Podcast Episodes
Back to Search
I Fried My First Squirrel Like Chicken and Made Shoe Leather. Then an Old Man Taught Me the Only Way It’s Meant to Be Cooked.
The first squirrel I ever cooked I cooked like chicken, because I was twenty-two and I figured meat was meat. I skinned a fat gray fox squirrel out o…
1 month ago
The Year I Stopped Hunting Grouse and Started Walking
The first grouse I ever shot, I shot by accident. I wasn’t hunting. I was walking back to the truck after a deer season that had gone nowhere, tired …
1 month ago
The Rifle I Hunted With for Ten Years Was Illegal the Day I Moved to Ohio
I moved to Ohio in August. By October I was standing on a gravel pull-off at four in the morning with a game warden’s flashlight in my face, and I ha…
1 month ago
Four Years of Fishing Walleye the Way the Books Said, Then a Cousin Pulled One Out of Three Feet of Water.
I spent four years believing walleye were a religion with one commandment: fish the bottom. Deep. Slow. A bottom bouncer dragging a crawler harness t…
1 month ago
The Hide Is Stiffening Into Wood by Morning, and There Is No Tannery for Six Hundred Miles
You Wake to the Smell of Fat Going Rancid, and a Hide That Will Stiffen Into Wood by Morning Late October, 1846. Somewhere along the Platte, three da…
1 month ago
The Bucket of Blood Nobody Warns You About
I killed my first deer at twenty-six, three miles from the truck, at the bottom of a ravine I had no business dragging anything out of. He was a spik…
1 month ago
A Forty-Dollar Single-Shot .410 and the Squirrels That Raised a Hunter
My first gun was a single-shot .410 with a barrel so worn you could watch a squirrel grin through the gap while you tried to remember which direction…
1 month ago
You Smoke a Deer by Hand, One Damp Chip at a Time, Because Ice Is a Thousand Miles Behind You
Late October, 1844. Somewhere along the bottomlands of the Platte, two days east of Fort Laramie. The wind has teeth in it now, and the cottonwood le…
1 month ago
The Deer Started Coming to Corn. The Buck Never Did.
The Argument Over the Feeders My dad and me closed on one hundred ninety nine acres in late March. It was the kind of purchase that makes a grown man…
1 month ago
The Line a Man Draws When Nobody Is Watching
My buddy Travis and I were splitting a case of beer on his tailgate last spring, talking about where we’d go if money ever stopped mattering. I said …
1 month ago