I’m in a Maine Guide canoe with a long-shafted beavertail paddle in hand. A lever rifle leans against the bow thwart. My guide and I cruise slowly around a sharp bend in the stream, careful to keep the bow from scraping on the river gravel. Brook trout dimple the water. Mosquitoes buzz. The guide grunts and bellows with a rolled birch-bark call, and the sound seems to skip over the water like a thrown stone, mellowing as it reaches the far shore. I scan the dense woods, picking apart the latticed boughs for the glint of an antler or the horizontal line of belly or back. In the dream, I am looking for pieces and parts of a moose and then, suddenly, the bull is right there, complete, at the water’s edge, silhouetted in front of a sheen of sunlit spruce.
And that’s how it ends. Every time. The dream never progresses beyond this point—no matter how many times I have had it, no matter how often I lie in bed trying to fall back to sleep so I can dream my way into slowly reaching for the gun, as the guide braces the boat for the rifle’s recoil. Over the years, I came to accept that a moose hunt might be a dream I would never have the chance to live. But if I did, I didn’t want to scout from a truck and hunt from a road. I wanted my dream— canoes, remote waters, paddling under the early- morning stars, stalking and calling, and nothing easy
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Volume 125 - Issue 4, 2020-Ausgabe von Field & Stream.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der Volume 125 - Issue 4, 2020-Ausgabe von Field & Stream.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
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LIVING THE DREAM
After the author arrives in Maine’s fabled North Woods with a moose tag in his pocket, an adventure he’s been wanting to take his entire hunting life, reality sets in, and he learns a valuable lesson: Be careful what you wish for
Get the Drift
How to make an accurate windage call under pressure
First Sit
An icebreaker outing in a pristine spot produces the rut hunt of a lifetime
A Local Haunt
The author finds a sense of place in an overlooked creek, close to home
A Hop and a Pump
Jump-shooting rabbits with classic upland guns is about as good a time as you can have in the outdoors
Welcome TO camp
Is there any place better than a good hunting camp? It has everything: great food, games and pranks, and of course, hunting. Shoot, we don’t even mind going to camp for grueling work days in the summer. Here, our contributors share their favorite stories, traditions, and lessons learned from camps they’ve shared. So come on in and join us. The door’s open.
THE DEERSLAYERS
Before you even claim a bunk, you need to eyeball the hardware your buddies have brought. In the process, you’ll see that the guns at deer camp are changing. What was walnut and blued steel may now be Kevlar and carbon fiber. The 10 rifles featured here aren’t your father’s deer guns. They’re today’s new camp classics
THE JOURNEY TO PIKE'S PEAK
Last summer, the author and three friends ventured off the grid to a remote fish camp in Canada. They hoped for great fishing, but what they experienced was truly something else
Stage Directions
When early-season whitetails vanish from open feeding areas, follow this woods-edge ambush plan
Rookie Season
A pup’s first year, from preseason training to fall’s big show