You’ve been there – hunting deer when you’d rather be kicking a dog. Or chewing broken glass.
Let’s face it, there are some days when you are so cranky you don’t even want to be alone with yourself. And I’ll bet those are days that you scarcely see a deer or hear an elk bugle.
Dude, it’s you. It’s the negative energy you’re emitting like smoke from a steam-age boiler. Game can pick up on your downer vibes. You are repelling them like so many fleas at a Front-Line sales convention.
Some random insights from life in a federal disaster area:
Pumps are whining. Calves are drowning. Neighbors are either distraught or blithely delighting in hardship. Even basic functions like getting clean water or flushing a toilet become hour-long odysseys. And the critters… the dry ground is literally crawling with deer mice and voles and shrews that have been displaced from their lower-lying habitats.
To prepare for her role in Black Swan (one of every Outdoor Life readers’ favorite movies I’m sure), actress Natalie Portman reportedly shed 20 pounds through exercise and an über-restrictive crash diet.
Portman has gone public with having changed her diet yet again, this time for the role of motherhood. But unlike her earlier diet, this one involved going from being a vegan to a vegetarian. What’s the difference? Well, apparently quite a bit.
What is your ability to climb into a deer stand worth? How about the price of a morning in the marsh, just as the day’s first mallards cyclone into your decoys? How much would you pay to be at the side of your child as she kills her first deer? What’s the price of a meadowlark’s cheerful warble?
They sound like rhetorical questions, but these very sorts of topics are being decided for you this week, as Congressional budget-cutters debate cost vs. benefit for everything from CRP to bass hatcheries to prescribed burning in national forests.
The flood I’ve been expecting for a month finally arrived overnight. Today the Milk River is out of its banks and spawning little side channels that are finding the low spots in roads and fields.
It’s a measure of my miserable winter that the window between the loss of our significant snow cover and the beginning of flooding has been narrower than the mind of a Nixon-era racist.
When it comes to tests of hunting and fishing gear, no one beats Outdoor Life. As one of our cornerstone tests, our annual compound bow shootout has helped solidify our position as the outdoor gear test leader.
Dr. Todd Kuhn’s crack team of compound bow experts has once again put the new bows for the coming season through the wringer. In addition to evaluating and scoring the bows on things like in-hand feel, smoothness of the draw cycle and general shootability, we also conduct various empirical tests to determine each bow’s true speed, noise and vibration readings. (You’re not going to believe this, but the advertised specs aren’t always accurate.)
Like the first robin sighting and the return of baseball, the Outdoor Life Bow Test is a highly anticipated rite of spring, but the wait is almost over. The 2011 Bow Test will appear in the May issue, which hits newsstands on April 19. In the meantime, check out exclusive footage on how we test and all the behind-the-scenes action.
“Dad!” My six-year-old son screamed loud enough for the entire park to hear. “Check out that snake! It’s huge!”
“Oh. My. Gosh!” My ten year old daughter exclaimed with her ever growing dramatic flair. “It. Is. Huge!”
Actually, the snake in question was fairly large – as far as Texas diamond-backed water snakes go – but as for “huge,” my kids ain’t seen nothing yet. And neither have yours. Because according to a U.S. Geological Survey report entitled “Giant Constrictors: Biological and Management Profiles and an Establishment Risk Assessment for Nine Large Species of Pythons, Anacondas, and the Boa Constrictor” that I just got around to reading, the big snakes are on their way. And by big, I mean some can reach upwards of 20 feet in length.
I was maybe 13, deer hunting on my family’s Missouri farm. My dad had posted me in a fence corner while he made a long push around a 100-acre soybean field. I didn’t hear him return.
Dad caught me pointing my new rifle, a Savage 99 in .243, up in the sky. I had a passenger jet in my 4-power crosshairs and was lazily following it as it plowed across the sky at 30,000 feet.
