How to Bring Wild Treats to Your Thanksgiving Table, Part 2

There are only two surviving primary documents that mention the first Thanksgiving (at least, according to the Smithsonian). These documents were written accounts of people who were actually in attendance. Unfortunately, the menu they mentioned was far from detailed. Venison was definitely at the feast. Chief Massasoit sent out some of his hunters who brought back several deer. The Plymouth hunters brought in their share as well, enough game birds to feed the company for a “week” (though turkey wasn’t mentioned by name). Earlier this week, we looked at some wild plant foods that could bring a taste of the historic wild into your modern menu. Now we’ll look at some wild game that might just be a game changer for your family’s traditions.

Try A Little Bird
So no one exactly wrote down, “Why yes, we ate a big turkey at the first Thanksgiving,” but this is the tradition that sprang up nevertheless. Turkey is certainly a possibility, but don’t forget the other game birds which could have been the centerpiece of the table. Goose, duck, and even pigeon may have been on the menu (the passenger pigeon especially). This now-extinct bird was once so numerous that flocks would darken the sky overhead, and be heard 30 minutes before they were seen. Even a novice archer could loose a single arrow into the cloud of birds and bring down several, according to eyewitness accounts. Those days are long gone, but don’t let that stop you from harvesting some small birds today. 

Sample Some Shellfish
Turkey and ham get a lot of real estate on the holiday table nowadays, but quite likely the original feast was more about big haunches of roasted venison, clay pots full of small game bird soup, and a clam-bake mound full of steamed shellfish. While oysters and their kin don’t always bring to mind a harvest feast like turkey and stuffing, they are very likely a more traditional early American cuisine than the latter. If you live near the water, why not get some shellfish for your holiday gathering? Sure, oysters look like a booger inside a rock, but with some attention from a good cook, they can be really delicious. 

Fish for Turkey Day?
Can’t get out hunting on Thanksgiving morning? How about a quicker trip, to your local fishing waters? Trout season and Thanksgiving don’t seem like a natural match, but what better way to get out of the house than to catch a creel full of pretty trout for smoking, frying, or baking? With all the heavy dishes of modern Turkey Day, something light and delicate like trout could be just what you need. The outdoor time away from the relatives wouldn’t hurt either.       

Do you hunt or fish around Thanksgiving as a family tradition? Tell us about it in the comments. We here at Outdoor Life are thankful for the blessings that have been bestowed upon us, and we are thankful for you–our fans and readers. We wish a Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!

How to Prepare and Cook Waterfowl Gizzards

When I was five years old, I lived in a small town in Illinois. The only super market in town was a Red Owl and every Sunday they would have fried chicken gizzards in the deli. So we would eat several pints of fried gizzards every Sunday after church. Admittedly, the gizzards were very chewy and had an odd crunchy texture, almost like chewing on rubber. But they tasted incredible. That is my first memory of eating offal. Now, gizzards are my second favorite type of offal (second only to the heart).

Gizzards are a thick, muscular part of the stomach used to help digest grains and seeds. They have almost no fat, and the meat is hard and dense. All birds have a gizzard and can be saved to eat, although I usually only save the duck and goose gizzards since there’s a good amount of meat on them.

When cooked correctly, gizzards are transformed into some very tender and delicious meals. They require a long cook time to help break them down and become tender. One gizzard isn’t really enough to work with, so you need to save up all of the gizzards out of the ducks and geese you shoot. It doesn’t take long to accumulate a couple of pounds. (If you have friends who hunt, there’s a pretty good chance they aren’t going to keep the gizzards and they’re usually more than happy to save them for you.)

Cleaning a gizzard is very easy; once removed from inside the bird, all you have to do is lay it flat on the cutting board and slice it in half. Use an old knife for this. The inside of a gizzard is full of sand and grit to break down seeds and grain. Once cut you can rinse out all the grit and sand out of the gizzard. You’ll notice an off color, sometimes black, membrane inside the gizzard. Peel it away, and the gizzard is ready to use.

I like to take it one step further, which you can also try. The gizzard is held together by that sack on the inside. I like to trim the little balls of meat off that membrane. When you’re done, you end up with four perfect bite sized pieces. (See photos.)

One of the best methods I have found for cooking gizzards is to corn them. Corning anything requires you to make a brine and soak the meat for several days. Then you simmer them in water until they are tender. This usually takes about two hours. I use a corning brine recipe from Hank Shaw, which works beautifully on all kinds of game. I add a tablespoon of juniper to the brine when I am using it on gizzards—otherwise the recipe is the same.

After the gizzards have sat in the brine for 3-4 days, I put them all in a pot and cover them with water. Simmer for about 2 hours, or until the can be mashed with a fork. At that point they can be served hot or cold and used however you like. You can dice them up and make a hash, or you can shred them and make cabbage rolls. 

How and When to Call Mule Deer and Blacktails

I have a tradition of spending Thanksgiving week down on Afognak Island hunting Sitka black-tailed deer. This year I am eagerly awaiting a new addition to my family, so needless to say, I’m not disappointed to be missing out on a few deer.

I don’t make any claims about being a deer-hunting expert, but if there’s one thing I've learned, it’s the value of keeping a deer call in my pocket. Calling is a widely successful strategy for whitetail hunters, and a large variety of calls are available, but blacktails and (their larger cousins, the mule deer) are also quite vocal and respond well to calling, especially during and even for a while after the rut.

I'm surprised that the practice of calling mule deer and blacktails isn’t more widespread. I don’t know of too many calls designed specifically for mule deer, but one I first used when I was a kid was the “Deer Talk." It’s a simple plastic call that uses rubber bands to reproduce the bleating of a mule deer doe and is made by the same folks in Gardiner, Mont. (ELK, Inc.) that make the similar “Cow Talk” for elk.

Although spot-and-stalk is a more typical method for muleys and blacktails, setting up and intentionally calling them can be a very productive method and show you deer you never would have seen otherwise. During this magical time of the year, the bucks will come running in search of a hot doe. Does will also respond to calls, probably out of curiosity. I've even managed to pull in bucks that were chasing a doe by calling aggressively to them.

There’s not many frills or tricks to successfully calling them. I’ve seen bucks come running both to rapid, almost distressful calling, as well as slow, periodic bleats. I found that the biggest key is in the setup. Ideally, you want to call with a partner, as probably 90 percent of bucks will come straight in, but then circle 25-50 yards downwind. If you place the shooter 30 yards or so downwind of the caller, they will often get a shot while the buck remains focused on where he heard the call. In fact, when hunting with my recurve, I found this setup critical to getting a shot before being winded.

Calling works especially well in the timber, and windy, stormy days are my favorite. I like to call relatively quietly, setting up on the edges of draws, thickets, and other cover where deer hole up. After calling for 15 to 20 minutes, I’ll move to the next spot that allows for a good setup and is out of earshot from where I called last.

Even after the rut has settled down, I’ve still found it handy to keep that call in my pocket to turn deer that I may have flushed. That call will stop a spooked buck nine times out of 10. While guiding hunters, I’ve seen quite a few bucks taken that just couldn’t resist the urge to stop and look back at the sound of the call, bucks that otherwise would have disappeared into the timber.

Although I won’t be notching any deer tags this year, if you have a late-season mule deer or blacktail tag and you haven’t put any thought into it, you ought to pick up a bleat call. You might be pleasantly surprised with the results.

Respecting the Animal: Where Do You Draw the Line on Photos from a Hunt?

"I know it when I see it."

That oft-quoted line about the definition of pornography was delivered by Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart as he defined the difference between art and obscenity in the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio. (Although, fun fact, his clerk is reportedly the one who helped him come to this conclusion when Stewart found himself stumped.)

In general, I find this to be a pretty satisfactory rule of thumb. The ends of the obscenity spectrum are pretty universally agreed upon, but the middle can get muddy. What's tricky is that it's 100 percent opinion based. If you’ve got sensible judgement, great (although what’s “sensible” is still wholly subjective). If you don't, and you're in a position of authority, then we end up with obscenity or its counterweight: censorship.

I bring this up because I’ve discovered the same principle of appropriateness applies to photography and videography of a hunt. What’s acceptable to show on camera, and what’s taboo? I feel reasonably safe in concluding that respecting a tagged or bagged animal is essential. But the question then becomes, what is respectful?

(Respectful photos are, among many other reasons, critical for ensuring anti-hunters don’t get up in arms about excessive carnage. I understand this point, so for the sake of this post, let’s keep the discussion within the hunting community. I know we don’t live in a vacuum, and photos can circulate beyond our control, but this post came about specifically due to disagreement among hunters.)

I've adopted this “respect it” criteria as my own standard when it comes to taking photos in the field, and even posting photos on this website. I've digitally corrected images in Photoshop: "washing" blood-stained shirts, "wiping" fur clean, and digitally "removing" lolling deer tongues that excited photographers neglected to tuck back inside jaws.

On the other hand, I’m an advocate of factual documentation and honest portrayals of any hunt. For instance, if you shoot an animal in the head, or the gut, or any place other than where you intended—say it. (I’m looking at you, outdoor TV.) Be honest about the shot and the recovery, even if it means admitting mistakes.

So, given all that background, consider this. The image that fueled this blog is below. Consider your reaction to it, independent of anyone else's interpretation. Then read what I have to say for myself and let me know your thoughts.

Above photographs by the author, via Instagram

This photo caused dissent among the OL editors. Some felt it was an accurate and necessary portrayal of a hunt. Others thought it was gratuitous gore. But when I look at it—and when I took the photo—I don't see gore. I'd just walked up on my first bow kill, a year-and-a-half old doe that crashed seconds after a double-lung shot.

I'd killed deer before, and seen plenty of other bowkills and dead animals, from birds and squirrels to elk and bear. But this was a new scenario. This was my bloody archery deer with a large wound channel and bright, bubbly, beautiful blood spread on her smooth fur. I couldn't help but notice the way the pattern stretched and spilled around the point of entry, and how the smaller droplets beaded perfectly on the water-repellent hide.

I’ve sat through too many modern art discussions in school, and while abstraction was never my favorite genre, this painting held appeal. This, this was abstract art if ever I'd seen it. Found art. Organic art. And I wanted to take a picture and preserve that untouched discovery, that warm, oxygenated lifeblood seeping into the cool night. This photo captured the transition of a living animal into a dead one. Soon it would become a hung carcass, ready for butchering. But for now, this was a portrait of the death of one individual deer, and one successful hunt. 

Yet the photos that I sent my friends were of the bloody vanes on my arrow (a teaser) and me grinning with the dressed doe in the cluttered bed of a pickup. But the more I thought about the hunt and the more I looked at it, the more I wanted to share it. Specifically to the OL Instagram account, where we post the more artistic photos from our adventures afield with short comments and a handful of hashtags. But usually the photo speaks for itself. 

Knowing it might be a bit much for some viewers, I checked with one editor before uploading it, and got an enthusiastic green light. I later got a note from another editor saying that, although the photo clearly has a lot of likes, he wasn't okay with it.

Which got me thinking about the whole business of photographing hunts. Blood is a part of hunting, and I don't see any use in trying to pretend it's not. It's not normal or disturbing to us when recovering an animal, or heaving the guts onto the ground, or hosing out the truck bed. But take a photograph of that natural process, and it becomes an issue bordering on obscenity for many. Blood on the vanes of my arrow went unquestioned, and drops on leaves and puddles in the dirt are acceptable, too. But show the actual source of that blood? We enter a gray area; some people even see red.

So a day later, with the second editor's comments in mind, I went back and looked at the photo. This time I saw what he saw. Just a mess of blood smeared across the screen. I should've kept the photo on my phone and off the internet, I thought. (Also a good rule of thumb for all you nudie enthusiasts out there.)

But then I spent several minutes studying it, and now I'm back to my original state of mind: admiration of nature and fond memories of the hunt.

Photograph by Craig Dougherty

I take hero shots and allow hero shots to be taken of me. It’s respectful, but it’s also artificial. Someone has removed the blood with a bottle of water or a sleeve (and maybe literally cut the tongue out of the animal). I appreciate both types of photos. But the controversial image was the moment before the tidying, and it was an important moment for me to preserve and share.

So let’s return to my original questions. How did you react to that photo? Let us know by leaving a comment here.

A Waterfowler’s Late-Season Guide to Effective and Ethical Pass-Shooting

 Photograph by Bill Buckley

By now, the ducks and geese in your neighborhood have Ph.D.’s in survival. They’ve figured out bogus decoy spreads and sour calls, suspicious landing zones, and the dangers that accompany Shadow Grass camouflage.

But these educated birds have a chink in their experiential armor: They must fly daily from water to food and back again. And anytime they take wing, they are vulnerable to hunters gunning for them from below.

These are the pass-shooters, those sky-busting knuckle-draggers that decoyers everywhere love to curse the way dry-fly anglers curse bait fishermen. That antipathy is sharpened every time a duck or goose is wounded and not recovered by a gunner who shoots at a bird low enough to pepper it with pellets but too high to bring it down.

But here’s the thing: Pass-shooters who post up at the right spot at the right time, and exercise both their legs and their restraint, can have far better success (with far less equipment and work) than their decoy-planting brethren. Follow these pointers to be a late-season limiter.

1) Hunt the Edges
In order to consistently pass-shoot birds, you have to learn their daily flight patterns and then find precisely the route they use to fly from roosting areas to feed and back again. But that’s just a start. The best pass-shooters know where to intercept these birds when they’re no higher than the treetops. Consider the property boundaries of no-hunting zones like wildlife refuges and city parks, and the edges of grain fields.

2) Expect to Move
The specific line the birds take changes daily, depending on wind direction or the whimsy of the flock. Be prepared to move up to 100 yards in order to be right under their flight line.

3) Consider Recovery Zones
A bird that you kill stone-dead 50 feet above you will sail at least that far on its descent, so make sure you set up where you can recover your birds. Bring a dog to run down cripples.

4) Find Cover
Just as decoyers use blinds and camouflage, so must sky-busters stay under cover, or risk flaring birds. Tree trunks, fence lines, or even obscuring reeds and grass will keep you hidden.

5) Shoot for the Beak
In order to place most of your pattern in a high-flying bird’s vitals, you must be slightly in front of it. Shoot birds as they’re flying toward you, not when they’re directly overhead or going away.

6) Know Your Limits 
This last consideration is the most important. In order to determine the extent of your range, pattern your gun at distance, and fiddle with choke and load combinations until you find one that consistently delivers lethal payloads. The research of Tom Roster, godfather of wingshooting lethality, proves that in order to consistently place at least a couple of pellets in the vital area of a large goose at 60 yards, you must be capable of placing 50 to 55 pellets in a 30-inch circle at that distance. Roster’s formula for pass-shooting geese: 1 ¼-ounces of BBB or T shot in an Improved Modified or Full choke.

The Tabernacle Buck

The original Deseret was supposed to be America’s 31st state, a vast empire of Mormonism that would have stretched from the Rockies to the Sierra Nevada, and from Wyoming south to Arizona. The brainchild of Mormon leaders, including Brigham Young, Deseret was intended to be the homeland for Young’s acolytes, a theocratic nation-state that resembled the Catholics’ Vatican City—only ten thousand times bigger and with infinitely more cactus.

Political tension between free and slave states in the years leading up to the Civil War doomed the State of Deseret, and Young had to settle for the modern boundaries of Utah in order for it to be admitted to the Union. But the name—and maybe more important, the idea—of Deseret lives on. You will find it in the name of one of the state’s largest newspapers, the Deseret News. And you can see it on road signs and other iconography of Utah. Deseret, according to Mormon scripture, is the name of the honeybee, and the beehive remains not only Utah’s state symbol, but also a reminder of the Mormon values of industry, community, and thrift.

A young Deseret mule deer buck.

A BIG-GAME RANCH
The modern-day Deseret is properly called Deseret Land & Livestock. It’s a 235,000-acre ranch, the largest single private property in the state of Utah. Since 1983, it’s been owned by the Mormon Church, which runs it as an agricultural operation. But the church leases the ranch for paid big-game hunts. Because of its reputation for producing record-class bucks and bulls, getting an invitation to hunt here is nearly as hard as getting an audience with the Pope.

Sherwood with his glassing setup—a 15X Swarovski binocular mounted on a tripod.

Deseret (the ranch) is spoken of with reverence among Western hunters, but few have actually hunted here. I’ve known of the ranch for years, partly by the black hole it creates on maps of the West. No public roads pass through the property, and a private corps of game wardens patrols its boundaries. You can look over the fence, but you can’t come in without permission.

I was given that permission last fall. Geoff Maki—the product manager for a new line of Browning hunting packs distributed by Signature Products Group, or SPG, in Salt Lake City—asked if I’d join him for a mule deer hunt in paradise.

Landon Sherwood and Geoff Maki glass for bucks at sunrise.

THE TYRANNY OF AGE
“You want to age him? Check his driver’s license!”

Maki smiles as he says this to our guide, Landon Sherwood, but it’s a comment borne of impatience and frustration. We have just passed up a 190-class mule deer, his antlers heavy as a pitchfork handle.

Sherwood sucks on the wiry tuft of hair on his lower lip—his outback soul patch—and shakes his head. “Four-year-old. Gotta let him go.”

We’ve been hearing this all day, as we’ve glassed one remarkable buck after another. “Too young.” “Give him a year.” “Let’s look for his daddy.” We are trolling, Sherwood’s term for driving remote ridgelines, stopping when we see either a herd of deer or terrain that’s likely to hold bucks. I stopped counting the sort of bucks I’d shoot at home in Montana when I hit 20. We are, Sherwood tells us, looking for five-year-old and older deer. That’s the ranch rule, imposed to perpetuate its reputation for record-class animals. Sherwood says if he brings a specimen back to the skinning shed that’s younger than five, at best he’ll get razzed by fellow Deseret guides. At worst, he’ll lose his job.

Hunters relax after packing out the author’s buck.

After a while, it’s fun to stand down on big bucks, if only because it builds my expectation that the buck that passes Sherwood’s muster will be a colossus. It’s also fun to mess with Sherwood, who may be the most selective bastard I’ve ever met when it comes to scrutinizing deer.

TROLLING WITH VAGRANT
His friends call Sherwood “Vagrant,” a nickname he earned from his vagabond existence in pursuit of big deer and elk across the West. He routinely quits seasonal jobs after a couple of weeks to go scout big animals or hunt for their shed antlers. Once, he tells me, he spent 30 nights sleeping in his pickup while hunting for the sheds of a single magnum mule deer buck on “The Strip,” the chunk of Arizona north of the Grand Canyon that is widely considered to be the best mule  deer hunting unit in America. He finally found the shed, he tells me, but obeying the code of shed hunters, he had to give it to his buddy who found the matching side first.

Vagrant knows mule deer like nobody I’ve ever met, which is one reason I acquiesce to his insistence on targeting only the oldest residents of this vast ranch.

How will we know him when we see him, I ask?

Maki and Sherwood hike to the edge of a secluded basin to glass for bucks.

“By his face,” says Vagrant. “In most years, you can also look at his body type. Old bucks have big potbellies and saddlebacks, and they just look physically big. But this year, we’ve had so much [forage-growing] moisture here that every deer is in great shape, physically, so body condition isn’t a good indicator of age. But the face is. You want to look for a prominent Roman nose, and old bucks have a wide brow with a dished-out forehead. Sometimes, old bucks have a white, chalky face, but that’s not always a good clue, because some younger bucks have white faces.”

But old bucks’ eyes look almost look like a predator’s, set close together, says Vagrant. That gives them a sort of squinty look, with a deep pouch at the tear duct. Their heads are blocky, almost square. Think of the look of a fight-hardened, punch-puffy boxer. That’s the face of a mature mule deer.

Antlers are almost the last thing Sherwood considers on a buck, but when he does, he doesn’t look at the points or the mass of a rack. He looks at the base, to find what he calls “pearling,” or the eruption of dozens of little rounded crenellations between the eye guards and the brow that is a trait of older bucks.

And so we continue to troll, studying the faces of every deer we meet, looking for a geriatric giant.

MULE DEER PARADISE
If you were to aim a riflescope at mule deer distribution in the American West, your vertical crosshair would cover the Rockies from Alberta to Sonora. Your horizontal reticle would probably range from Nebraska to southern Oregon. And your crosshairs would meet near the point where Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah come together. Deseret Land & Livestock is only slightly south of here, and it contains what seems like an endless expanse of essential mule deer habitat.

We find deer scattered across sagebrush meadows, grazing beside elk and moose in the shade of well-watered groves of quaking aspen. With our 15X binoculars, we spot them stepping into or out of pine timber, bedded beneath canyon rimrocks, and munching on mountain laurel and serviceberries. They get edgy at the approach of our pickup but seldom bolt like their public-land cousins do. This is one advantage of hunting behind Deseret’s fence: Exclusivity breeds tolerance, since the occupants of most pickups in this neighborhood don’t open fire the moment they spot antlers.

That tolerance lures us into a sort of complacency midway through my hunt here. We’re careless with our approaches to deer, and I wonder how many pressure-sensitive older bucks we’re bumping. Early one morning we park on a promontory so photographer Michael Friberg can take pictures in the gorgeous mountain light. Movement below catches my eye. It’s a herd of does being pushed by a big buck. We should have blown them out—we’ve done everything wrong here: parking on the spine of the ridge, the four of us skylined and talking loud like we’re ordering breakfast, careless with our scent. But the deer are forgiving. They drift away into a patch of timber, where they bed down in the shade of the rising morning.

The author waiting on an open shot at a bedded buck.

We get only a fair view of the big buck. We can tell he’s tall and a wide-framed 4-by-something, but he’s clearly an old deer. As he moves into cover, he seems to wince, like he aches in his joints.

Vagrant gets excited judging him through his spotting scope, and it occurs to me that even after three days, Maki and I haven’t had “the talk” to decide who is shooting first. “You have your gun,” Geoff observes. I had snatched my rifle, a Montana Rifle Company model chambered in the flat-shooting .280 Ackley Improved, from the truck to pose for photographs, not expecting to see a candidate for a shoulder mount. But I waste no time getting behind my binocular, suddenly invested in the outcome.
Unfortunately, so is the deer. As we’ve been assessing him, he’s disappeared somewhere in the timber. We slink around the hill and finally find him in the obscuring cover, but he’s bedded. There is a hole in the branches nearly as big as a cereal box, and I’m sure I can thread a 140-grain Nosler AccuBond through it. But just as we range him (364 yards), he stands up, turns, and a forkhorn buck beds just behind him. No shot.

Vagrant and I watch for another 45 minutes, silently cheering when the young deer moves away, then groaning when our buck shifts behind even more cover. This is one of the unexpected realities of mule deer hunting: Deer simply disappear. They’re masters of evaporating in tendrils of cover that don’t appear large enough to hide a jackrabbit, let alone a mature buck. On this hot October day, as bees hum in the sun-fired sagebrush, our buck is moving with the shade, and somehow there is always a limb, or a tree trunk, or a shrub between him and us.

THE OPPOSITE OF TROLLING
Vagrant and I have given up on our original spot, staking Maki on the slope in case the deer exit the cover the way they went in. The other three of us back out, hike up and over a ridge, and spider-walk down into the timbered vale where we hope the buck is still bedded. We use ridgelines and sagebrush to hide our approach and finally get set up a quarter mile from where we think our buck is holed up. This is how I like to hunt mule deer, gaining feet and inches at a time, instead of trolling from a pickup. 

We see pieces and parts of a few deer, but we can’t put antlers on any of them. An hour into this new spot, Friberg asks how long we might be here. Vagrant says deer like to stand up to stretch between 1 and 2 p.m. I check my watch: 12:57. When I look up, a doe is standing, then a young buck appears, then our buck stands, stretches, turns, and beds down again, but this time within full view of us. His rack is tall and wide. His face is blocky and white. He may be older than five. We range him: 352 yards. I have all the time in the world to set up Landon’s tripod as a shooting rest and settle my crosshairs behind the sleeping buck’s shoulder.

When I shoot, the bullet splits the mountain air. Then, a fraction of a second later, I hear the hydraulic thwump as lead meets venison down in the shade. The buck stiffens, and then stretches out in his bed.

It takes us the rest of the afternoon to quarter the buck and pack him out of the timbered hole. My Browning pack hauls the backstraps, a front quarter, and the buck’s head. Then we’re back in the pickup, trolling again for an old veteran for Maki, as Vagrant enumerates the bucks of Deseret.

“The ranch’s goal is a 190-inch buck, or a 200-plus-inch non-typical,” Vagrant says. “Every year, about half the deer we kill are typicals, half non-typicals. Last year we killed a 208 typical and a 245-inch non-­typical.” I’m in the back seat, scraping blood and meat out of my fingernails. It’s not that I’m uninterested in the quantification of Deseret’s deer. It’s just that the numbers don’t especially matter to me.

The author pauses after packing antlers and meat from his buck, which he killed in one of the timbered draws below.

Instead, I drink in the evening light from a high ridge. To the south, I see the spine of the Wasatch Range hanging over the Great Salt Lake, and in my binocular I can see a ski slope above Park City. To the east, the Uinta Mountains catch the last of the sun. To the north of the mountains, I can see into Wyoming. A bull elk bugles from somewhere down a dark aspen canyon. The sun sets, and we turn the pickup toward the skinning shed.

God’s country, indeed. 

---

Mule Deer Gear
A pack, and a rifle, suited to the backcountry

I want a hard-wearing, flat-shooting rifle for mule deer hunting, where shots can be out to 400 yards. I settled on Montana Rifle Company’s Model 1999 chambered in .280 Ackley Improved and topped with a 4–12x50 Cabela’s Euro riflescope. Shooting a 140-grain Nosler AccuBond, the ballistics of the .280AI match those of the 7mm Rem. Mag., with far less recoil. My pack was SPG’s new Browning Buck 2500RT, which weighs only 3.5 pounds empty but can tote 2,500 cubic inches of gear and features a quiet, moisture-resistant fabric.