Pursuit, Author at Pursuit

Whispers In The Wind: Chasing Gobblers & Finding Ghosts

by Pursuit | May 1, 2025 | Hunting

We set out that morning with turkey calls in our pockets and high hopes in our hearts. Spring was just starting to hit full bloom, and the gobblers were supposed to be plentiful. The sun had just begun to spill gold over the rolling hills when we crested a rise and stopped short.

There, draped across a boulder like a relic from another age, lay the remains of a longhorn, its massive horns curling skyward like frozen smoke. The carcass, half-consumed by time and weather, seemed to hum with a strange energy — as if it wasn’t just bones and hide we were looking at, but a story the land itself was trying to tell.

We forgot about the turkeys.

In the quiet of the morning, we could almost hear the echoes: hooves pounding the earth, cowhands shouting across the plains, campfires crackling under the stars. This place had been alive with movement and purpose once, long before it became a backdrop for our hunt. Now, if you slowed down enough — if you listened — you could catch glimpses of that life, still drifting on the breeze.

We never did find any turkeys that day. But we found something else: a reminder that the land holds more than just game. It holds memory, mystery, and a kind of quiet reverence for those who take the time to notice.

Sometimes, you go looking for one thing and find another. And sometimes, that’s exactly what you need.

How to Take Your Father Turkey Hunting

by Pursuit | Apr 18, 2025 | Hunting

There’s an old split-rail fence at Mom and Dad’s place that separates the lawn from the horse pasture. I like to lean against it just before dark and owl hoot. Across the pasture, and beyond the creek, is an oak hillside, and in the spring a gobbler roosts there as many nights as not. The acoustics must be perfect because if I hoot from that fence and he’s there, he’ll answer. Tonight, he’s there.

I expected as much because Dad had seen him strutting in the pasture just the day before. He’d even set up on him, but although the bird gobbled, he never did come in. I was glad to hear that Dad had given it a try, though, because the fire he once had for turkey hunting has faded. There’s nothing I’d like more than to help Dad shoot this bird in the morning.

When I walk back into the cabin with the good news, Dad is watching CNN at two clicks shy of full volume, the television set buzzing like a cheap sound system. He turns it down and asks, “Hear him?”

“Yep,” I say. “He’s roosted right over the creek. But we’re going to have to set up early.” As I emphasize that last word, Dad’s eyes narrow the way they always do when I hint at taking the lead on, well, anything.

“How early?”

Getting a Start

Twenty-four years ago, I watched my first gobbler walk into gun range. I was sitting between Dad’s knees, cradling a 20-gauge as the turkey gobbled over and again, first on the limb, then on the ground. Dad whispered to me, “I’ll tap your neck when he’s close enough.”

He often used friction calls, but Dad was talented enough with his natural voice to win a few local calling contests. He yelped softly, and the longbeard popped into view 30 yards away. The tap on my neck, and the roar of the shotgun, and the gobbler winging out of sight seemed to happen all in same moment. I fought back tears but couldn’t hold them all. Dad just smiled and said, “Do you want to quit?”

“No,” I said.

“Good.”

That one morning shaped my whole life, to this very moment. How do you repay something like that?

Too Late

I know we need to get up at 3:45, but I also know that if I suggest that, I’ll have to argue with Dad, and I’m not up for it. As he’s gotten older, he likes to sleep in. “Four-thirty,” I tell him. “But we’ve got to go as soon as we get up.”

At 4:50, I’m pacing the cabin while Dad fusses with contact lenses and nurses a cup of black coffee. I step onto the porch and strain my eyes at the sky, as if staring at the stars will keep them out a little longer. When I go back in, Dad’s wearing camo pants but fishing around in the hunting closet. “Have you got some extra shells?” he asks.

“I’ve got you covered there,” I say. “TSS No. 9s.”

“Nines?” he says. “I like 4s.”

“Dad, these are…” I stop myself. “I have some lead 4s too.”

He walks back over to his coffee, and I step back out onto the porch, where I hear the first notes of the dawn chorus. “Dad, we need to get going!” I say, slinging a bag of decoys over my shoulder.

“OK!” he says, and splashes his coffee into the sink.

We cross the fence, and I can already see the maples on the edge of the creek, where we’d talked about setting up. It’s shooting light by the time we sit down. Two distant birds sound off, but all around us, it’s silence.

“Think we scared him?” Dad whispers.

“Yes,” I answer. “He watched us walk across that pasture and set those decoys, plain as day.”

“I don’t think so,” he says.

I shrug. The gobbles from the distant birds are faint but steady. Suddenly I see Dad twist to his right and shoulder his 870. My heart jumps. I’m thinking that the roosted tom has walked in silently. Instead, I see the wake of a beaver swimming down the creek. We’ve lost a few acres of timber due to flooding out here, and I know what’s coming. Dad hits the beaver in the head with the entire payload of a $10 TSS shell, which I’d handed to him in the dark. Geese flush off the creek, and the horses stampede from the pasture as the blast reverberates through the timber. Dad racks the slide, and regards the smoking hull with a smile.

“Killed that son of a bitch dead,” he says. “You think we ought to move?”

New Spot

We sneak to the other end of the farm, where the distant birds have since gone silent. Setting up on the side of a ridge, with our backs to a copse of hickory saplings, I stake the decoys 20 yards ahead on the right, to Dad’s side. I sit on his left and cutt hard on a mouth call, and any expectations of relaxing in the sun vanish when a gobbler with marbles in his throat fires off 100 yards away. Dad yanks his shotgun to his knee.

I call again, and the bird cuts me off with another deep gobble. He’s coming fast. For five minutes, it’s back and forth—call and gobble—and I know we’re about to see him. I’m watching the rise just beyond the decoys, expecting the tom to materialize at any second. But then, nothing. I yelp, but there’s no response. No drumming, no walking in the leaves. Fifteen minutes pass, and I think this turkey too has busted us.

Then Dad yelps with his voice. Damn, we sound desperate, I think to myself—but the turkey roars back, right on top of us, and I hear drumming. I look all around the decoys, but he’s not there. Cocking my eyes to the left—on my side—I can see the gobbler standing in full strut and plain view, about 30 yards away. Dad has no shot with me between him and the bird.

“Kill him,” he says. I don’t move. “He’s going to get away if you don’t!”

The bird spins his fan to me and drums, and I snap my gun to my shoulder. Dad yelps again, and the turkey deflates, craning his neck. At the shot, the bird flops down the hill, coming to rest just feet from our decoys. When I stand up, I’m shaking my head in disgust.

“What’s the matter with you?” Dad asks.

“I really wanted you to shoot that bird,” I say.

“Hell, I’ve been calling them in for you to shoot for 25 years,” he says. “I don’t know why that should change now. Let’s go eat breakfast.”

Mom takes our picture with the turkey, next to the split-rail fence. It might not be the exact hunt I was envisioning, but I think in Dad’s mind, it played out perfectly.

Written by Will Brantley for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.

Featured image provided by Field & Stream

Why Pocket Water is the Coolest Spot to Catch Summer Trout

by Pursuit | Apr 2, 2025 | Fishing

Here’s how to pick off trout in high-water streams with a simple nymphing rig. Also, be prepared to get soaked

From the bank, I pulled the knot tight on my dropper fly and looked out over the river, which sent a quick shiver of fear knifing through my excitement, like the feeling you have before you get on a carnival ride. The river was up, hurtling foam over the boulders after one of those long summer rainstorms that leaves wisps of steam spiraling above the fields—exactly how it looked when my grade-school buddy Jo and I first fished the spot, years ago.

Jo had a reputation as a tough kid. (Nobody pointed out to Jo, for example, that only girls spell that name without the e.) The river didn’t scare him. He hiked the worm box—filled with night crawlers we’d pinched in the rain the night before—from his waist to his armpits and cinched the belt across his chest. Then he dropped in and battled the current to a rock below a roaring plunge pool.

It was when he turned and motioned for me to wade in that his sneakers began to slide, and he started flailing in vain to catch his balance. The worm box popped open. Night crawlers sailed. And in the boiling slick below, where the fat morsels plopped and raced downstream, a yellow slab rose and parted the surface.

It was the biggest trout I’d ever seen.

After that, I wasn’t scared either. I jumped in and lobbed a crawler into the slot—and the brown crashed and bolted downstream. As I leaned into the fish, my sneakers shot in opposite directions, and I rode the current downstream, rod held high above the froth. But when I finally got my footing, the fish had broken off.

Upstream, Jo was laughing. Since we were both soaked, we spent that day wading or swimming to the river’s hardest-to-reach holes—and had one of the best days of summer fishing I can remember.

Make It Easy

In midsummer, I want to be waist-deep in heavy pocket water, when the river is up and the fishing turns on. I don’t lob crawlers much anymore—not because I think I’m above it. I just think flyfishing is more fun. And summer should be fun.

Summer should also be easy. It’s a nice coincidence that if there is good rainfall, pocket water can fish well through the hotter months. By then, I need a break from all the fussing that goes with slow-water dry-fly fishing, and pocket water is the perfect antidote. It’s one of the rare things in life where you can take the easy road and not give up any success.

The easy road, from a technical fishing standpoint, is to put a strike indicator above a subsurface fly or two on a 9-foot 5X leader and walk up the middle of the river, picking pockets left and right. You can make it more complicated. You can study the water as if reading it were a form of code-breaking. But why would you? The fish are in the slower spots next to the faster spots. And eager. Make a decent drift, and they’ll usually grab your fly.

Just about any pattern that looks like trout food (and plenty that don’t) will catch fish in pocket water now, but as a general rule, I think it’s tough to beat a weighted stonefly nymph with a Muddler Minnow dropper. If there are more rainbows than browns, I’ll swap the Muddler for a Woolly Bugger. It just seems to work better. Choose a pocket or seam, wade close, and cast above it with a little flick of your wrist to drive the flies under. High-stick them through the sweet spot, then let the Muddler swing down and across before you pick it up. If the trout don’t seem active enough to chase a streamer, switch to a small nymph or wet fly. That’s it. Work fast, and cover a lot of water.

And don’t be afraid to get soaked. Put on some wet-wading shorts and jump in. This might sound crazy, but after nearly 40 years of fishing pocket water, I’m convinced that when flows run high and fast, nothing increases the number and size of the fish you catch more than simply wading aggressively. I don’t say recklessly—you need to stay safe. And I don’t wear sneakers anymore. Studded wading boots help, and a collapsible wading staff is handy in the roughest patches. Just remember that in heavy water, it’s the hard-to-reach spots that hold the neglected, and often bigger, fish. And you can’t rely on long casts to reach them. With so many intervening currents, pocket water forces you to wade close, often real close, to get a decent drift.

Redemption Time

Back on the bank, I took one step into the drink and went in to my waist, then I fought my way to the slick below the roaring plunge pool where I’d lost that huge yellow slab years ago. Halfway into the drift, my indicator stopped. But this time the fish ran upstream instead of down, and I landed it in a shallow side eddy. My tape read 23 inches—the biggest brown trout I’d ever caught in a freestone stream, along with a nice dose of redemption. And I didn’t even have to go swimming. Summer fishing doesn’t get much easier—or more fun—than that.

Gear Tip: Take it to the Top

Midsummer can have sporadic but good surface stonefly activity. So bring a handful of big, buoyant stone imitations, like Stimulators or Sofa Pillows. Grease them up and skitter them over the soft spots about an hour before dusk, or if you see big bugs popping. You won’t catch any more fish this way, but you’ll watch some big trout roll and slash. And as long as you remember to beef up your leader to at least 3X, you’ll land a few of them too.

Written by David Hurteau for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.

Featured image provided by Field & Stream

Total Outdoorsmen: Eat, and Share, What You Kill

by Pursuit | Apr 2, 2025 | Inside Pursuit

No matter if it’s a gourmet feast or a rustic camp supper, a family meal of shared wild game has always brought hunters together

The dusky grouse came from the big slopes of the Flathead and Kootenai national forests, behind Tom Healy’s house in the Northern Rockies. When Fast Eddie, Healy’s wirehaired pointing griffon, locked up along an edge of pines, Healy knew instantly and intuitively that it was no ruffed grouse. “The big duskies like that sunshine, that open ground in the big woods,” he says, standing in the deep shade of a wall tent, stirring a mixture of grouse meat, elk meat, and wild rice. “I knew what was coming.”

Healy harvested this wild rice too, with his wife, in a canoe deep in Minnesota’s Boundary Waters. Now he stirs the dirty rice in a black iron pot as he describes arrowing through the dense rice stalks in the canoe, knocking the grains loose with short wooden batons so they fell into the boat.

There is elk heart in Healy’s dirty rice mix too, and elk sausage from a cow he killed eight days into a Big Hole Valley backcountry hunt. He had a .270 in camp, he recalls, but he carried a slug gun that day. “I wanted to force myself to get a little closer,” he says. “Make it a little more real.”

I glance around the tent. Nearby, a tall, bearded, cowboy-hatted guy sears mallard breasts from a Rocky Mountain spring creek. Another outdoorsman debones a Bristol Bay salmon. There is snowshoe hare and Idaho chokecherry sauce and goose confit in the works. On an open fire outside the tent, skewers of lynx meat sizzle. Getting closer to the heart of the matter seems to be the dish of the day. I’m in Boise, Idaho, at what is arguably the world’s most impressive wild-game meal: the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers field-to-table dinner, held during the group’s annual Rendezvous. Each year, some of the country’s best wild-game cooks put on a fundraiser feast so fine, it’s been written up in gourmet-cooking magazines.

I wander from camp stove to fire pit, sampling beaver meatballs and smoked Lahontan cutthroat trout. I quiz the chefs about each dish, but what I hear most isn’t the merits of wild plums versus the grocery-store variety, or why jackrabbit is underrated on the table. Instead, everyone tells me a story about the harvest. I hear how warm it was that January day on the Boise River when the trout were biting, how the moon lit the trail on the tough hike out with the elk quarters.

It’s been this way, always. This might be one of the fancier wild-game gigs I’ve ever attended, but I’ve felt this same kinship in Cajun squirrel camps, Yukon duck camps, and my deer camp back home. It’s what we do. The earliest art, religion, and connections between human communities were all rooted in the things we chase, kill, and eat. And share.

Spice of Life

Here’s another story: A few years ago, my wife, Julie, and I had new friends over for dinner. I smoked a chunk of pronghorn backstrap and served it with Gouda cheese and red peppers blackened on the grill. It was not terribly different from our normal wild fare. To our guests, though, antelope was the most exotic meat they’d ever eaten. They gushed about its tenderness and sage-tinted bite. They wanted to know where I’d killed it (Wyoming) and how (arrowed from behind a decoy). They asked about my other hunts. They were surprised to learn that I butchered my own deer and aged ducks in the refrigerator’s vegetable crisper. They were unaware of the modern hunter’s connection to this ancient cycle, that wild meat still nourishes soul as much as body.

I asked if they’d like to meet their meal, since the antelope’s head was hanging on my office wall. They politely declined, but still, that one simple meal sparked a conversation about hunting, sustainability, and the honesty of eating what you kill. They still talk about it. Not every wild-game dinner is a conversion experience, to be sure. Sometimes you just want to chew on a squirrel leg. But there’s no doubt that a grilled backstrap is as fine an argument for hunting and fishing as any philosophical treatise.

At the BHA chow-down, I hover over Idaho chef Randy King as he works up a dish of spring rolls stuffed with goose confit. Always a sucker for a good goose dish, I’m about to ask for the particulars of the dish, but King tells a different story. “This is kind of funny,” he says, “in sort of a bad-funny way.” He tells me that he and his 12-year-old son, Cameron, hunted these geese from a southwestern Idaho farm ditch last winter. Cameron was shooting a single-barrel 20-gauge, the kind with an exposed hammer, and with the first shot, the hammer bit the boy on the cheek hard enough to require stitches. Blood gushed. “I felt awful,” King says, “but he is so proud of that scar, you wouldn’t believe it.”

But I would, of course. What hunter wouldn’t? It’s the kind of story that seasons a meal and life long after the hunt, and makes every day on this Earth a sweeter bite of life.

Gear Tip: Cooking by the Book

Time to make some room on your bookshelf. Randy King’s collection of recipes and essays, Chef in the Wild: Reflections and Recipes from a True Wilderness Chef is pretty close to sharing a cooking fire with the Idaho icon. And the latest cookbook from award-winning food author Hank Shaw, Pheasant, Quail, Cottontail: Upland Game from Field to Table, elevates gamebird and small-game cookery to its rightful status.

Written by T. Edward Nickens for Field & Stream and legally licensed through the Matcha publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@getmatcha.com.

Featured image provided by Field & Stream

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Next Entries »

Whispers In The Wind: Chasing Gobblers & Finding Ghosts

How to Take Your Father Turkey Hunting

Getting a Start

Too Late

New Spot

Introducing Woods & Waters – Your New Hunting & Fishing HQ

Why Pocket Water is the Coolest Spot to Catch Summer Trout

Here’s how to pick off trout in high-water streams with a simple nymphing rig. Also, be prepared to get soaked

Make It Easy

Redemption Time

Gear Tip: Take it to the Top

Total Outdoorsmen: Eat, and Share, What You Kill

No matter if it’s a gourmet feast or a rustic camp supper, a family meal of shared wild game has always brought hunters together

Spice of Life

Gear Tip: Cooking by the Book