A SHORT SEASON

Tater has bitten my Adan, blown up my plans and narrowed my life to six trusted people. Can I learn to love the complications? A story about dogs, burritos, and what I’ll miss when they’re gone.

I left my optics at home so I would film more. Now, I’m just sitting on the hill while Chase and Zach glass. And I’m slapped again, but not by the wind.

A low shot breaks a buck’s front leg, and it changes everything. On how a few inches decided whose deer it was.

By the time you hear the thwap, it’s already over.

I found a buck at 900 yards with the edge of my eye. Gray light isn’t gray, and your headlamp is costing you deer.

There’s no better shared meal than a pizza made by hand. Here’s my dough recipe.

I used to be afraid of what lurked in the shadows. Then I got lost on a night so dark there were no shadows. And now everything has changed.

My best day on the water was a lesser memory than watching someone else’s best day in the mountains. Here’s why.

I dial the scope turret and settle the crosshairs on the cat’s shoulder. I squeeze the trigger. When the rifle resettles on the gut pile, the cat is gone.

I was filming Cam Hanes hunt moose in Alaska when we woke to six inches of fresh snow and zero visibility. Every instinct said stay in the tent. Cam had other plans, and what he said that day has stuck with me ever since.

I killed the ugliest deer of my life in Sonora, then tried to give the meat to the cartel so I wouldn’t have to pack it four miles out. That’s how we ended up on a mountaintop, unarmed, waiting for the boss to decide what to do with us.

Life has a funny way of teaching us lessons when we least expect it. For me, one of these lessons came at 13,000 feet in the Caucasus Mountains of Azerbaijan. Chase and I were there to hunt Dagestan Tur. This was two years after we hunted Dall sheep in the Alaska range, and we were anxious to get into the

hopscotching down a steep sandy hill trying to stay on the broken slabs of sandstone. Deep sand captures a large puddle of blood like kitty litter clumping spilled motor oil. The bull I’m following is bleeding out both sides of his chest making it easy to follow the puddles. We edge around a rock bluff gaining a vantage of the

he herd of elk stopped feeding peacefully and started running across the cholla filled desert flat. I wondered what spooked them. Chase and I had been watching them feeding safely half a mile beyond the private land fence. Now, suddenly, they were running toward a lone island of state land—the nearest cover of junipers. Could I be that lucky? From

aime and I are working up a steep ridge to get closer to a bull tahr Jaime found a few minutes earlier. I look up the ridge and plot a route up what looks to be a reasonable line. “We can make that.” I say. “Right behind you” Jaime replies. Halfway up we stop on a flat section that’s flanked

I‘m sitting above a deep canyon with my eyes buried in glass. I’m panning left and right, while Josh and Ricky are panning right and left. We’re looking for fuzzy antlered mule deer. Josh has a tag and his bow. The three of us have been in this exact spot doing this exact thing at this exact time of year

It’s type-two fun. The kind of fun you hate. The kind of fun you dread. It’s the kind of fun that’s only fun looking back on it. The kind of fun that results in tingling feet, raw hips, and sore backs, but also a freezer full of goodness. On Monday, Chase killed a great Arizona bull in a rugged unit