A few years back, the Grim Reaper took a swipe at me but missed. Oh, he winged me all right, but he couldn't make the retrieve. He hit me with a triple whammy: a prostatectomy, a rupture and an abscess on my colon. By the time I could crawl out of my den to enjoy the sun again, almost a year had passed, including the better part of two hunting seasons. Oh, I was as handsome as ever (which is not saying one heck of a lot), but the Reaper had left me just a shell of the man I had been. My nether regions felt like they'd been scrambled. My muscle memory had atrophied beyond recall, and my legs felt like stumps. My eyes wouldn't focus, and I flinched at the slightest sound. But I didn't intend to give that ornery, old cuss a second chance at me, at least not anytime soon.
Now, I'm a flushing dog man, springers to be exact, and they're not tuned to wait to make a flush until the old man hobbles up to them. My female pup Elf (short for Evertage Ebony Elf) lived to retrieve. As it happened, once I was healed enough to hunt, my dawdling or missing a bird or two just intensified her flushes. Because of me, we exercised a lot of birds that season but retrieved very few. That drove her nuts! Unless they died of heart attacks, they had earned a year's reprieve. It got so that Elf seemed to feel as though unless she hauled a bird out of the sky all by herself, it was as good as gone. I had never noticed before such positive effects of my own ineptitude.
This story is from the Winter 2025 edition of The Upland Almanac.
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This story is from the Winter 2025 edition of The Upland Almanac.
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THE BIG HURTS
my Uncle Pat once told me that both pain and disappointment were good:“The more of those you have experienced,” he explained, “the longer you have lived; suffer but a little, and you’re in an early grave.
Day's End
NEAR MISSES
Hunting Dog Hypoglycemia
The first time I ever saw a dog have a seizure from hunting dog hypoglycemia was 25 years ago while hunting pheasants in western Kansas.
Profile of an Artist: MATT DOYLE
Throughout Matt's life, there has always been an active passion for the great outdoors. As a young Pennsylvanian boy, his dad and grandfathers would take him out fishing and later hunting to share their deep-rooted respect and enjoyment for God's country. It became very clear that their passion for the outdoors would soon develop his passion for it as well.
DESERT CATHARSIS
Miles of sagebrush and grasslands slipped past during the 10-hour drive between Bozeman and Denver.
RED CAR WHITE DOG:
A Riff on Sporting Vehicles and Other Matters
UENATOR CAUE (HUNTER BEWARE) A FIELD GUIDE +O HUNTING LODGES
From ice bars to plywood shacks, in-room hot tubs to a kitchen staff uprising, the hunting lodge experience can be fascinating and frustrating.
Charles Helles & Sons, London
“Some enchanted evening ... you may see a stranger across a crowded” – gunroom.
ON POINT: Finding My Way with the Help of an English Setter
Becky came into my life in a rather unusual way. My friend Tom McGuane had just bought a home on Mobile Bay as a place to retreat from the cold winters of his Montana ranch.
Tail feathers - STANDARDS AND PRACTICES
\"An armed society is a polite society,\" the NRA says in one of its dicta, cribbed from Robert A. Heinlein, a 20th-century American science fiction writer.
