Field Honest Audio Stories
Honest hunting, fishing, field skills, gear, wild food, conservation, and outdoor stories, narrated for the road, the workshop, and the quiet hours after dark.
I Froze My Own Kid in a Tent and Blamed the Weather
I froze my own kid on a Cub Scout camping trip last weekend and it took me three days to admit the mattress did it. Not the sleeping bags. Not the weather. The mattress, which I bought at a big-box store six years ago for forty dollars and never thought about again. Here is how […]
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I Killed Two Trout I Couldn’t Keep, and Nobody Told Me Catch and Release Was a Skill
Two dead rainbow trout on a stringer I wasn’t even supposed to have. That’s how my Tuesday after work ended, standing on the bank of a stocked creek with two fish floating belly-up that I never planned to kill, in a stretch of water where the season doesn’t open for eating until March. I’m new […]
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I Could Not Send the Arrow This Season, and the Deer Came Back Anyway
I have hunted deer since I was eight years old, which means I have hunted through every kind of season a man can have. Wet ones, dry ones, broke ones, lucky ones. But I had never hunted through a season like this one, and I almost quit over it. My wife, Dana, died last April. […]
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I Let a Trail Cam Buck Own Me for a Whole Season, and I Ate Tag Soup for Thanksgiving
His name was Ghost, and for three months last fall, he owned me. It started in late August with a single trail camera picture sent to my phone at dusk. A heavy, wide ten-pointer with a split G2, standing in the clover plot behind the barn, looking right at the lens like he knew I […]
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The Gut Shot That Taught Patience, and Then Taught Shame
The buck wasn’t a monster, but he was handsome. A solid eight-pointer, the kind of deer that makes you stop breathing for a second when he steps out of the brush. He was 60 yards out, broadside, and there was a solid rest. Everything leading up to that moment had gone right. The scouting, the […]
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The Day a Treestand Almost Turned Someone Into a Lawn Dart
Competence and complacency are two very different things, and on one crisp autumn morning high up in an old oak, that difference got learned the hard way. It was one of those perfect fall days. Cool air, still and clean, the leaves a riot of color, the woods just starting to wake up. A couple […]
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The One Time Grandpa Didn’t Ask, the Rifle Stayed on the Kitchen Table
For fifteen years, every single time the door was headed out for a hunt, the same question came from the worn-out armchair. Coffee that was more chicory than anything else, glasses looked over, and the grumble: “You got your rifle?” It did not matter if it was 16 or 30. It did not matter if […]
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The Buck Fever That Turned My Brain to Mush and My Arrow Sideways
I had him. After three months of watching this ten-point ghost my trail cameras, after two weeks of hunting the October lull with nothing to show for it but empty thermos flasks, he was finally there. A hundred and ten pounds of bone and muscle, standing broadside at twenty-eight yards, steam puffing from his nose […]
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Amos’s Diary: Monday, July 20, 1903
Four pages in the diary now, and the year’s been turned all the way round once and tipped over into itself again. Summer come back around, and Amos went back to the same work a man always goes back to, which is the whole secret of livin on this ridge and never once figurin you’ve […]
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I Trusted an Eleven Dollar Pair of Gloves to Keep My Hands Warm, and I Watched My Deer Walk Away
The first time I ever sat a late-season stand in real cold, I did the thing every broke, overconfident hunter does. I pulled on a pair of insulated “waterproof winter gloves” I bought off a gas-station sale rack for eleven dollars and told myself the woods owed me a deer for being tough enough to […]
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The ‘No Man’s Land’ Shot and What to Do When the Blood Trail Dies
I had a buck pegged for three months. A big-bodied nine point I’d been getting on trail camera since July, always on the same oak flat, always moving in the same thirty minutes of last light. I studied him like I was going to take a test on him. I had my wind, I had […]
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The State Cut My Favorite Timber, and I Was Furious Until I Saw What Grew Back
I spent a decade telling anybody who would listen that the timber company was the enemy. They owned the thousand acres behind my house, the ground I learned to hunt on next to my dad, and every few years they would come through with feller bunchers and skidders and turn a piece of the prettiest, […]
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The Afternoon I Got Lost on Public Land and Walked in Circles Until I Sat Down
The first time I got seriously lost in the woods, I wasn’t scared. I was embarrassed. That’s the part nobody tells you about. Fear you can handle. It has a job. Embarrassment just sits on your chest and calls you a fool while you pretend you know where you’re going. It was a late October […]
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I Lost the Biggest Bass of My Life to a Knot I Was Too Stubborn to Check
The biggest bass of my life ate a worm at about seven in the morning, and I was already mostly checked out. I’d been standing on the same dock for an hour and forty minutes, had already lost two plastics to a snag, and the coffee had worn off enough that I was starting to […]
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I Fed My Family Silver Skin Venison Burgers and Called Them Gamey for Two Years
I killed my first deer and I knew exactly what to do with it, because I had watched a man grind a whole whitetail in ten minutes flat on a video the night before. He made it look like the easiest part of the hunt. Knock the quarters off, run everything through the grinder, pat […]
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Amos’s Diary: Thursday, April 9, 1903
Three pages in the diary now, and every one turns the year over like a flat rock. Summer and winter and the far edge of fall got wrote down, so this next one come round to spring, the season that don’t decide nothin and gets the whole world doin the most work for the least […]
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I Fell Asleep in the Stand and Woke Up to the Biggest Buck of My Life Under My Tree
The first thing I remember is the taste of the inside of my own mouth, dry and sour, and the second thing is the weight of a deer I never heard arrive. I opened my eyes and there he was, a heavy nine point standing directly under my tree, not forty yards out, his head […]
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I Saved Eighty Bucks on a Knockoff Scope and It Fogged Up on the Only Buck I Saw All Season
The scope on my rifle was old when I got it. I bought the rifle used from a man named Earl who said the glass was “good enough for a walkin fella,” and for a few seasons it mostly was. Then I saved up a little and decided I was done with “good enough.” I […]
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I Practiced on a Bench All Summer and Couldn’t Hold Steady From a Treestand
The shot was thirty-one yards, and I had shot it a thousand times. A thousand times on a cement bench at the range, with a sandbag under the forend, a stool under my rear, and a paper deer that never moved and never cared whether I lived or died. The buck standing down in the […]
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We Dont Shoot Does: The Buck Only Rule That Starved a Herd for Ten Years
My granddad said it so many times it might as well have been chiseled on the mantle. “We don’t shoot does.” My dad said it too, and his dad before him. It wasn’t a rule you questioned. It was a rule you inherited, same as the rifle and the hat that smelled like a lifetime […]
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You Took the Wrong Ruts and Lost the Road. Now Find West With a Floating Needle and the Dead Man’s Habits.
You wake with the taste of dust on your teeth and the knowledge, certain as sunrise, that you have made the wrong turn. It is late July, 1849, and somewhere west of the Sweetwater the wagon road has thinned into a set of wheel ruts that fade into the sage and then into nothing. The […]
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I Ruined the Liver on My First Deer and Blamed the Organ for Three Years
I broke the bile sac on my first deer and then spent three years telling people I did not like liver. That second part was a lie, and I did not even know I was telling it. Here is what actually happened. I was sixteen, alone in my uncle’s garage at ten o’clock at night, […]
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I Sold My Bow After Losing My First Deer, and Ray Talked Me Back Into the Woods
The deer was dead somewhere in the swamp. I knew it when the blood quit. Bright red for sixty yards, then a smear, then one drop the size of a dime, then nothing. I stood there in the dark with a headlamp that kept dying and I whispered things at that deer I would deny […]
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Amos’s Diary: Saturday, October 17, 1903
Two pages in the diary so far, and each one is a whole season by itself. July sun baking the fence row, January frost two fingers down in the ground. This next page got turned to a different corner of the year, the one where everything is done and nothing is, and the air smells […]
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I Set the Hook Too Early Every Day for Thirty Years
I have been setting the hook too early for thirty years and nobody ever bothered to tell me to my face. It took a frozen boat ramp, a hangover, and a seventy year old man named Herb who calls every fish “son of a bitch” whether it got away or not. The Ramp at First […]
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A Buck That Dropped Like a Stone and Then Ran Off With a Second Chance
The buck dropped like somebody cut his legs out from under him. One shot from the .30-06, a sound like a wet board smacking a fence post, and he was down. Flat. Not twitching, not kicking, nothing. One second he was standing broadside at eighty yards working a scrape, and the next he was a […]
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I Spent Two Grand on Scent-Proof Camo Before I Learned the Wind Was Free
The first rifle season I took seriously, I spent more on clothes than I did on the rifle. That is not a flex. That is a confession. I had a perfectly good used .30-06 that I knew inside and out. I had boots that were already broken in. What I didn’t have, according to the […]
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I Bumped the Buck I Shot and Almost Lost Everything
Last fall I put an arrow through a big-bodied buck at twenty-six yards. Felt like a good shot. The deer hunched, bolted, and crashed through the slash for maybe sixty yards before the woods swallowed him. I sat in the tree for ten minutes, then thirty. Then I climbed down and started looking. That was […]
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The Sky Turns Green and the Hail Flattens the Prairie. Now Hide Your Family Where There Is Nothing to Hide Behind.
The Sky Turns Green Late afternoon, June 1849. Somewhere on the Platte, two days east of Fort Laramie. You are walking alongside the wagon to save the oxen from your weight, and the first thing you notice is that the wind has stopped. The grass goes still all at once, the way a room goes […]
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The Lead I Left in the Gut Pile and the Bald Eagle That Ate It
I gutted my first deer when I was seventeen and I have told the same joke about it ever since. The joke is that nothing goes to waste in the woods. You drop the liver and lungs and stomach in a heap, you turn your back, and by morning the crows and the coyotes have […]
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The Backstrap I Cooked Like a Hamburger and Blamed On the Deer
The First Backstrap a Man Destroys Every hunter ruins his first backstrap the exact same way, and I am here to tell you it is never the deer’s fault. The deer did everything right. It ran, it stopped, it gave me a clean shot at 60 yards, and it died faster than I deserved. The […]
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Amos’s Diary: Tuesday, January 20, 1903
The pages in the back of the leather folder don’t run in order, so I read them the way Amos must have wrote them, one tired evening at a time. The second page I can make out clean is dated Tuesday, January 20, 1903, and the ink is different, thinner, like he’d cut it with […]
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The Plastic Deer That Bought Me a Seat at Deer Camp
For ten years I told people I was a hunter. I owned a rifle. I owned camo. I owned opinions about bullet weight that I repeated from a podcast I didn’t remember listening to. The only thing I had never done was sit in an actual deer camp with men who knew what they were […]
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The First Buck I Ever Killed Was Small, and That Was Exactly the Point
I did not grow up hunting. That is the first honest thing I ever said about the subject, and it took me until I was thirty-one to admit it out loud. Nobody in my family owned a deer stand. My grandpa drove a forklift and watched baseball. My dad fished twice a summer from a […]
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The Wall Fish That Flipped Off My Wet Hands and Back Down the Hole
It was the biggest fish I had ever seen come out of a hole in the ice, and I had my hands on it for maybe three seconds. That was all it took. A flip, a splash, and it was gone, back down into the black water like it had never been there at all. […]
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The Day My Son Out-Hunted Me and Handed Back Every Lesson I Ever Gave Him
The Morning I Turned Into My Dad, and Hated It I woke my boy up at four in the morning the way my dad used to wake me, one hand on the shoulder and a voice too loud for a dark house. He rolled over and said something I could not make out, and I […]
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You Wake With Lice on Your Neck and Mosquitoes Over the Oxen. Now Keep the Small Enemies From Eating Your Family Alive.
You wake because something is crawling across the back of your neck, and your fingers come away with two gray lice crushed between them, warm from your own skin. It is late May, 1848, on the Platte somewhere east of Fort Laramie, and the wagon train has been moving for six weeks without a real […]
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Shot the Bull Two Miles In. Then the Real Hunt Started.
Everybody dreams about the moment the animal falls. The shot, the thump, the walk over. Nobody dreams about the mile and a half after that, because that part has no glory in it. It has sweat and a knife and a pack that suddenly weighs more than it should. I learned this the hard way […]
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Three Hours of Gas and an Unloaded Buck: Why You Check the Gun Before You Drive
My old man only ever said one thing about getting ready for a hunt, and he said it every single time, right before we backed the truck down the drive. “You got your gun?” Not “you got your rounds,” not “you got your tag,” not “you got the cooler.” Just the gun. I spent twenty […]
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The Doe I Passed for Fifteen Years, and the Herd That Paid for It
I was thirty-one before I shot a doe on purpose, and I stood over her for a long time wondering if I had done something wrong. Nobody had ever told me I was allowed to. Every fall I had grown up chasing antlers, and somewhere along the way I decided a deer without a rack […]
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