, and primitive weapons quite literally known as ‘The Chase.’” Gerald Thurmond explores his deep reverence for snakes, those other-worldly predators which, like wolves, have taught us much about the stealth of predation and the suddenness of the strike.

Throughout this volume, you’ll find references to familiar landmarks in the literature of hunting—Ortega y Gasset, Teddy Roosevelt, Ernest Hemingway, Aldo Leopold—but this collection is most valuable when it veers in unexpected directions—from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful to Ted Nugent and PETA. If you think of college professors and their work through some dismissive, stereotypical lens, your perspective would be enlarged by rubbing elbows with these writers who are intellectual in the interest of becoming more closely related to nature and whose admirable scholarship leads them back to their own roots and to the roots of culture itself.

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lthough I don’t think he has a Ph.D., writer, editor and publisher Tom Pero has been burrowing like an anthropologist deep into the quirky subculture of turkey hunting. In 2017, he gave us Turkey Men (reviewed in August 2017).

Since then he has found six more diehard turkey hunters who have tagged wild birds in 49 states and gives us their unvarnished accounts of those quests in Turkey Men: Volume 2 (Wild River Press, hardbound, 198 pages, $49.95). This group is a varied lot of hunters based in the east, men whose names and home towns have the mellow tones of rural American life—Dave Owens from Acworth, Georgia; Tom “Doc” Weddle of Bloomington, Indiana; James Hascup Jr. of Ringwood, New Jersey; John Pries of Trout Run, Pennsylvania; and from Virginia, James Wilhelm from Eagle Rock and Daniel Rorrer of Pulaski. Motivated, as diehard hunters are, by a gumbo of casual and serious motives, these gents took their interest in bagging turkeys, notoriously difficult game in any woods on any spring morning, across the varied geography of

North America. Like the first volume, this richly illustrated book offers lively conversation, including a good deal of deep insider talk on calls and calling, hunting practices, triumphs and failures. This volume includes a professionally recorded CD of his interview with Weddle and Owens, the latter of whom went on to win the 2018 Senior Division Grand National Calling Championship.

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ome anglers and hunters have something beyond fishing and hunting that centers their outdoor lives—a love of wooden canoes, an attachment to a grandfather’s Parker, a lifetime relationship with a bird dog. For Colorado native Tom Reed, it’s horses. Skyhorse Press has published a paperback edition of Give Me Mountains for My Horses: Journeys of a Backcountry Horseman in paperback (197 pages, $16.99), a book I missed the first time around. Reed writes vivid and powerful prose, as if the placid strength of horses and the clarity of their temperaments has schooled his own sensibility over the years. For most of his adult life, horses have taken him into the backcountry he loves and observes with attentive affection—the high country of Colorado and Wyoming mostly where he pursues elk and casts for cutthroats. In gem-like essays, he accounts for himself and the ups and downs of life as he seeks what’s left of the Old West in wild places. Horses are not merely his means of transportation into the wild, but his guides to what he needs: “It’s a wonderful life, this life spent outside. When life is troubling you, go there. Learn the wildfl wers, know the birds, the insects. Listen. Grow a garden. Eat farm eggs and elk steak. We live life in a world of machines, but our true nature is nature.” An homage to horses, horsemen, and good country, Tom Reed’s prose is the kind of spare writing you show to students so they know how unassuming and powerful good prose is. When you read it, you’ll hear the creak of saddle leather and smell the rich, musty odor of a good trail horse. n Chris explored his need to hunt in his third book, Hunting from Home. Professing English at Bucknell University, he tries to keep his syllabi, like his life, as earthy as he can.

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GSJ

POEM

keys, strings, and solos

by Matt Smythe two hundred tarpon immense shadow on white sand choose one, choose wisely strip strip bumpbumpbump morse code on the line, sadly lost in translation static torpedo slack high laid-up and waiting uninterested upper harbor key rookery in full riot blank horizon west from this light’s angle silver from silver to sky close to alchemy

Matt Smythe enlisted in the army as a senior in high school at the medium-rare age of 17, serving for eight years before heading home and changing majors seven times. After earning a master’s in poetry, having three kids, and learning to cast a fly od, he is communications director for the American Fly Fishing Trade Association.

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