If you hunt in grizzly country, chances are you’re breaking the rules.
That’s because you creep around. You hunt during early morning and evening. You mask your scent and walk into the wind. You usually hunt solo. You stay intensely focused on your prey. This is what hunting requires.
But it’s also the opposite of what bear safety experts say you should do in grizzly country.

Brandon Renkin isn’t very big. Though he’s 15 years old, he weighs just 38 pounds. But it’s almost all heart. The rest of it is brain and spunk, wrapped in a layer of patience. These are things that make a hunter.

Here’s something to think about the next time your neck and arms have become an itching, oozing mess.
Or when the whining in your ears makes you think seriously about spending the night in a lake, underwater.
Or when you’re inhaling flies the size of your thumbnail.

Big Sky Journal

Fall, 2007

For me, October is the squinting season, a time to throw my eyes as far as I can, to find little white speckles on a vast sagebrush plain, track them down and make meat of them.

In the process, I’ll become mudded and blooded, dehydrated, scraped up, and wind chapped. It’s something I look forward to every year, right up there with Christmas and the first raft trip of the summer.

Mention carp inside the tonier fly fishing loops around the West and you’ll draw some funny looks, if not downright sneers. If trout symbolize choice tidbits on the menu of sport fishing, served on fine china, then carp are cold Spam sandwiches, sweating grease in a sour lunch box.