Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in the June 1953 issue of Outdoor Life and it reflects the language and stereotypes of the times.

A COLD OCTOBER drizzle was soaking the Ontario bush when the old Ojibway Indian and his wife beached their canoe below our tent. They had a little boy with them, sort of wedged in the bow ahead of the woman, and he was yelling bloody murder. 

They looked too old to be his parents, and the man explained that, jerking a finger at the toddler and grunting, “Mamma dead.” 

After we welcomed them with cigarettes, the woman held the boy up and pointed to his mouth. “Hurt,” she said. And he wailed at the top of his voice. 

Neither my partner, K. K. (Knick) Knickerbocker, nor I is a medicine man, but we got the idea. The poor little cuss was teething, and they’d come to our camp hoping we could do something for him. I rummaged in my gear for the best remedy we had, a bottle of aspirin. We didn’t dare give them the whole bottle for fear they’d feed them all to the kid. So I shook out a dozen tablets, broke each in half, then pointed to the face of my watch and held up half a tablet for each hour. 

They were tickled pink. The woman poked the first dose into the boy without ceremony. He went right on crying, but they paid no attention to him. 

They came up to our tent and the man’s eyes fell on our two 70-pound-pull hunting bows and the arrows. Curious as a kid with a bulging Christmas stocking, he tested the razor-sharp edge of the four-bladed arrowheads, tried the pull of my bow. Then, after looking in vain for firearms, he grinned at me, and said, “Moose big. String-gun too little.”

KNICK AND I were still chuckling about it long after the Indians paddled away. 

“Honest Indian,” Knick said. 

But we didn’t share all the old man’s doubts. I started hunting big game with a bow in 1935, and I’ve never carried a gun since. Knick’s also an experienced archer, and he’d come all the way from Virginia to match his bow with a moose. Up to the time of our moose hunt, I’d killed nothing bigger than deer (though I’ve added moose, bear, antelope, and elk to my list since) and neither had Knick. Still we both felt our bows would stop a moose. Other archers had proved that. 

The Indian wasn’t the first to rate us underequipped for moose hunting. We’d had difficulty finding outfitters and guides willing to handle us, once they learned we intended to use bows rather than guns. 

One outfitter bluntly canceled our reservations. Another said he was booked full. 

We didn’t blame them. Surprisingly few know much about the killing power of hunting bows. And since big-game guides live largely by the success of their parties, it’s only natural that most shy away from archers. Guns get more game. 

It wasn’t until Knick and I contacted Archie McDonald in Quibell that we were able to arrange for a moose hunt in Ontario. And I confess we’d been in Archie’s main camp on Cliff Lake two days before we let it be known we were gunless. By that time it was too late to pack us out. 

For guides we drew Bill Humphries an Victor MacQueen, an Englishman and a Scot respectively, and they were good sports about the thing. We were to hunt in an area where they trap beavers in winter. They assured us there were plenty of moose there, and if we were willing to take chances on bows it was O.K. with them. 

So the four of us set out for Cedar River, the outlet of Lake Wabaskang, 100 miles north of International Falls. We worked through a chain of lakes—Twilight, Evening, Mystery, Cliff, Cedar, Perrault—traveling in two canoes with five-horsepower outboards, and portaging over rocky trails. Cold rain fell in an endless drizzle, broken only by harder squalls. We were wind-bound on Cliff Lake, on Cedar, and again at the lower end of Wabaskang. 

We made camp late one afternoon, dried our clothes and bags, and let a good fire drive the chill from our bones. By morning the rain stopped, and the world began to look like a fit place to live. 

It became a wonderful world when we took our casting rods down to the Cedar and flipped our spoons at the foot of a low waterfall. We caught wall-eyes and northern pike as fast as we could take ’em off the hooks. The pike ran 10 to 12 pounds apiece. In 30 minutes I landed three that totaled 40 pounds. We hung a few in trees around camp for bear bait. We put back the ones we caught after that; it was wall-eyes we wanted for eating, and the river swarmed with them. 

Yet we found the best fishing of all at Wine Lake, a few miles down the Cedar from Wabaskang. Lake trout from three to 12 pounds had come up in the shoals to spawn, and they pounced on our lures the way a leopard goes after a goat. Now and then we hooked lunkers that wouldn’t be handled on our medium-weight casting rods. We broke lines and smashed tips on some I bet weighed over 25 pounds. We kept no lakers, still preferring wall-eyes at camp, but we caught them at the rate of 10 or 12 an hour anytime we fished. 

It was raining again the second morning, but Knick and I had come a long way to kill a moose and we didn’t have all fall to do it. So after breakfast we climbed into the two canoes and headed downriver. 

Knick and Bill turned off where Wine Lake has its outlet in the Cedar, but Vic and I kept on another three or four miles. Then we went up a small creek and into a little unnamed lake that Vic said was a moose hangout. By that time the wind was blowing a gale and the cold rain had us drenched to the skin. We went ashore, got a fire going, and huddled over it until our teeth stopped chattering. Then we went moose hunting. 

Wet weather gives an archer one great advantage over the prey. He can move without noise, which he must do to get close enough to score with an arrow. Vic and I traveled slowly, combing every open place ahead. Eventually we spotted a sleek whitetail buck, a six-pointer, coming toward us. I picked an opening ahead of him in the brush and lined an arrow on it. When he walked into it I let go. It should have been an easy shot, since his neck and part of his shoulder were in sight at about 30 yards, but there was too much thick stuff in the way. Or maybe it was my fault. My fingertips were numb with cold by that time, and I didn’t get off a good release. 

I heard the arrow thud into something solid and saw the deer whirl and run. I found the arrow, bedded in a young pine, three paces short of where he’d stood. It had brushed a twig, glanced off, and whacked into the tree. “I got a name for this place.” I told Vic. “Let’s call it Arrow Lake.” 

He grinned, but it was a feeble performance, and I could see he was biting his tongue to hold back some remark on my performance. 

It helped when I missed another shot at a bigger buck late that afternoon. I shot high, and again I blamed my cold fingers. But I knew better than to alibi to Vic. We saw seven deer that day, including three bucks, and I could have killed all three with a rifle. By the time we got back to camp I realized that any fragment of faith Vic and Bill may have had in archery was as good as gone. At supper the guides exchanged significant glances across the fire and acted like a couple of guys who have picked a lame horse. 

THE WEATHER broke two days later, and we saw stars overhead and pink in the morning sky for the first time since the hunt began. We hurried through breakfast and were on our way before sunrise, running, the canoes through a winding canyon of gold and scarlet foilage. We hadn’t realized how far autumn had advanced. Ducks got up in front of us, and an eagle soared lazily overhead. 

We separated once again, agreeing to meet for lunch. Vic and I saw two cow moose that forenoon, but nothing with antlers. Knick and Bill stalked a good buck but couldn’t get within range. 

At noon we met in a cove formed by a big point that thrust half a mile out into the lake. We were finishing the last of our grub when a series of low, whimpering grunts rolled across the water to us. Bill lifted a warning hand. We listened until it was repeated. 

“Cow, calling,” Vic said softly. “She may have a bull with her.” 

We got up noiselessly and laid our plans in a hurry. The point was connected to the main shore by a neck of land about 200 yards wide and timbered with open stuff. Knick and I would have a chance for shooting there. The guides would drive, starting at the far end of the point, and if there was a bull with the lovelorn cow he’d have to come past us to get ashore. 

Knick and I picked our stands and Bill and Vic shoved off in one of the canoes. Ten minutes later a cow moose come out of the willows 300 yards away, splashed through the shallows, and struck out across the cove. When nothing else showed up in three or four minutes I relaxed. Then I heard a heavy animal coming through the brush in a hurry and headed almost at me. I caught a glimpse of brown, too light for a moose, and an eight-point buck came busting out of the adlers. He was spooked, and going places, but I had him in the open and I knew he was my buck. 

He went past me at 15 yards, running in long, reaching bounds. I shot when he was broadside. The arrow made a good solid hit, but I saw that I’d failed to lead him enough. I’d aimed for the rib section but the arrow had flashed into his flank. 

I found out later the shot would have killed him anyway, likely within 100 yards. The four-bladed head had severed big arteries and was bedded against the hip bone. But I didn’t know that at the time. 

The only apparent effect of the shot was to slow him down. His long jumps changed to short, high hops. I sent another arrow after him before he’d gone 20 yards. It sailed over his back, a clean miss. 

He was going straight away from me, 40 yards off, when I loosed a third arrow. That sounds like fast shooting with a bow but my average time between shots is five seconds, and the buck lost a lot of his speed as a result of my first shot. 

I took a little more time with that third shot. It struck him in the back of the neck, just below the head, and he went down like a dishrag. When we dressed him we discovered the arrow had gone through the first vertebra behind the skull and had driven deep into the brain. No bullet ever killed a deer quicker. 

Bill and Vic came out of the brush in a few minutes, plainly disappointed and disgusted. They’d heard no shooting, of course, and I realized it hadn’t even occurred to them there could be a kill without gunfire. 

“See anything?” Vic asked with patient resignation. 

“Saw a cow moose and a buck,” I replied. “The moose swam the cove.”

“What happened to the deer?” 

“He went right through here,” I said, pointing. 

I let them take the lead, and they almost fell over the dead buck. 

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Vic muttered. Bill added, “No shooting or nothing.” It wasn’t lavish praise, but the way they said it made it about the biggest compliment I’d ever had on a hunting trip. 

Back at camp that night, however, I could see the two weren’t convinced that a bow was proper moose medicine. They’d witnessed a trial demonstration and were inclined to give me more credit than I deserved, but there’s a difference of something like 800 pounds between a moose and a deer, and to their way of thinking, killing a moose would require a far more lethal weapon. 

Knick and I voted to try the Arrow Lake country next morning. We’d seen plenty of moose sign there and also a couple of cows. It looked like a good bet. 

Knick and Bill left camp first but they loitered on the way down the Cedar, scouting for tracks, and Vic and I passed them. But five minutes after we paddled into the little lake they came out of the creek behind us—just in time for the show. 

Right then, with both canoes in plain sight, a moose showed up at the edge of the alders across the lake. We saw his antlers first, over the top of the brush, and then he waded into the water. I had my glasses on him before he took three steps. He was a big bull with a fine head. 

WHY HE DIDN’T spot us, I still don’t know. While our canoes were fairly close to shore and he was almost half a mile away, we had no cover. I didn’t think there was a chance we could cross to his side of the open lake unseen. But we had to try. 

Vic and I crouched low and drove our canoe with hard, noiseless strokes. Knick and Bill were close behind as we rounded the end of the lake. A brushy point now hid us from the moose, so Vic turned the canoe toward shore. I was out of it and into the alders before its bottom touched land. 

When I’d last seen the bull he was coming down the lake in our direction, walking slowly in shallow water about 25 yards offshore. There was a strong wind, blowing in my favor and making enough noise in the undergrowth to cover my movements. A few yards back in the brush I found a game trail running parallel to shore, and I followed it until I figured I was halfway to the moose. Then I took a branch trail down to the water. 

Unable to see more than a few yards along shore, I crouched at the edge of the alders and waited. Nothing happened for a minute or two, and I was sure the bull had heard me and turned back. But I squatted there patiently and listened. 

Then I heard him, splashing and grunting. Another five seconds and I caught sight of him through a hole in the bushes, 75 yards off. 

For an instant I was as near to buck fever as I’ve ever been. He looked as big as a boxcar, and I recalled what the Indian had said about my string-gun. Suppose he was right? That was a lot of moose bearing down on me. I wondered what he’d do when my arrow drove into him. Would he come crashing for shore and pound me to a pulp with his big hoofs? 

Then I took another look, sizing up his black bulk and his broad antlers, that shone like polished mahogany. They’d go 48 inches or better. I thought of Knick, Bill, and Vic back on the point, watching from the brush, waiting for my shot. 

My bow was up to it. Was I? 

IF THE MOOSE kept his course he’d pass in front of me about 20 yards away. I could take all the time I wanted, and at that range I could hardly miss. 

I found another opening in the brush and settled myself on one knee. I could no longer see him but I could hear him coming. Then his neck and shoulders filled the opening. I brought the bowstring back to full draw and heard the sharp, satisfying twang as the arrow left it. And I was on target. The feathers of the arrow suddenly sprouted out from the center of the bull’s rib section. 

“That ought to fix him,” I murmured to myself. 

The moose flinched and stiffened. For an instant he froze in his tracks. Then he whirled and lunged toward deeper water. But he made only three jumps before he stopped broadside to me. 

I had a second arrow on the string when he humped his back, stretched out his neck, and blew a red gush from both nostrils. I eased off my draw then, knowing he was done for. He turned toward shore, but his legs buckled and he went down. One arrow killed him before he’d moved twice his own length from the place where he stood when it hit him. 

We got ropes on him and towed him ashore. When we dressed him we found that my arrow had entered between two ribs, sliced through the lungs, cut off big blood vessels, and stopped when the head sheared off a rib on the opposite side. The moose was dead a minute after he was shot. That’s how a hunting arrow is supposed to kill. 

The Indian and his wife and the little boy turned up at camp about noon next day. Maybe they smelled meat. Anyway, they heard of our luck—perhaps via the moccasin telegraph. The kid was quiet, but both he and the old ones looked hungry. 

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We had two moose tenderloins hanging in front of our tent. I took one down and gave it to the old fellow. He grinned from ear to ear, and the woman started to paw through the duffel piled under a tarp in the middle of their canoe. She came up with a faded sugar bag full of wild rice, and handed it to us. When they were making ready to leave the man saw my bow propped against a tree. He looked from it to the moose quarters hanging near by. “String-gun plenty big!” he grunted. 

It was Bill, the once-skeptical guide, who whooped a hearty “I’ll tell the world” back at him. Across the fire that night Vic put an interesting question to me. “How much would it cost me,” he asked, “to get a bow like yours?”

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FOR A WEEK we had been hunting chukars above the Snake River in eastern Washington, my son Chris and I, laboring along those god-awful lava slopes each day and getting back to camp late, bone-tired and rock-sore. We were set up just across the river from Lewiston, Idaho, where Jack O’Connor lived. I’d meant to call him and let him know we were around. But as the week wore on and we wore with it, getting raunchier by the day, we didn’t figure the O’Connor hearth would be much enhanced by our presence.

I should have known better. The next time we stopped at Paul Nolte’s Lolo Gun Shop in Lewiston there was a message waiting: “Dammit, call me. O’Connor.” 

By phone, Jack told me he didn’t give a hoot how we looked. He’d seen dirty Levis before. “When you get in from hunting today, come on up to the house,” he barked. “We’ll have a libation and look at some stuffed animals. Then we’ll eat beefsteaks someplace. Adios.” Click. 

The libations were waiting when we got there, and the stuffed-animal tour got under way. It was something, it really was, although I can’t recall many details. Hides, horns and tusks, cases of superb custom rifles and shotguns that dreams are made of. Shelves of classic books bound in buckram and leather. And in the high-ceilinged trophy room, the big heads the grand slam of sheep, the stately racks of elk, caribou, moose, mule deer, kudu, and orderly benches with reloading presses, and racks of dies and components. Then back by a slightly different route, past more hides and oiled walnut and blued steel. 

If I was dazed by all this, 19-year-old Chris was stunned. He hadn’t said a word. When we got back to the living room, Jack asked: 

“Tell me, Chris, have you ever seen anything like that before?” 

“No, sir. I sure haven’t.” 

“What do you think of it?” 

“Well, sir,” said Chris thoughtfully, “you don’t fish much, do you?” 

In the 20 years I knew Jack O’Connor, it was the only time I ever saw him at a loss for words. 

As a matter of fact, Jack hated fishing. And for a gun editor, surprisingly, he wasn’t exactly breathless about handguns, either. But when it came to the long guns, and applying rifle and shotgun to the taking of game, he was deeply experienced and expressed that experience in some of the best writing that’s been done on the subject. 

Jack was one of my guiding lights in the late 1930s, when I was beginning to shoot and hunt. He was one of a special band of dream-spinners called gun writers—men like Bob Nichols, Col. Townsend Whelan, Maurice Decker, Ned Crossman, Phil Sharpe and Elmer Keith. I savored their exploits on the target range and in the field, coveted with wonderful guns they pictured and praised, and tried my best to apply what they taught me to my old low-wall .22 and the local farm thickets. 

I don’t know how many of those old-time gun writers and editors really hunted. Some of them, like some of today’s shooting writers and editors, probably hunted little or never. But there’s no denying O’Connor’s credentials in that department. His hunting skill went beyond basic shooting ability and coolness in the presence of game, although he had developed great measures of each. Jack also knew the game he hunted. He knew what it took to hunt and kill that game decently, and even more important, he knew what the game needed from the land if it was to withstand hunting pressure. He wasn’t just a sometime shooter who could turn a clever phrase. He was a hunter who’d been there and done it, and it showed. It always shows. 

Jack relied heavily on personal experience, but he was enough of a technician to distrust isolated examples and fluke occurrences. He preferred to test a bullet, cartridge or rifle in many ways before drawing a conclusion. I don’t think he ever felt really familiar with a particular cartridge until he had hunted with it. Sure, he reported on new loads and rifles tested only on the bench, but his gilt-edge endorsement was generally reserved for guns and ammo proved under rigorous field conditions. 

To the shooting public, Jack O’Connor’s middle name was “.270 Win.” He was the cartridge’s official press agent—so outspoken in its praises that he had a sort of spiritual copyright on it. The .270 may have been Winchester’s baby, but Jack was its adopted daddy. This got a bit wearisome in his later years. He was sometimes a little touchy about his public identification with the .270, but he brought it on himself with glowing anecdotes like this one from his story “Up to Our Necks in Deer”: 

“Whoopee!” said Zefarino. “That’s the kind of rifle I like, one that has power. One shot and the buck doesn’t move. How do you call it?” 

“The .270,” I said. 

“The same you shot the ram with, no?” 

“The same. 

“With the .30 you shot a buck and it ran. Then the smaller boy shot a buck with the .25 and it ran. Now the large boy shoots a buck with this rifle and it is dead in its tracks. How good a rifle, this .270!” 

“It shoots a good ball,” I said. “A very fast ball.” 

So spoke O’Connor, and the .270 flourished apace. And characteristically, Jack knew whereof he spoke. He’d wrung out the .270 on three continents. He shot at least 36 species of big game with this cartridge. These included more than 30 rams (four grand slams of American mountain sheep and four Old World species), an even dozen moose, more than a dozen black bears, two grizzlies, at least 18 elk, 17 caribou and several species of deer. How many deer? I doubt if even Jack knew. He also used the .270 in Africa on such tough game as oryx and zebra, as well as ibex, gazelle and antelope in Iran and India. 

In many ways, Jack was in the catbird seat as a gun writer. He developed during the 1920s and 1930s when great advances were being made in really modern rifles, sights and cartridges. It was a time when the bolt-action sporting rifle and its high-intensity cartridges began to really come into their own. New powders and primers and revolutionary bullet designs were appearing, telescopic sights and mounts were evolving rapidly, giant strides were being taken in fitting rifle actions and barrels into one-piece stocks, and men were revising what they’d known about accuracy. Jack O’Connor knew many rifles and shotguns, but he’ll always be most closely identified with the superbly accurate, strongly breeched, bolt-action rifle with ’scope sight and fast, jacketed bullet. After all, he was mainly a man of open country, of mountains and plains and deserts, and this showed in his interests and preferences. 

As a gun writer who depended heavily on hunting mileage, he had plenty of grist for his mill. Born in Arizona Territory in 1902, he grew up in a hunter’s paradise that still had overtones of the Old West, next door to the game-rich desert wilderness of Mexican Sonora. He’d begun writing during a period when new road systems and air travel were opening up many remote hunting ranges in the West, British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska. He had served his apprenticeship at the close of one era and the beginning of another. 

I first met him in the fall of 1958, at the first Winchester Gun Writers’ Seminar, at Nilo Farms in southwestern Illinois. Those were some fandangos, those early seminars, including such scribes as Warren Page, Pete Kuhloff, Larry Koller, John Amber, Pete Brown, Dave Wolfe, Elmer Keith, Les Bowman, Col. Charley Askins, Bill Edwards, Tom Siatos and such notable drop-ins as Col. Townsend Whelan, Nash Buckingham and Andy Devine. 

I’ve never laughed harder, learned more, or had days and nights pass any faster than at those early Winchester seminars. Rich talk and wild tales, all leavened with deep experience and salty humor. How I wish we’d taped some of those sessions in the old Stratford Hotel! About half the guys were more or less deaf, of course. A conversation between Jack O’Connor, Lee Bowman, John Amber and Elmer Keith could be heard through most of the hotel. A stranger might get the idea they were violent antagonists yelling at each other. Not so. They were good friends just trying to hear each other after too many years of unshielded muzzle blasts. And later on, after dinner, we’d all convene for the main bullshoot with half of us sitting on the floor while actor Frank Ferguson, Pete Kuhloff, Andy Devine and other masters vied in round-robin story contests that would send us to bed at 3 a.m., completely laughed out. 

Yet, I don’t think I ever heard Jack O’Connor tell a joke at one of those shindigs. He just wasn’t a joke-teller. His style of humor was anecdotal. You never belly-laughed at an O’Connor story; it was wry, dry and low key. His humor lay in the sardonic twist of real experience, and he often used it to make a point. For instance, this comment on rifle stock design: 

“Sometimes very slight changes in curves and angles make the difference between a beautiful and graceful stock and a homely and ordinary one. I am thinking of two sisters I once knew. Both were blond, witty and charming. But one (though she was a fine cook and had a heart of gold) was a rather ordinary-looking lass who got by on her good disposition and winning ways. The other was a tearing beauty, a creature so lovely that one look at her sent young men’s blood pressure skyward and set them to uttering wild, hoarse cries and tearing telephone directories apart with the bare hands. Yet actually those two girls looked much alike. It was easy to see they were sisters. What made the difference was an angle here, a line there, small dimensional differences in eyes, noses, mouths. And so it is with stocks.” 

Jack was a great admirer of the late H. L. Mencken and shared many of that great man’s views on the sad state of the English language and the world in general. Like Mencken’s, even Jack’s compliments could have a wire edge. I once spoke at a dinner meeting that Jack attended. I can’t remember the subject now, but Jack came up afterward and said: “Well, that wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be. It was fairly tolerable—although as a rule I hate afterdinner speakers like God hates St. Louis!”’ 

He spoke with authority, for his wife, Eleanor, was a St. Louis girl. Jack met her at the University of Missouri. Still, I couldn’t let that slight to one of my favorite cities go unanswered. I loved to needle Jack. 

A couple of years later, coming into Lewiston from Missoula, I passed a pulp mill whose sulphite stink tainted the air for 10 miles up the Clearwater. When I saw Jack, I gave it to him: “O’Connor, don’t you ever badmouth St. Louis again! Why, I can’t wait to get back to the Mississippi and away from this west Idaho stench! Come home with me, Jack, and breathe some good air for a change!” 

He gave me a long, level look through those wire-rimmed glasses of his. You could almost hear the gears meshing. He asked: “Madson, tell me something. How much does Remington pay you to work for Winchester?” 

“Not enough!” I said without thinking. 

“AGREED!” Jack yelled triumphantly. It made his whole day. 

We had some good yarning sessions on guns and hunting, although near the end of his life it seemed that Jack was less disposed to talk about guns than other subjects. And a thing he never tired of discussing was writing. 

Jack was a trained journalist with years of teaching at Arizona universities. All that showed, too. His work was disciplined, carefully controlled and structured. It wears well. Jack never used a heavy word when a light one would do, and he seldom used any word carelessly. He was a relentless self-editor who knew that simplicity and directness are the essences of good communication. His sentences were short, crisp and to the point. No, come to think of it, they weren’t always short. As a fine double-gun seems lighter because it is well-designed and balanced, so Jack’s longer sentences usually seem shorter than they really are. 

Jack was a durable man and well designed for his calling, seemingly made of slabs, laths, bits of wire and scraps of leather. He had to be named O’something. With that long upper lip and wire-framed specs, he was Paddy to the life—and the older he got the more Irish he looked. Now and then he’d wear a shapeless tweed hat that someone had given him; all he needed then was a blackthorn stick to be the image of a reformed Donegal poacher. 

He was also inclined to be a dour man. He was outspoken and intolerant of those he considered fools, phonies or bores, and some of his bitterest opinions were reserved for writers who produced what he called “the vast amount of vague, windy, sloppy and sometimes dishonest writing that is put out about rifle accuracy.” 

Most of Jack’s career was linked with Outdoor Life. He wrote his first piece for OL in 1934—a conservation story titled “Arizona’s Antelope Problem.” He did several more stories for the magazine during the mid-1930s, and late in 1936 editor Ray Brown asked him to write exclusively for OL. Jack accepted, and took a year’s leave of absence from teaching journalism at the University of Arizona to write magazine stories and work on a book. Thus he entered the rarefied world of freelance writing. 

He was back at the university full-time, and still doing articles for Outdoor Life, when shooting editor Ned Crossman committed suicide in 1939. Jack was asked to replace him, and began doing a regular department called “Getting the Range.” In the June 1941 issue Jack was named arms and ammunition editor and continued in that job until 1972. During his years with Outdoor Life he wrote more than 200 articles for the front of the book, in addition to shooting columns that appeared almost monthly for about 43 years. No other gun writer has racked up that much mileage with one magazine. 

Jack retired officially from Outdoor Life in 1972 although he served as shooting editor for another year after that. During those last years I hunted upland birds in level fields with him. He got along fine, but his mountain days were about over. He’d been in a bad car wreck in 1957. 

Jack died on Jan. 20, 1978, aboard a cruise ship returning from Hawaii, just two days before his 76th birthday. His wonderful wife and favorite hunting companion, Eleanor, was with him at the end—and followed him within the year. 

A few years before Jack left Outdoor Life we were yarning away an autumn evening in Lewiston, talking about hunting in general and gun writing in particular. Jack had been reflecting on the old-timers—Whelan, Sharpe, Nichols, Crossman and the rest-when he suddenly turned to me and said: “John, how in hell can they ever replace me? Who can they find who’s seen what I’ve seen, and can write about it?’’ 

My first impulse was to land on him for such a typical O’Connor remark, but after a moment’s reflection I understood. No one could really replace him. He was the product of a special time, and we’ll not see his like again, for the country and experience that shaped Jack will never exist again. He couldn’t be replaced; he could only be succeeded and by a younger man who’d write for today’s shooters, sharing their problems and hopes and not letting the rich memories of vanished places and long-ago hunts sour today’s adventures. A successor like Jim Carmichel, who Jack approved as “a good writer and a very knowledgeable young man.” Coming from O’Connor, that was about as good as anyone will get. 

The epitaph of Western artist Frederic Remington is simply: “He knew the horse.” If two generations of shooters and hunters were to rephrase that, Jack’s stone would say: “He knew the rifle and loved the game.” 

Good hunting, old friend. See you in camp at sundown.

This story, “Remembering Cactus Jack,” originally appeared in the July 1980 issue. Read more OL+ stories.

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Anyone who wants to hunt moose or bighorn sheep in Montana knows just how hard it is to compete for such limited tags. Considering the .9 percent success rate for 2022 moose tags and the 1.4 percent rate for sheep, a successful 2023 draw for either species might feel too good to be true for any hunter.

Unfortunately for 55 sheep hunters and two moose hunters, it was too good to be true. On May 16, Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks staff discovered a human error that had thrown off the May 12 moose, sheep, goat, and bison drawing. Licensing staff incorrectly entered quotas into the draw system for four sheep units and three moose units. Sixty four more licenses were drawn for all seven units than the state had set quotas for, with a margin of error ranging from one to 35 extra tags per unit.

The bighorn sheep errors are as follows:

• Unit 482-20: 15 tags available, 20 applicants drawn
• Unit 482-30: 5 tags available, 40 applicants drawn
• Unit 622-30: 10 tags available, 20 applicants drawn
• Unit 680-31: 30 tags available, 40 applicants drawn

The moose errors are as follows:

• Unit 270-50: 2 tags available, 3 applicants drawn
• Unit 332-00: 6 tags available, 8 applicants drawn
• Unit 341-50: 2 tags available, 3 applicants drawn

On Thursday FWP announced its decision to still award the five extra 482-20 tags, highly-coveted either-sex bighorn sheep tags, to the hunters who drew them, despite the error. Two lucky moose hunters also get to keep their tags; the two hunters who drew an erroneous tag in unit 270-50 and unit 341-50 will receive them, despite the original quota of two per unit, FWP Communication and Education Division administrator Greg Lemon tells Outdoor Life.

“The mistake isn’t acceptable. But the reality is harvesting [seven extra animals] is not going to have a biological impact,” he says. “The reason [we’re] making this change … is because we know the impact of this [on hunters]. We want to make sure we were as surgical in correcting this mistake as we could be.”

The other 57 extra tags in units that FWP says could not handle above-quota harvests will be rescinded. FWP knows exactly which hunters drew which extra tags, thanks to a number attached to their application, Lemon explains. This means all hunters who rightfully drew tags will still receive them.

As soon as FWP discovered the glitch, they put a block on the website so that none of the successful applicants in the seven affected districts could purchase their tags. Now, they’re in the process of identifying and alerting the 57 applicants who didn’t actually draw.

“We know this is disappointing for the people affected by this mistake, and we’re very sorry,” FWP deputy director Dustin Temple said. “We are putting the resource first, and here that means following the science for population management and ensuring that we meet hunters’ expectations for a quality hunt. In this circumstance, that means pulling back some of the licenses drawn to ensure the health of the sheep and moose populations in these areas.” 

This is the second time in two years that Montana big game draws have resulted in inaccurate draws. Last year, elk hunters had the opposite problem as this year’s sheep and moose hunters; some were kicked out of the elk draw when they should have drawn successfully. A collection of hunt units became “first and only choice” units for the 2022 season. But when hunters went in to apply and selected one of the first-choice-only units, they were still able to select second and third choices. Those who did so—2,482 applications across 10 hunt units, to be exact—were booted from the draw automatically.

The most recent elk population count puts the statewide number at around 141,000, or almost 50,000 elk above objective. Sheep and moose populations are much lower, which result in the single- to low-double-digit quotas in most units. But applications flood the draw system anyway, and the success ratios of actually drawing a tag are miniscule. In 2022, 328 out of 34,395 moose tag applications and 569 out of 40,890 sheep tag applications (which included 6,676 second-choice ewe applications) were successful, according to FWP data. 

Read Next: A Glitch Kicked 2,400 Elk and Deer Applicants Out of Montana’s Permit Draw. FWP Says They’re Fixing It

Of course, these numbers are impacted by the complexities of preference points, bonus points, residency status, and all the other moving parts that make draw systems so complex. And as point creep becomes more of a concern and hunters who play the game start feeling more like donkeys chasing carrots, these mistakes only become more crushing for hunters who get their hopes up.

“For most of these people who put in for these tags, it’s a passion,” lifelong Montanan, hunter, and taxidermist Dale Manning tells Outdoor Life. “We don’t know what their situation is. We don’t know if it was a 77 year-old man who’s been putting in since he was 16 and finally drew. Moving forward, where’s our confidence in the system? Now this has happened two years in a row. Is it going to be me next year?”

The post 64 Hunters Drew Montana Sheep and Moose Tags in Error, 7 Get to Keep Them Anyway appeared first on Outdoor Life.

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A shed hunter in Utah recently found a mule deer shed worth $10,000 in the Cricket Mountains near Delta. This makes Kreed Keele, of Price, the second winner in the ongoing $50K Bitcoin Shed Hunt that is currently taking place across the intermountain West.

Billed as “the ultimate treasure hunt for the modern-day hunter,” the competition is a PR stunt sponsored and organized by Scout to Hunt, a GPS app designed specifically for Western shed hunters. The treasure hunt involves five individual shed antlers that the company has hidden on public land in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. This includes one moose shed, two elk sheds, and two mule deer sheds. Each specially marked shed antler is worth $10,000, which can be located by solving riddles and redeemed in cash or bitcoin.

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The promotional treasure hunt is open to residents of all 50 states, but participants must create a free Scout to Hunt account to be eligible for the prize money. Participants who purchase an annual “Shedicated” subscription (at a cost of $30) also get access to a series of five riddles, which offer hints as to where the individual sheds are hidden in each state.

The first hidden shed worth $10,000 was found earlier this month in Idaho. Idaho Falls resident Bryan Haccke found the moose shed in southern Idaho, roughly eight miles from the Utah border. Haccke found the hidden antler within a few days of when the five Idaho riddles were sent out on May 4, according to Local News 8 in Idaho Falls.

Read Next: Why Everybody Loves to Hate Nonresident Elk Hunters

“The riddle [was] quite long,” Haccke told the local news station. “It started at the Raft River, and I followed the Raft River back to Narrows Road—the riddle mentioned that the path to the antler will be narrow.

Scout to Hunt released the answers to the Idaho riddles, along with the location of the moose shed, soon after Haacke reached out to claim his prize money. This involved taking a picture of the shed, marking his GPS location, and sending that information to the phone number that was attached to the base of the antler.

Keele, who was declared the competition’s second winner on Monday, found his hidden mule deer shed on May 14. Keele’s discovery means there are still $30,000 worth of specially marked shed antlers dropped on public land somewhere in Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico.

A Boon for Western Shed Hunters or a Promotional Gimmick?

If you think the whole idea behind the treasure hunt sounds a bit gimmicky, you’re not alone. By simultaneously promoting their digital mapping app and cryptocurrency, some would say the contest turns a simple pastime into a digitized frenzy for money and attention. This is something that several critics pointed out last year, when Scout to Hunt held its inaugural $50K Bitcoin Shed Hunt.

“WTF. Putting more people out on wintering grounds pressuring stressed animals for your own social media promotion,” one user wrote on the company’s YouTube channel. “This is freaking shameful. Cancel this and donate the $50 G’s to a conservation org.”

Read Next: Antler Dealer Busted for Burying Shed Caches on Public Land Receives 5-Year Hunting Ban

Besides, do we really need more financial incentives for shed hunting in the West? Dog chews are already selling for steak prices on Etsy, antler theft is on the rise, and it seems like every year people get busted caching sheds on winter ranges when they should be giving big game herds a rest. In February, Utah banned shed hunting until May 1 to avoid pressuring already vulnerable wildlife.

And speaking of the resource, any wildlife manager in the region would tell you this spring is not an ideal time to build your social media following by shed hunting. A brutal winter has caused huge losses in herds throughout the West, with Utah seeing some of the worst winterkill in decades. State agencies are already cutting tags while some hunters contemplate sitting out this hunting season altogether.

The post Shed Hunter Finds $10,000 Mule Deer Antler, One of Five Hidden Across the West appeared first on Outdoor Life.

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An Alaska man has been indicted for offering hunting guiding services without necessary licenses and helping two clients harvest bull moose illegally. Michael Mikhail Beans, 34, of Saint Mary’s faces two felony charges for Lacey Act violations and 19 felony counts of wire fraud stemming from $59,000 collected from unsuspecting moose hunters. A federal Grand Jury in Anchorage charged Beans on April 21.

More than 30 hunters have fallen victim to Beans’ ploy since October 2021. They paid him for guiding services on moose hunts scheduled for September 2022 and 2023. Beans then canceled the hunts without providing refunds to clients. Two clients actually went on bull moose hunts with Beans and were eventually successful. But Beans’ lack of a big game guide or transporter license rendered those hunts illegal.

An arraignment date has yet to be set, but Beans could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine if convicted.

Alaska’s Recent History of Unlicensed Hunting Guides

Such a punishment is similar to what Anchorage resident Stephen Hicks received in July 2022 after getting busted for selling unlicensed Dall sheep guiding services, guiding same-day airborne hunts, wanton waste, hunting without tags, and other wildlife crimes. Hicks was sentenced to six months in prison and three years of unsupervised release. He was also ordered to pay $13,460 in restitution for an illegally-sold Dall sheep hunt.

Idaho resident Paul Silvis was also found guilty of multiple Lacey Act violations for selling unlicensed guiding services on bear and moose hunts in Noatak National Preserve. In January 2020, Silvis was sentenced to six months of home confinement, five years of supervised release, and a $20,000 fine. Silvis also received a lifetime ban from hunting in Alaska. He had made an estimated $121,500 from his services, which he advertised under “Orion Outfitters.”

Read Next: Every Hunter Should Know What the Lacey Act Is and How It Works

“Unwavering wildlife law enforcement is critical to the health and well-being of the state’s wildlife populations, which are an irreplaceable part of Alaska’s natural heritage,” District of Alaska attorney S. Lane Tucker said of Hicks’ case. “Wildlife is also critical to Alaska Natives for subsistence hunting and fishing as well as sport hunting and tourism. In coordination with our federal and state partners, our office will pursue and prosecute to the fullest extent of the law those who violate wildlife laws.”

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The annual moose hunt is one of Maine’s most revered sporting traditions. Beyond that, the fact that Maine has enough vast wilderness to support moose, its state animal, is a source of pride among residents. But harvest numbers have been slowly shrinking over the few decades, and in 2022, the hunter success rate reached a record low.

Hunters filled just 62 percent of moose tags this season, data from the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife shows. If you include a statistical outlier from the adaptive unit hunt, where state biologists are conducting experiments on how moose and ticks interact, the success rate was even lower, just 58 percent. (The overall success rate from the adaptive hunt unit was 26 percent.)

Maine Moose Hunts Past

These numbers fall well short of the 18-year average 73.5-percent success rate. Interestingly, there were more permits issued this year than in recent years. Including the adaptive management hunt, 4,050 permits were available for the 2022 season. The last time more than 4,000 permits were issued was in 2013, when the state distributed 4,110 of them. But that same year, hunters had a 72-percent success rate and harvested 2,978 moose. This year, hunters harvested 644 fewer moose than they did in 2013, and almost 300 fewer than in 2021.

In the years that followed the 2013 season, harvest numbers took a serious dip. They bottomed out in 2017 when just 1,518 tags were filled. But available permits were also lower than usual, so success rates were pretty average around that time. You can see how harvest success has fluctuated in the graph below.

Made withVisme

So what does this all mean? In the grand scheme of things, the shifting numbers aren’t as indicative of the overall state moose population as they might seem. Harvest success is impacted by changes in weather, season dates, and hunting rules, not just the overall number of moose on the landscape. DIF&W started managing the moose population in 1999 and they’ve “changed so many things since the beginning of the moose hunt that it’s not really comparable over time,” moose biologist Lee Kantar told the Bangor Daily News.

Tick-ing Time Bomb

The DIF&W says that moose populations are stable in their core range for now. But biologists are increasingly concerned about the toll winter ticks take on cow reproductive success and calf survival. As climate change pushes the first hard snow later and later into the year, ticks and other parasites don’t die off in the cold months when they used to. Instead, they attack moose in the late summer and early fall, especially as moose become more mobile during the rut. The ticks ride out the winter on their hosts and detach in early spring, at which point females can lay up to 4,000 eggs and the cycle starts all over again. (Winter ticks are different than dog ticks and deer ticks.)

Winter ticks killed 60 of the 70 collared calves that biologists were tracking in Piscataquis and Somerset counties in 2021. The moose can carry anywhere from 40,000 to 90,000 ticks at a time, DIF&W told Maine Public Radio. The state agency’s solution? Lower the moose population density to give ticks fewer hosts to thrive on. That’s where the adaptive management hunt unit experiment comes into play.

Started in 2019 and expected to run through 2025, biologists are increasing the number of permits in one part of the unit and distributing a normal number of permits in the other, in an attempt to see if a reduced population density would make a difference in how ticks prevail. This science could support how northern Vermont and New Hampshire handle their winter tick issues as well.

“It’s complicated, but the nature of our adaptive hunt is we have room to make some changes if we need to and we’ll look at all that stuff,” Kantar told the Bangor Daily News. “We need to figure out how we’re going to continue to make our way through this.”

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This is the first story in our This Happened to Me series, which is based on our long-standing adventure comic first published in 1940. We will be publishing one each week in the coming months.

BY THE TIME we started glassing for moose the morning of Sept. 17, I figured the worst of our troubles was over.

I was with my buddy Cal Stefanko and his dad, Craig, and this was a bucket-list trip: my first fly-in Alaska moose hunt. It was a do-it-yourself hunt, and the only help we had was from the air taxi that had dropped us and our gear at the lake we were camped by.

I was lucky enough to kill a big bull during our first day of hunting on Sept. 13, but I quickly learned how difficult it is to pack such a massive animal across that unforgiving and uneven country. I had shot the moose 2.5 miles away from where we were camped, and it took us the rest of that afternoon and the entire next day to pack everything back to camp.

We spent the next several days hunkered down in our tent as a typhoon lashed the coast, bringing floods, downpours, and brutal winds to most of southwestern Alaska. The storm was actually a blessing, because we were so damn tired that we could hardly get out of bed those couple of days. At 70 years old, Craig was exhausted. My own body was toast, and even Cal, who is only 22, was beat. By the time the storm passed through, we could hear bulls in every direction. With one more tag to fill, Cal and I made a deal: We wouldn’t kill another moose unless we could recover it within a mile of camp.

Read Next: This Happened to Me: I Almost Froze to Death on a Solo Bighorn Hunt

We kept to our word and the next afternoon a huge, 70-plus-inch bull came in slowly and crossed the river. Cal dropped it with one shot at 15 yards—just 350 yards from our tent. After caping out the bull and skinning it, we returned to our tents and passed out.

The next morning, I used my Garmin inReach to message the bush pilot. I let him know that we had tagged both our moose and were still quartering the second one. We would be ready to get picked up later that day. But it was foggy and raining with low visibility, so the pilot told me to touch base with him again that afternoon.

We finished with Cal’s moose by lunchtime, then napped some more. I stepped outside the tent at 4 p.m. and let him know the fog ceiling had lifted. I told him we could see the mountaintops all around us.

“We’re on our way,” he replied. “We’ll be there at 5:30.”

Because of all the added weight from our moose, they sent two Beavers to pick us up. Our lake didn’t have enough runway, so the two pilots puddle-jumped all our gear to a bigger lake nearby. We loaded both planes and distributed the weight evenly, but by this time the weather started getting really bad again—and so did our luck.

I climbed into one plane beside the pilot, and Cal got in the back seat. Behind him was the cargo net holding the giant moose antlers and some of our gear. Craig, the rest of our gear, and the meat were with the other pilot in the second plane.

Our pilot took off first. He pointed the plane to the north—the only direction without the big, steep banks that surrounded us. But as we started to climb up out of the bowl, a huge crosswind slammed into our right wing, turning the plane. The gust shoved the tip of the left wing down and into the water. Now we were careening west—straight toward a 20-foot bank.

The pilot tried his best to get us off the water, but we didn’t make it. The left pontoon rammed into the bank and catapulted us, spinning, into the sky. Then the plane started to slow and tilt, and we rushed toward the earth again, nosediving as the tundra sped up to meet us. The impact was so severe that the plane flipped over.

The first thing I said was, “Cal, you OK?”

But then the pilot started yelling. “We gotta get out!” he shouted.

I unhooked my seatbelt, but I didn’t realize we were upside down. I fell straight onto the roof of the plane, disoriented.

The whole windshield was broken, so I crawled out and hit the SOS button on my Garmin. I turned around and saw Cal staggering out of the side door, and then the pilot came last, crawling out through the windshield. He was bleeding from his head, and he kept yelling, “We gotta get away from the plane!” He thought it was going to catch on fire.

The three of us ran for all we were worth back to the lake. I saw the other Beaver pulling up as we arrived, and they were in shock, too. They had seen the whole horrible crash and couldn’t believe we were still alive. Craig was up front with the other pilot, and we could see his stricken expression even through the windshield. He was as white as a ghost because he thought he’d just lost his son.

Eventually we determined the wrecked plane was safe to approach—there were no visible sparks, and we couldn’t smell gasoline—so we grabbed our gear from the back. Then we loaded our essentials into the other Beaver, and we all flew back to King Salmon.

Meanwhile, my wife was getting calls from the Alaska State Troopers and search-and-rescue personnel. “Your husband has been in a plane crash,” they all told her. She was worried at first, but eventually decided that since I was able to hit the SOS button—and because I’m a nurse—we’d be able to survive for at least a night.

After we landed safely, the authorities took me, Cal, and the pilot to get checked out at the hospital. I had some cuts in my hand that required glue, and the pilot needed 17 stitches in his head. The investigators were already there to ask us questions, and everyone we spoke with said they had no clue how we walked away from the plane crash. With those kinds of G-forces, they explained, we should have died on impact.

The pilot recovered, but that turned out to be his last flight. He was an awesome guy and said he’d been flying up there for 40 years, but he told his boss that day that he was done. He retired on the spot.

Read more OL+ stories.

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Olive A. Fredrickson wrote six stories for Outdoor Life about her life as a homesteader, trapper, and subsistence hunter in Canada. Eventually, she turned her experiences into a novel, The Silence of the North, which was co-written with former OL staff writer Ben East and ultimately made into a movie in 1981. This was her first magazine story, published in 1967 under the title “I Had To Have Moose.”

THE CANOE WAS a 30-foot dugout that the local tribe had given me on credit. They’d be along in the fall to claim payment in potatoes.

It had been hollowed out from a big cottonwood with a hand ax, but the tree wasn’t straight to begin with, and the canoe had inherited the character of its parent. Otherwise they would not have parted with it. As a result it was not only heavy and unwieldy but also so cranky you hardly dared to look over the side unless your hair was parted in the middle. 

I was in the stern, paddling. My six-year-old daughter Olive was wedged firmly in the bow. Between us were Vala, five, and the baby, Louis, two. We were going moose hunting, and since there was no one to leave the children with, we’d have to go as a family. 

We weren’t hunting for fun. It was early summer, and the crop of vegetables I had planted in our garden was growing, but there was nothing ready for use yet, and we were out of food. 

The moose season wouldn’t open until fall, but at that time British Columbia game regulations allowed a prospector to get a permit and kill a moose any time he needed one for food. I was not a prospector and, anyway, I had no way to go into town for the permit unless I walked 27 miles each way. But my babies and I were as hungry as any prospector would ever be, and we had to have something to eat. I was sure the good Lord would forgive me, and I hoped the game warden would too, if he found out about it. 

So one hot, windless July day—shortly before my twenty-eighth birthday—when fly season was getting real bad, I called the youngsters together. 

“We’ve got to go try to kill a moose,” I said. I knew the moose would be coming down to the river on that kind of day to rid themselves of flies and mosquitoes. 

I had never shot a moose, but necessity is the mother of a lot of new experiences, and I decided I could do it all right if I got the chance. I got Olive and Louis and Vala ready, loaded them into the big clumsy canoe, and poked four shells into my old .30/30 Winchester Model 94. I jacked one into the chamber, put the hammer on half cock, and started upstream against the quiet current of the Stuart River. 

It was a little more than a year after the June day in 1928 when a neighbor, Jack Hamilton, had come to our lonely homestead 40 miles down the Stuart from Fort St. James, in the mountain country of central British Columbia. He had a telegram for me from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at Edmonton, and had to break the news that my husband, Walter Reamer, a trapper, had drowned in Leland Lake on the Alberta–Northwest Territories border. Walter’s canoe had tipped over in a heavy windstorm. 

That was almost 40 years ago, but I still remember raising my hand to my eyes to wipe away the fog that suddenly clouded them and Hamilton leading me to a chair by the kitchen table. 

“You’d better sit down, Mrs. Reamer,” he said. 

I looked around at my three children. Olive, then only five years old, stood wide-eyed, not quite taking it all in. Vala was playing with her little white kitten, and Louis lay on his back, reaching for his toes. What was to become of them and me?

Olive leaned her head against my skirt and began to cry softly for her daddy, and I felt a lump in my chest that made it hard to breathe. But that was not the time for tears. If I cried, I’d do it out of the children’s sight. “Will you be all right?” Jack Hamilton asked before he left. 

“I’ll be all right,” I told him firmly. 

All right? I wondered. I was 26 and a homesteader-trapper’s widow with three little children, 160 acres of brush-grown land, almost none of it cleared, a small log house—and precious little else. 

That was just before the start of the great depression, the period that Canadians of my generation still call the dirty thirties. There was no allowance for dependent children then. I knew I could get a small sum of relief money each month, maybe about $12 for the four of us, but I did not dare to ask for it. 

Olive and Louis had been born in Canada, but Vala had been born in the United States, as had I. I was afraid that if I appealed for help, Vala or I or both of us might be sent back to that country. In the very first hours of my grief and loneliness, I vowed I’d never let that happen, no matter what. It was the four of us alone now, to fight the world of privation and hunger, but at least we’d stay together. 

My father had been a trapper, and my mother had died when I was eight. We had been a happy family, but always poor folk with no money to speak of. And after I married Walter, his trapline didn’t bring in much. I had never known anything but a hard life, but now I was thankful for it. I knew I was more up to the hardships that lay ahead than most women would be. 

I don’t think I looked the part. Please don’t get the idea that I was a backwoods frump, untidy and slovenly. I was small, five feet two, and weighed 112, all good solid muscle. And if I do say it, when I had the proper clothes on and was out dancing, I could compete with the best of them in looks. 

There were a lot of moose around our homestead, some deer, black bears, wolves, rabbits, grouse, fox, mink, and muskrat. I decided I’d become a hunter and trapper on my own. 

We had a little money on hand to buy food with. We had no horses, but I dug potatoes, raked hay—did whatever I could for our few neighbors to pay for the use of a team. By the next spring, I had managed to clear the brush and trees from a few acres of good land. 

Olive was housekeeper, cook, and baby-sitter while I worked outside. I planted a vegetable garden and started a hay meadow. I hunted grouse and rabbits, and neighbors helped out the first winter by giving us moose meat. We managed to eke out a living. It was all hard work, day in and day out, dragging myself off to bed when dark came and crawling out at daylight to begin another day. But at least my babies and I had something to eat. 

Then, in July of 1929, our food gave out. I couldn’t bring myself to go deeper in debt to my neighbors, and in desperation I decided on the out-of-season moose hunt. With the few odds and ends we had left, we could make out on moose meat until the garden stuff started to ripen.

We hadn’t gone far up the Stuart in the cranky dugout before I began to see moose tracks along shore and worn moose paths leading down to the river. Then we rounded a bend, and a big cow moose was standing out on a grassy point, dunking her ungainly head and coming up with mouthfuls of weeds. 

I didn’t want to kill a cow and maybe leave a calf to starve, but I don’t think I was ever more tempted in my life than I was right then. That big animal meant meat enough to last us the rest of the summer, and by canning it I could keep every pound from spoiling. I paddled quietly ahead, whispering warnings to the kids to sit still and keep quiet. The closer I got, the more I wanted that moose. She finally saw us and looked our way while I wrestled with my conscience. 

I’ll never know what the outcome would have been, for about the time I was getting near enough to shoot, Olive let out a squeal of pure delight, and I saw a little red-brown calf raise up out of the tall grass. That settled it. 

The children all talked at once, and the cow grunted to her youngster and waded out, ready to swim the river. We were only 200 feet away at that point, and all of a sudden she decided she didn’t like us there. Her ears went back, the hair on her shoulders stood up, and her grunts took on a very unfriendly tone. I stuck my paddle into the mud and waited, wondering just what I’d do if she came for us. 

There was no chance I could maneuver that cumbersome dugout out of her way. But I quieted the youngsters with a sharp warning, and after a minute the cow led her calf into deep water and they struck out for the opposite side of the river. I sighed with relief when they waded ashore and walked up a moose trail out of sight. 

A half mile farther up the river we landed. I took Louis piggyback and carried my gun, and the four of us walked very quietly over a grassy point where I thought moose might be feeding. We didn’t see any, and now the kids began to complain that they were getting awful hungry. I was hungry, too. We sat down on the bank to rest, and I saw a good rainbow trout swimming in shallow water. 

I always carried a few flies and fishhooks in my hatband, and I tied a fly to a length of string and threw it out, using the string as a handline. The trout took the fly on about the fifth toss, and I hauled it in. I fished a little longer and caught two pikeminnow, and we hit back to the canoe. 

I built a fire and broiled the rainbow and one of the pikeminnow on sticks. The kids divided the trout, and I ate the pikeminnow. As a rule pikeminnow have a muddy flavor, and I had really caught those two for dog food. But that one tasted all right to me. 

A little farther up the Stuart, we came on two yearling mule deer with stubby spikes of antlers in the velvet. They watched us from a cut bank but spooked and disappeared into the brush soon after I saw them. A little later the same thing happened with two bull moose. They saw us and ran into the willows while I was reaching for my gun. I was so disappointed and discouraged I wanted to bawl. 

That made four moose we had seen, counting the calf, without getting a shot, and I decided that killing one was going to be a lot harder than I had thought. And my arms were so tired from paddling the heavy dugout that they felt ready to drop out of the sockets. 

I had brought a .22 along, as well as the .30/30, and a little while after that I used it to shoot a grouse that was watching us from the bank.

I had about given up all hope of getting a moose and was ready to turn back for the long paddle home when I saw what looked like the back of one, standing almost submerged in the shade of some cottonwoods up ahead. 

I shushed the kids and eased the canoe on for a better look, and sure enough, I was looking at a young bull, probably a yearling. Just a dandy size for what I wanted. 

He was feeding, pulling up weeds from the bottom and putting his head completely under each time he went down for a mouthful. I paddled as close as I dared, and warned Olive and Vala to put their hands over their ears and keep down as low as they could, for I had to shoot over their heads. 

I put the front bead of the Winchester just behind his shoulder, at the top of the water, and when he raised his head I let him have it. He went down with a great splash, and I told the kids they could raise up and look. 

Luckily for us, the young bull did not die right away there in deep, muddy water. I don’t know how I’d ever have gotten him ashore for dressing. When I got close with the dugout he was trying to drag himself out on the bank. My shot had broken his back. I crowded him with the canoe, feeling sorry for him all the while, and as soon as I had him all the way on dry land I finished him with a head shot. 

I had always hated to kill anything, and by that time I was close to tears. Then I saw Olive leaning against a tree, crying her heart out, and Vala and Louis with their faces all screwed up in tears, and I felt worse than ever. But I reminded myself that it had to be done to feed the children, and I wiped my eyes and explained to them as best I could. About that time a porcupine came waddling along, and that took their minds off the moose. 

Dressing a moose, even a yearling bull, is no fun. I went at it now, and it was about as hard a job as I had ever tackled. The kids tried to help but only succeeded in getting in the way. And while I worked, I couldn’t help worrying about my out-of-season kill. What would happen if I were found out? Would the game warden be as understanding as I hoped?

WHEN THE JOB was done, I built a small fire to boil the partridge I’d shot and a few pieces of moose meat for our supper, giving Louis the broth in his bottle. I felt better after I ate, and I loaded the meat into the dugout and started home. But it was full dark now, and I was so tired that I soon decided not to go on.

We went ashore, spread out a piece of canvas, part under and part over us, and tried to sleep. The mosquitoes wouldn’t let us, and I finally gave up. I sat over the children the rest of the night, switching mosquitoes off with a willow branch. Daylight came about 4 o’clock, and we got on the way. 

I’ll never forget that early-morning trip back to our place. My hands were black with mosquitoes the whole way, and the torment was almost too much. Joel Hammond, a neighbor, had given me some flour he’d made by grinding his own wheat in a hand mill, and the first thing I did was build a fire and make a batch of hot cakes. The flour was coarse and sort of dusty, but with moose steak and greens fried in moose fat, those cakes made a real good meal. Then I went to work canning meat. 

That was the only moose I ever killed out of season. When hunting season rolled around that fall I got a homesteader’s free permit and went after our winter’s supply of meat. It came even harder that time.

The first one I tried for I wounded with a shot that must have cut through the tip of his lungs. He got away in thick brush, and I took our dog Chum and followed him. Chum drove him back into the river, and he swam across and stood wheezing and coughing on the opposite side, too far off for me to use my only remaining shell on him. Chum swam the river in pursuit, and started to fight him in shallow water. 

Another neighbor, Ross Finley, who lived on the quarter section next to ours, heard me shoot and came up to lend a hand. He loaded Olive and me into our dugout, and we paddled across to where the dog was badgering the moose. When we got close, Finley used my last shell but missed. 

The bull, fighting mad by now, came for the canoe, throwing his head this way and that. I was scared stiff, for I couldn’t swim a stroke and neither I could Olive. I knew that one blow from the moose’s antlers would roll the dugout over like a pulpwood bolt. 

I had the bow paddle, and I moved pretty fast, but at that the moose didn’t miss us by a foot as I swung the canoe away from him. He was in deep water now, and Chum was riding on his shoulders and biting at the back of his neck. The dog took the bull’s attention for a second or two, and I reached down and grabbed Finley’s .22, which was lying in the bottom of the dugout. 

I shot the moose right at the butt of the ear, with the gun almost touching him. He sank quietly out of sight, leaving Chum floating in the water. The dog was so worn out from the ruckus that we had to help him ashore. 

We tried hard to locate the dead moose. But the current had carried it downriver, and it was days before we found it. The carcass was lying in shallow water at the mouth of a creek, the meat spoiled. 

There were plenty more around, however. We could hear them fighting at night, grunting and snorting, and sometimes their horns would clash with a noise as loud as an ax hitting a hollow log. In the early mornings I saw as many as five at one time along the weedy river shore. I waited and picked the one I wanted, and that time I killed him with no trouble. 

The Stuart was full of ducks and geese that fall, and there were grouse everywhere I went in the woods. I had plenty of ammunition for the .22 and always a few .30/30 shells around. I canned everything I killed and no longer worried about a meat shortage. Life was beginning to sort itself out. 

A few unmarried men came around and tried to shine up to me, but I wasn’t interested. All I wanted was to get more land cleared and buy a cow or two and a team of horses of my own. The young homestead widow was proving to herself that she could take care of her family and make the grade. 

BUT BEFORE the winter was over I had another crisis. By February most of our food was gone, except for the canned meat and a few cans of vegetables. We had used the last of the hand-ground flour that Joel Hammond had given me and were desperately in need of groceries. I had no money, but I decided to walk the 27 miles to Vanderhoof, on the Prince George-Prince Rupert railroad, and try to get the supplies we needed on credit. I knew I could pay for them with potatoes the next fall, for by that time I had enough land cleared to grow a bigger potato crop than we needed for ourselves. 

I left the three children with the George Vinsons, neighbors a mile and a half downriver, and started out on a cold, wintry morning. I had a road to follow, but only a few teams and sleighs had traveled it, and the walking was hard, in deep snow. Two miles out of Vanderhoof I finally hitched a ride. 

I didn’t have any luck getting credit against my potato crop. Those were hard times, and I guess the merchants couldn’t afford much generosity. I tried first to buy rubbers for myself and the kids. We needed them very badly, and they were the cheapest footgear available. But the store turned me down.

A KINDLY WOMAN who ran a restaurant did well by me, however. She gave me a good dinner, and when I put her down for 50 pounds of potatoes, she just smiled and shoved a chocolate bar into my pocket. I saw to it that she got the potatoes when the time came, anyway.

Another storekeeper told me that he couldn’t let me have things on credit, but he gave me $2 in cash and told me to do the best I could with it. I knew where part of it was going for the oatmeal and sugar I had promised Louis and Vala and Olive when I got home. But I couldn’t see any way to pay for another meal for myself or a room for the night, and I walked around Vanderhoof thinking of how wet and cold our feet would be in the slush of the spring thaw. 

I was about as heartbroken as I’ve ever been in my life. 

Finally I decided to make another attempt. Some of my neighbors on the Stuart River traded at a store at Finmoore, 19 miles east of Vanderhoof. I also had a friend there, Mrs. John Holter. I’d walk the railroad track to Finmoore and try my luck there. At the time I didn’t know how far it was, and I expected a hike of only 10 miles or so. 

It was about dark when I started. The railroad ties were crusted with ice, and the walking was very bad. My clothes were hardly enough for the cold night, either: denim overalls, men’s work socks, moccasins, and an old wool sweater with the elbows out, worn under a denim jacket. 

I had never been brave in the dark, any time or any place, and I can’t tell you what an ordeal that walk was. All I could think of were the hobos I had heard stories about, the railroad bums, and I was afraid of every shadow. 

I got to the lonely little station at Hulatt, 15 miles from Vanderhoof, at midnight and asked the stationmaster if I could rest until daylight. I lay down on the floor by the big potbellied stove. It was warm and cozy, and I was worn out. I started to drift off to sleep, but then I began to worry about the children and the likelihood that if I was later in getting home than I had promised, they might come back to the house and get into trouble starting a fire. Things were hard enough without having the place burned down. I got up and trudged away along the track once more.

It was 2 o’clock in the morning when I reached the Holter place. Mrs. Holter fixed me a sandwich and a cup of hot milk, and I fell into bed. She shook me awake at 9 o’clock, as I had told her to. Those scant seven hours were all the sleep I had in more than 36.

Mrs. Holter loaned me another $2, and I went to the general store and struck it rich. The proprietor, Percy Moore, stared at me in disbelief when I poured out my hard-luck story. 

“You’ve walked from the Stuart River since yesterday morning?” he asked in amazement. “That’s forty-six miles!” 

“No, forty-four,” I corrected him. “I got a ride the last two miles into Vanderhoof.” Then I added, “I’ve got fourteen more to walk home before dark tonight, too.” 

The first thing he let me have, on credit, was the three pairs of rubbers we needed so desperately. Then he took care of my grocery list. Eight pounds of oatmeal, three of rice, five of beans, five of sugar and—for a bonus-a three-pound pail of strawberry jam. 

I plodded away from Finmoore at 10 o’clock that morning with almost 30 pounds in a packsack on my back. 

Three inches of wet snow had fallen that morning, and the 14-mile walk seemed endless, each mile longer than the one before. My pack got heavier and heavier, and sometime in the afternoon I began to stumble and fall. I was so tired by that time, and my back ached so cruelly from the weight of the pack, that I wanted to lie there in the snow and go to sleep.

But I knew better. After each fall, I’d drive myself back to my feet and stagger on. 

TO THIS DAY I do not know when it was that I reached our place, but it was long after dark. Chum met me in the yard, and no human being was ever more glad to fumble at the latch of his own door. 

I slid out of the pack, pulled off my wet moccasins and socks, and rolled into bed with my clothes on. The last thing I remember was calling the dog up to lie at my feet for warmth. The children awakened me at noon the next day, fed me breakfast, and rubbed some of the soreness out of my swollen legs and feet. 

Next fall, when I harvested my potato crop, I paid off my debt to Percy Moore in full, except for one item. There was no way to pay him, ever, for his kindness to me when I was broke and had three hungry children at home. 

I was to make many more trips to Finmoore in the years before I left the Stuart, for I did most of my trading at his store. And when times got better, he and his wife and daughter Ruth often came out and bought vegetables and eggs from me. I remember walking back to his place the next year, carrying six dressed chickens, selling them for 50¢ apiece, spending the money for food and packing it home. Three dollars bought quite a heavy load in those days.

This text has been minimally edited to meet contemporary standards.

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“IT’S ALL BURNED UP,” Chad Hewitt shouts over the Beaver’s roar, briefly lifting one hand off the flight controls to wave across a blackened expanse. “Everything’s gone.”

I try yelling a question from the second-row seat, but my voice is lost in the drone of the single propeller. My hunting partner, Steven Kurian, doesn’t hear me either. As we approach the pond where we plan to start our 50-mile float hunt, the traveling dot on my phone screen grazes waypoints with names like “open pit” and “bulk tailings storage.” A platinum-blond grizzly observes our low passage over the tundra. Hewitt banks, sails over a few more ridges, and circles a verdant confluence of creeks before splashing down. As we glide to the bank, he leaps from the cockpit to the float, then lashes the plane to a scrub alder. Steve jumps out behind him.

I met Steve, veteran gill net captain and owner of Pride of Bristol Bay, a direct-from-the-fishery wild Alaska salmon business, just six months before this hunt. We bonded over shared backgrounds in commercial and fly fishing, and a fondness for traditional archery and nasty wilderness adventures. He was looking for a moose-hunting companion this fall, and I raised my hand.

“The mine camp was over there, or what’s left of it,” Hewitt says as we toss dry bags and raft parts onto the spongy lakeshore. “They tried to cut a fire line around the buildings and drilling gear, but it jumped.”

This summer, the Upper Talarik fire ripped through 9,000 acres of trees and tundra, demolishing the Pebble Partnership’s exploratory mining facilities. Nearly 300,000 more acres burned just to the west during one of the hottest, driest Alaskan summers on record. But compared to stiff political headwinds, a few torched Quonset huts are only minor setbacks for the Canadian mining corporation. Northern Dynasty Minerals, Pebble’s owner and parent company, is likely flying in a holding pattern until those winds shift in its favor again.

Hewitt has seen this cycle play out many times before. He first came to the Bristol Bay region in 1993, a few days after graduating high school and shortly after one of the world’s largest deposits of copper and gold was discovered here. Hewitt started as a fly-fishing guide but fell in love with flying. Now 47, he co-owns three fishing lodges, a rafting business, an air taxi company, and a remote fishing camp on the hallowed Lower Talarik Creek. Even with all those businesses to manage, he still flies his immaculate de Havilland Beaver every day.

To Hewitt, the Pebble Mine remains an existential threat. “It’d completely change all of this,” he says. “My livelihood would be done.”

Much ink has been spilled over the proposed mine’s potential effects on commercial, recreational, and tribal fisheries. Every conservationist hails the area’s native rainbow trout population and the economically critical sockeye runs—each the largest of its kind on Earth. Few examine the changes a road system and a 5.3-square-mile mine footprint would bring to wildlife in this untrammeled land.

“You guys didn’t bring much stuff,” Hewitt comments idly, untying the plane and glancing over our gear. Steve and I lock eyes with looks of dismay bordering on panic. We packed light on purpose—should we have brought more stuff?

“OK, good luck!” Our pilot waves, drifting away in the de Havilland.

Before either of us knows it, or we really know each other, we’re watching Hewitt’s floatplane disappear over the horizon, leaving us alone in the wilderness.

On Tundra Time

We inflate the raft and drag it to the river, sweating in our waders after maneuvering the 15-foot boat through gnarled bank-side alders. As we return to the pond, a caribou comes over the rise on the other side. Ears erect, the crusty old bull trots our way to get a better look, then beds to watch us haul another load of gear. He’s gone when we make a third trip.

The river flows shallow and gunmetal gray as I assemble my Seek Outside Tipi Tent on a grassy bank, pondering Hewitt’s intel that no one has floated this stream in four years due to low water and logjams. Camp arranged, we string our bows and set out to glass and call. Steve and I both aspire to make a traditional bow kill, but I brought a rifle just in case. The principal goal is to bring home meat, to make a success of this harebrained adventure. Moose season opens tomorrow, so we head out to scout—and look for the ptarmigan we heard chuckling earlier.

A nearby rock field affords a view of a braided section of river, and Steve wails through his birch-bark cone like a lonely cow. We peer into the cottonwoods for an hour before I decide to walk around the pond to survey our route downriver. A band of mottled ptarmigan sail off a weathered bluff ahead, and I nock a blunt-tipped arrow. One tall head remains as I creep to 20 yards. The shaft brushes the bird and vanishes into spongy tundra moss forever.

From a promontory beyond, miles of tundra give way to forests of cottonwood, birch, then spruce as the landscape slouches toward Bristol Bay. Mountains constrict the valley some 20 miles off, bisected by scars from wildfire. So much ground to cover, I think.

I return to the moraine expecting Steve has seen as many moose as I have. Instead, he vectors my spotting scope to a meadow where a young bull appears to be pestering a cow. A good omen but no opportunity in this unit, which permits nonresidents to kill bulls with only four or more brow tines or a 50-inch spread. We return to the tent as the light dissolves.

Rain patters on the tent as we gear up with that edginess reserved for opening morning. So much moisture lingers that we can barely glass for five minutes from the moraine without wiping lenses. Index fingers to my nose and thumbs on my throat, I bawl my loudest nasal moan across the tundra.

The fog and drizzle clear enough for us to see up the valley, but the moose we spotted have moved on. Restless after two hours of glassing, Steve wanders toward camp for a fresh angle. I hear him gasp from 30 paces.

“Bull,” he exhales. “Big bull. Back by the tent.”

I rush over to train the spotting scope on the gray-brown dot moving steadily up the far side of the valley. The word steroids flashes oddly in my mind as a neck and expansive shoulders come into focus. There’s no doubt this heavyset moose is legal.

I cow-call again and the bull slows, lifting his head in acknowledgment. We run to the river to set an ambush, only to find our knee boots insufficient for the rising current. Steve keeps watch while I jog to the tent for our waders (and my bullets). I hear him call pleadingly as I hustle back. Donning waders, he points to where the bull veered up a hillside covered in old-growth alders. We ford the stream and spot the moose again, glaring and alert to our grunts and wails but otherwise unmoved. After hustling higher to the edge of the thicket, I begin bashing a log against a tree to imitate a bull raking his antlers. The moose takes a few steps and vanishes.

We call for an hour, then retreat to the river for a better view. But this landscape, which looked so flat and gentle from the Beaver’s window, can apparently hide an animal too tall to walk under a NBA basketball hoop.

Eventually we decide to bushwhack up the mountain. A high knob above the trees gives us the elevation we want, but we can’t see through the thick brush. I need to get in there and bird-dog this three-quarter-ton pheasant.

With my rifle across my back, I drop back to the treeline. Creeping among volcanic rubble and impenetrable jungle, I glass every gap in the vegetation, calling as I go. A few hundred yards puts me well past where we last saw the bull, so I turn and again reach a rise. I grunt as loudly as my lungs can manage. Ivory tips spring above the greenery.

I grunt again. The paddles lower and trees dance. I jog uphill to try to see Steve, but when I turn around, the antlers are gone. I mentally mark the spot and hike high enough that Steve notices my jumping-jack wave. Minutes later, he arrives with his bow but not mine.

Oh well, I think, no time to waste.

We thread our way through alders separating strips of moraine for 150 yards until I motion to Steve to slow.

“I’m pretty sure he’s only about 30 yards past these rocks,” I whisper.

Steve sneaks to the edge and nocks an arrow. I hang back to call, climbing a big rock and racking a round for good measure. Filling my chest with air, I punch out a hard “ERRUH.”

Antlers rise fast. The bull corrects my intonation with a deeper, more nasal grunt. He smashes through trees as he comes uphill. Just before running out of cover, he stops. For five long minutes, he rakes alders and answers calls. Steve stands ready at 12 yards but can see nothing more than antlers. Finally, the bull continues inside of the treeline as he works downwind. Steve looks to me, curling his index finger in and out as if pulling an invisible trigger.

“Do you have a shot?” he whisper-shouts. “He’s gonna wind us. Shoot him if you can!”

I reposition myself higher on the rock until I can just see a sliver of hide. As I settle behind the scope, the moose steps forward enough to expose the crease behind his shoulder, and I fire.

The bull spins and smashes off, bulldozing alders thick as my leg. The report of my follow-up shot echoes with a tremendous crash below. As Steve and I climb back to our packs, a strange remorse briefly floods me.

That could have been Steve’s archery opportunity. And you have another eight damn days out here, I think. Then my better angels reply. I’m pretty sure that’s the kind of bull you do not let get away.

A Mine in the Morass

That night, I feed the collapsible wood stove to dry clothes and braise backstrap in butter while trying not to cramp up. From where I lie on my sleeping bag, it’s about a mile to the kill. Another handful of trackless miles beyond that sits the proposed location for two mine tailings storage facilities. The closest, to be built without a lining, would store up to 1.15 billion tons of waste rock. The second would be lined to prevent up to 150 million tons of tailings and “potential acid-generating,” or PAG, waste from leaking into nearby rivers.

An embankment dam 265 feet tall would rise to a towering 545 feet during the proposed 20-year lifespan of the mine. Once the mine closed, PAG waste would be transferred to an open pit, under the water table, which “eliminates all potential for downstream failure impacts,” according to the Pebble website. (The partnership did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

The pit, which could become the largest in North America, would sit in a high saddle dividing three headwater streams that drain toward Bristol Bay. Any environmental mishap could affect two major watersheds that annually welcome tens of millions of sockeye salmon, plus runs of four more salmon species and other game fish. Many conservationists worry acid drainage could wind up in these waterways through porous soil or a tectonic shift. The Lake Clark fault lies less than 20 miles away.

But even the world’s cleanest mineral-extraction operation in this untouched wilderness would displace game. My moose likely wouldn’t have been rutting here if the adjacent 5 square miles contained a mine. Multiple studies have found moose and caribou typically distribute away from roads and human noise, even if they’re not being hunted. Roads fragment habitat and separate populations. And once there’s one road, spurs will branch off it.

Mining’s impact on big game and other terrestrial critters hasn’t been studied as well as its impact on fish. We do know a 2022 report found that American game has lost, on average, 6.5 million acres of vital habitat to development over the past two decades. Of those species, moose lost the most: one out of every 93 acres in their range. There’s even some indication that Pebble has already affected ungulates. Subsistence hunters said noise during Pebble’s exploration phase “disturbed moose populations and altered caribou migration patterns,” the EPA reported in 2018.

If the mine is permitted—which seems vanishingly unlikely—developers would first need to reach its location. That would require a road to the neighboring villages of Iliamna and Newhalen across the massive Newhalen River, several more streams, and 20 miles of untracked tundra. From there, they’ve proposed either two ports to cross the oceanic Lake Iliamna or a 60-mile road around it. Developers also envision a 165-mile natural gas pipeline to power the mine. The Conservation Fund is currently under contract to buy 44,000 acres of conservation easements from the Pedro Bay Corporation, effectively preventing the construction of that road. But that hurdle is just one of many the project currently faces.

In May 2022, the EPA proposed to use its authority under the Clean Water Act of 1972 to prohibit developers from using, changing, or discharging into nearby streams. The agency received more than 500,000 public comments on this proposal and released a recommendation on Dec. 1 that will functionally veto the project—for now.

Still, that process has been reversed before. (The battle over the proposed mine has a three-decade history.) Conservationists have been lobbying Congress to pass a bill that would effectively kill Pebble. Optimists say the Pebble project is already dead. Others say it was never more than an elaborate ploy to fleece investors. Still more people believe the mine will find a way.

Doubling Down

Two days after I killed my bull and one day after we finished our fourth and final pack-out, I rig the raft while Steve breaks camp. We cut a lattice of alder for the stern, allowing air to circulate around the meat and keeping it off the water in the self-bailing floor. Grayling have been rising during our four days here, and Steve strings our fly rods accordingly. He catches a stout one almost as soon as we start downriver.

A few straggler sockeyes swim ghostly and fading in the deeper holes. The high tundra stream forces us to negotiate rock gardens and shallow bars before dropping faster into cottonwood and willow country. But it clearly flooded hard this spring, and none of the logjams or strainers block the entire stream.

We stop at intervals to call and glass, reaching a major confluence some 10 miles down by early afternoon. Steve hooks a 5-pound “silver” salmon sporting a fierce kype and blood-red war paint. We release the coho, reckoning we have plenty of meat already. Steve lands his second nice grayling near a fallen spruce, and I catch another a few holes down. The river is rising and perfectly stained with overcast skies and spawning salmon—looking ideal for trout.

We float on, aiming for wetlands that stretch across the map like the roots of a tree. At a grassy bank up the outflow, we pitch the tent near a pile of brown bear scat and take turns calling near the ponds until dusk. The next day brings tight channels and logjams that force us to pull over and scout, but I’m able to shoot the chutes each time.

The forest feels endless and impossibly dense, and I wonder how we’ll ever find another moose in it. It’s that sheer wildness of this place that makes the possibility of a mine so offensive to so many people, so discordant with a landscape that has eluded development. Steve wonders aloud what a mine would mean for these moose, this river, and his ability to catch the salmon downstream that he ships to people across the country.

Sometime midafternoon, we eddy out. I grunt three times before lying back on a gamebag and drifting off.

A nasal shock wave smacks me from across the river. “ERRUH.” I sit up, spinning with vertigo as a wide bull storms out of the willows. Steve and I freeze as the moose squints at us from barely 60 yards out. He seems to see the moose rack on the rather moose-shaped, albeit bright blue, NRS raft. I lift my binoculars carefully.

“Three and two brows, but he is wide,” I whisper. “What do you want to do?”

“He’s definitely 50,” says Steve, glancing from his binos to his bow. My own eyes dart to the rifle strapped behind me.

It’s amazing the moose is still standing there, and I wonder if it’s ever seen a human before. Still, a traditional archery opportunity is nonexistent. I slip the scope cover off my rifle and rack a round before slowly passing it to Steve. As the bull turns to go, the muzzle-braked barrel discharges.

“I didn’t hear an impact.”

Steve mouths words at me and I find an explanation in my temporary deafness.

“I think it was a good shot,” Steve says, louder this time.

We agree to wait 45 minutes; we last 15. It’s later than we’d like, and the urge to find blood in daylight is strong. I row across the river, and we wade into the flooded willows. No blood. We work into a slough, then a game trail that disappears into the fathomless spruce. No blood.

Steve climbs the high bank first. As I follow, he hoots with joy.

“Holy shit, here he is!”

We walk up on an animal more brown than my own gray tundra bull. His antlers are thinner but wider, with long spider tines laid broad and flat. One is partially broken from a recent run-in with another moose or a tree. Steve, who normally wears a grin from ear to ear, looks like his face might crack.

Return From Paradise

Frost glitters on the ground the following morning, and we decide to make a run for it. It’s only 25 miles to our pickup point, we reason.

The rowing proves easy early on, and we strip, drift, and drag a variety of flies. A swimming brown bear reverses course upon seeing us round the bend, then sprints into the woods. We see the first jet boat soon after, heading upriver with jugs of gasoline crammed in the hull. Later, we pass the river’s only cabin.

After several long hours of back-rowing into the wind, the stream gets spicy again where it meets the mighty Mulchatna River. The much larger, swifter flow sucks in our 2,000-pound raft the way a Labrador inhales steak trimmings, hurtling us toward Bristol Bay alongside cords of fresh driftwood. Hewitt pointed out an island where he could land, so we find a birch grove nearby and lash logs to hang our thousand pounds of meat. The next morning, Hewitt, who we messaged for an early extraction, buzzes our overloaded boat before alighting downstream and taxiing in.

“Wow, you guys really did it,” he says, seemingly amazed we didn’t fail or die.

Upon arrival in Iliamna, we learn it’s customary for visiting hunters to donate a portion of their meat to the Native tribe. That’s how we meet Trefin Andrew at his home outside town. We park between a towering, trailered Bristol Bay gill net boat and a truck bed already loaded with moose quarters. The 58-year-old is busy deboning meat to distribute to elders, widows, and families in need.

“People appreciate that,” Andrew says, flashing a big Athabaskan smile. “Some of them can’t get out and hunt, so [this] gives them some meat for the winter. It’s been working.”

Poverty is a major problem for these villages—one of many reasons he’s in favor of the Pebble Mine.

“There’s some families that are less fortunate, don’t have the Bristol Bay [gill net] permit, can’t afford to get one,” Andrew says. “So I view [the mine] as opportunity for them to work, give some economic resource for our region, because there are a lot of them that are just sitting back, relying on government handouts. Where’s the pride in that?”

When people are working, Andrew says, they’re happy. They can afford new vehicles, snow machines, and boats, and they can participate in the subsistence harvest because they can afford gas. He thinks the mine will happen someday, even if it’s not in his lifetime. All the outside focus on Pebble’s risks to Natives, he says, has conveniently focused on tribes nearer the ocean and farther from the copper deposit, who depend more heavily on salmon for food and income. A 2015 study by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game found that the subsistence harvest in the Bristol Bay area was among the largest in the state.

“We still do our subsistence activity, but we still want to be pro–economic development,” Andrew says. “We just can’t rely on salmon only, we gotta have other revenues.”

Andrew doubts the mine would substantially affect salmon because few travel all the way to those tiny headwaters. As for moose and other game, they’d simply relocate, like the once-abundant caribou herds did a decade ago.

“Everything will still be the same. We’ll still have our animals, our fish. All this technology, it’s amazing what they can do. It’s not like back in the early years,” he says. “But it would be an eye-opener [for there] to be a gigantic hole there. A lot of people travel that place and hunt.”

One hang-up for Andrew is the idea that Pebble could be only the beginning of a massive mining district. Developers have privately expressed interest in expanding to nearby deposits, possibly even the greenlighted Donlin gold mine 150 miles northwest of here.

“I’ve seen some people that were pro-development and once they heard that, they kind of went the other way,” says Andrew, who remains troubled by families leaving the village to find work elsewhere. “I tell everybody, ‘You just try to educate yourself and make your own decision. Don’t listen to everybody else. We’re the ones that live here.’”

An Unspoiled Place

A dozen USGS maps detailing the vastness of southwest Alaska are stitched together on the back wall of Hewitt’s guide shack in Iliamna. Steve and I drop by after grabbing $25 hamburgers—a reminder of what it costs to live here and why Andrew is concerned about local jobs and sharing venison.

Mining jobs pay well. So do fishing jobs, which currently dominate the region’s employment and income despite being fickle and seasonal. Even Hewitt wonders what future tech might pollution-proof a mine. Some locals point to other mines in Alaska that are generating local wealth, tax revenue, infrastructure, and critical minerals without extirpating nearby fish and game. Outside of catching fish and seeing bears, there’s no economic activity here now.

Still, there are precious few empty landscapes where we haven’t gone and built something. To Steve and Hewitt, that big blank place on the maps tacked to the wall is everything. It sustains their bodies, their bank accounts, their souls. Before we depart, a silent agreement passes between them: to remain vigilant to the threat of a mine, no matter what.

“They say, ‘Oh, the Clean Water Act is going to fix it forever,’” Hewitt says. “The fact is there’s gold in those hills and there’s a lot of people who want it. Someone’s always going to want it. The fight will never go away.”

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ORDINARILY a man doesn’t have any advance warning when the tight squeezes of his life are coming up. Certainly I had none that day in Alaska.

Maybe the red squirrel had nothing to do with it. Maybe there was some other reason why the brown bear left the moose trail she was following on the mountain a hundred yards above me, and came down to look me over. 

She may have spotted me as I came slogging up the slope and mistaken me for a small moose. Or perhaps she knew I was a man but just didn’t want me in the neighborhood. 

In any case, I shall always think that if I hadn’t seen the squirrel and stopped to fool around with it the rest wouldn’t have happened. And in that event I’d have missed the closest shave I’ve had in almost twenty years on the game trails of Alaska. 

I was on a pack trip along the Chickaloon River at the time, in a remote section of the Kenai Peninsula. Not a pack-train trip—I was traveling afoot, carrying my grub, sleeping bag, and equipment on a packboard on my back. My object was to get pictures of the big Kenai moose. It was October, their rutting season, and a good time to stalk them with either gun or camera. I’d told my wife when I left our cabin on Kenai Lake that I’d be gone a month, but the moose hunting was exceptionally good and time slipped away fast. I had been out thirty-five days the morning the bear jumped me. 

By that time I’d walked better than 200 miles, carrying a pack of about sixty pounds. Hunting big game with a camera is no soft job, but I’d made some good pictures of moose, including close-ups of big bulls and a movie record of a brisk scrap between two rivals. In thirty-five days I had not seen another human. 

The weather had turned bad, with a lot of cold rain. Finally the rain changed to snow and a foot of it came down in one night—a powdery fall that started to soften and settle as soon as the sun rose next morning. I decided to make one more trip out from my base camp and then start for home. 

A few miles from camp, down a small creek that ran into the Chickaloon, I had located earlier a big bench on the side of a mountain, grown up with willow, quaking aspen, and cottonwood. There was plenty of moose food there, and an unusual concentration of moose. Shortly before the snow came I had spotted one big bull with seven cows in his harem. If they were still together I wanted pictures of them. I left camp right after breakfast and headed that way. 

On that trip, for the first time, I was carrying a Colt .38 Special double-action revolver, a Police Positive. Never before had I packed anything heavier than a .22 automatic for picking off ptarmigan, grouse, and rabbits for the pot. But my wife, worried about bears, finally talked me into switching over to the .38. That was the best bill of goods I ever bought! I took good care of the handgun, carrying it in a shoulder holster so it wouldn’t catch in the brush, and keeping it clean and dry. 

I followed the creek down toward the bench. When I was almost directly below it I started to climb, picking my way through open stands of spruce and birch as noiselessly as possible and keeping the wind in my face. 

I was within 300 feet of the bench when I saw the red squirrel feeding on cones in a thin patch of alder. Just for the heck of it I walked over and talked to him in an undertone until he set up an excited chattering. I realized afterward that between us we made noise enough to reach the ears of the bear up on the bench. The squirrel’s scolding warned her that something out of the ordinary was going on. 

Her tracks told me after the affair was over that she had been traveling on a moose trail that followed the bench. Apparently, when I stopped to tease the squirrel, she turned downhill to investigate. 

I left the squirrel and went on, looking for the best going up the mountainside. Seventy yards ahead was a thick stand of young spruce, roughly circular and about 100 feet across. I’d have to go around it. I picked out a route along the lower edge and plodded up. 

I was twenty feet from the thicket when I heard a commotion on the far side. It sounded like a bull moose breaking brush, and instantly I visualized a chance for pictures. I decided to set my camera up and get ready for him at close range if he came through the thicket toward me. 

I leaned forward to ease an arm out of my pack straps, and through the spruce I caught sight of a patch of brown thirty yards away. The moose? No, something about it wasn’t right. I crouched for a better look under the branches and stared at a bear head that looked as big as a washtub! 

I took it all in in one quick glimpse, ears, muzzle, color. Then the head vanished in the snow-hung growth and I heard brush crack—the noise of a heavy animal running straight at me. 

I got out of that packboard like an eel sliding through a greased chute, jerked off my gloves, and whipped the .38 from its holster. I swung the gun up just as the bear’s big brown head broke out of the brush four steps from me and halted there, seeming to float to a stop. 

I’ll never know why she didn’t finish her charge, unless she had believed she was stalking a moose and jerked to a surprised halt when she found herself facing a man instead. Anyway, she gave me the chance I needed. 

She stood at the edge of the brush, so close I could have flipped a pebble into her face, acting as if she had lost track of me. She lifted her head and cocked it to one side, and her nose wrinkled as she tested the wind. 

I was reluctant to risk a shot from the handgun if I didn’t have to. It was no weapon for the job, and I didn’t want to shoot until I was sure she meant to come on. 

I HAVE BEEN ASKED many times since whether I was scared. Put yourself in my shoes. The bear would have weighed not less than 700 pounds and she had trouble written all over her. And when I paced the distance later it was exactly eleven feet between her tracks and mine. You can bet your last dollar I was scared, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. But luckily I wasn’t rattled. I knew my only chance was to stand still and count on the .38 to do the job if it had to. Somehow I believed it would. Nevertheless, I recall the chill phrase “This is it!” ticking through my brain. 

It all happened a lot faster than I can set it down here, of course. After a second or two the bear lowered her head and I decided not to wait any longer. I was sure she had made up her mind to come for me, and with her head down I had a chance to smash the 158-grain bullet flat against her skull, where it wouldn’t be likely to glance off and not ram through to her brain. 

At that range I couldn’t miss. I brought the gun down on her head as deliberately as if I had been shooting at a match target. The slug smacked about an inch to one side of center, and I saw blood fly. She slumped like a boxer knocked half off his feet, and I felt pretty good—for a second or two. 

Then she straightened up and stood staring at me. I leveled the gun, waiting for her head to drop again. Instead she did the last thing in the world I expected. She turned slowly and calmly, and walked back into the thicket, out of sight. 

I thought she moved as if she were a pretty sick bear, but I didn’t count too much on it. For maybe a minute I heard nothing more. I waited, tense and ready, expecting her to come at me again from any one of a dozen places. Then, at the far side of the spruce clump, hell broke loose.

She let go a series of roaring bawls that were enough to turn a man’s hair white. There was a scuffle, then all of a sudden I heard a cub squall. That was my first inkling that there were cubs in the act, and it wasn’t a pleasant thought. It explained a lot of things and it also meant, almost certainly, that the show wasn’t over. I could count on her to be really vindictive now! 

I looked around desperately for a tree. The best I could locate was a dead spruce, standing by itself in the open about twenty feet to my left. But it had a tangle of bleached branches all the way to the ground and I saw that I’d have to claw my way into it to reach the trunk. It wasn’t a tree a man could climb in a hurry, even in desperation. All the same, I started to edge toward it, moving very carefully. If the bear had forgotten where I was I didn’t want to remind her. 

Her fight with the cubs didn’t last long but it was nasty while it lasted. The old lady seemed to be cuffing the daylights out of her whole family. When the racket stopped, I felt pretty sure she was coming back after me. I stopped sidling toward the tree and braced myself, with the Colt cocked and ready, trying to watch the entire edge of the thicket at one time. 

SHE DID EXACTLY what she had done before, except that this time I didn’t hear her coming through the brush. She appeared without warning, twenty feet away, and again she slid to a stop at the edge of the thicket. 

Her head was lowered, giving me a good target, and I didn’t wait. I leveled down on her and heard my second bullet thud against her skull. Again she flinched and humped from the impact, sagging without going off her feet. That was the only sign she gave that she was hurt. She didn’t bawl or slap at herself, and almost instantly she pulled herself together, stepped out of the brush, and came on at a rolling walk.

I hope I never live through another minute like that one, as I stood and watched her lumber toward me, step by step. I held the cocked Colt on her head, expecting her to come those last few feet in a sudden roaring rush. But instead she veered slightly and went by me a few paces away. 

When she was directly in front of me she gave me the best target I had had. Her head was broadside to me then and I knew I could put a shot into her skull just below the ear. There was a chance of reaching the brain and ending the affair. It was a tempting gamble but the risk was pretty terrible. If I failed to kill her outright she’d be on me in a single lunge.

If she had swung her head to look at me, if she had stopped or even hesitated, I’d have shot. But she didn’t. She walked on as if she no longer knew I was there. My two shots, driven into her skull without actually penetrating the brain, must have dazed her temporarily. Save for my gun arm I didn’t move a muscle while she was in sight, and I can only suppose that she passed me after that second shot because she didn’t know where I was. 

Back in the thicket again, she circled slowly toward the cubs. When she reached them there was another brief argument, with bawling and slapping and squalling. And now for the first time, crouched almost on my belly in the snow, I got a look at her family, which consisted of three good-size cubs.

I still did not dare to try getting into the tree. But after a minute the four bears started to move off up the mountain. They went very slowly. The old girl was having a hard time and the cubs were running around her in circles, puzzled and alarmed. When they got far enough away for me to move without attracting attention, I inched cautiously over to the tree and wormed my way in among the branches. And once I had the trunk in my hands it would have hustled a squirrel to keep out of my way! 

Now I felt better. Beyond the spruce thicket the old bear was laboring a step at a time up the steep, snowy slope, with the three cubs in frantic attendance. I could see blood in the trail behind her, and she didn’t look around or pay any more attention to me. I was ready at last to finish her off and end the whole affair.

She was about twenty-five yards off and her broad back was an easy target. I squirmed into a comfortable position in a fork, laid the Colt across a branch, and let her have it between the shoulders. She spun half around, fell over backward, and rolled all the way to the foot of the slope.

That was a jubilant half minute. I had broken her back, killed a brownie with a handgun. Or so I thought. But I didn’t think so for long. She picked herself up and started to climb again, working painfully up the mountain toward the bench. 

I had the gun cocked and the sights lined on her once more, when it occurred to me that I was throwing away a lot of ammunition considering my limited supply. A quick mental inventory told me I had nine shells left. 

I was forty miles from home and—I now realized—in bear country. I might need those nine shells badly before I got back to the cabin on Kenai Lake. I was sure the bear would die anyway, so I decided I couldn’t afford another shot. But I’m still half sorry I made that decision. 

I stayed in the tree for half an hour after the four bears had disappeared up on the bench. Then I climbed down, looked over the tracks and blood sign, and started after them. Probably it wasn’t very smart to trail that wounded brownie, but I still felt certain she was fatally wounded, and the more I thought about it the more I wanted her pelt to remember her by. It was a beauty. 

I TOOK plenty of time. I went up on knolls to get a look at the trail ahead and I even climbed trees to scout out the country and make sure I wasn’t walking into an ambush. I followed the bears for a mile and a half, taking most of the afternoon to do it. Then I realized I had just about time enough to get back to my base camp before dark, so I gave up. 

I was confident the bear would die in the night. The snow was settling and going fast, but there was enough left the next morning for tracking, so I left camp at daylight and went back to pick up her trail. It showed less and less blood sign and I was down finally to a small clot here and there on the snow or leaves.

I stayed on the track until noon, following it another mile. By that time the snow was gone, and when the trail led down into an alder patch I gave up. I still believed she was dead and I still wanted her pelt, but not badly enough to follow her into the alders with a Colt! 

Looking back on it, I’m not so sure she died after all. The clotted skeins of blood were few and far between where I lost the track at the edge of the alder patch. I hadn’t damaged her brain or she couldn’t have traveled that far. As for the shot that hit her in the back, I doubt it amounted to more than a deep flesh wound. The best guess, it seems likely, is that she had nothing worse than a bad headache for a week or two. 

There are a lot of unsolved riddles about the whole affair. Did the bear notice me in the first place because of the commotion the squirrel made? Did she come after me because she was hunting, or because she resented my presence near her cubs—or just because she was looking for trouble? And having found me, when she broke out of the brush twice, why didn’t she keep coming and finish what she had started? And finally, when I hammered those two ineffective shots into her head, what kept her from doing what a wounded brownie is supposed to do? 

I’ll never know the answers, of course. And nobody among the Alaska guides and hunters of my acquaintance claims to know them. But a neighbor of mine on Kenai Lake made one statement when I got home that I accepted at face value. 

“You just weren’t born to be killed by a brown bear,” he said. “Or if you were, the day ain’t arrived yet!”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: The stirring adventure related by Cecil Rhode in “This Is It” stemmed directly from his work as a professional wildlife photographer in Alaska—and came near ending his career. That career had its beginnings back in 1933. Up to that time Rhode had lived in Oregon, Kansas, and California, spending a great deal of his time in the outdoors. While prospecting for gold one summer in the Sierra Nevadas (and trout fishing on the side) he met an old sourdough who described the glories of Alaska. Rhode decided to have a look at it, via a float trip on the Yukon River. He went, he saw—and he’s lived in Alaska ever since. He makes his headquarters in a cabin near Moose Pass on the Kenai Peninsula. Using it as a base, he has hunted (with rifle or camera) all the big game of the north except the polar bear.

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