How to Photograph Dogs
No question about it, Ed Zern walked to the beat of a different drummer, and his penultimate creation, Orville Dykenfoos, was, in many ways, an entirely appropriate alter ego.  For Zern inhabited an alternate universe, one filled with out-of-kilter hunting and fishing yarns, obscure literary references, elaborate puns, and the doings of an inexhaustible supply of bemused friends. Beginning in 1958, Exit Laughing anchored the last page of Field & Stream, and it remained a staple of the magazine for nearly 35 years.  Some columns would produce peals of laughter, others a wry smile; there were those, too, that produced letters from befuddled readers asking just what the hell was going on.  The editors didn’t always know, which was fine by Zern. This particular Exit Laughing, which appeared in December 1959, will give readers a peek into Zern’s fertile mind. And he came up with this stuff every month! Click here to read the story.

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• Hunting Turkeys, Ducks, Geese, Pheasants, and Quail With Bird Dogs

At the last meeting of the Madison Avenue Rod, Gun, Labrador Retriever and Bloody Mary Benevolent Association one of the members complained that he had just got back the day before from a north woods hunting trip and that, as always on returning from a stay in wilderness country, he had been unable to sleep because of the night noises of the city. This reminded me of the time a few years ago when I was staying at Dana McNally’s fishing camp on Fourth Musquacook Lake in northern Maine, trying to coax some of those monster Barrel Hole squaretails to chew on a homemade Rat-Face MacDougall, and Dan said he was about to fly his Piper float plane over to Long Pond where his 80-year-old father, the legendary Willy McNally, was supervising construction of a new camp.

When Dana asked if I cared to go along I said yes indeed, and off we flew. When we’d landed (if that’s the word) on the lake, taxied a quarter mile up the Chemquasabamticook Stream to the new clearing, and beached the airplane on a sandy bank, we went ashore and found Willy McNally. He looked to be a well-preserved 60 or 65, pointed out without eyeglasses a deer I could barely see with my binoculars, and had a wit as sharp as his eyesight.

After he’d ushered us into the new cabin and sat us down before the fireplace, he asked if I was from New York. “Yes, sir,” I said, and asked him if he’d ever been there. “Once,” he said. “Did you stay long?” I asked. “No, sir,” he said. “Did you like it?” I asked. “I did not,” he said emphatically. “What didn’t you like about New York?” I asked. “Oh, various things,” he said, “but mostly it was the noise. My hotel room was on the third floor, and traffic was something terrible outside my window. I couldn’t sleep a wink.”

“It’s pretty bad, all right,” I agreed. “Bad?” he snorted. “It’s ungodly awful! All night long that clop, clop, clop!” I thought about this awhile and then said, “Exactly when were you in New York?” “Well, sir,” said Willy, “it must have been about 1908 or thereabouts. I suppose it’s changed some.” I agreed it had, and said new buildings were going up faster than a man could keep track of them. “Shucks,” said Willy, “we’ve got some new buildings too, right here.” He said he had run a trapline along the Chemquasabamticook when he was 17 years old, and had thought then that it would be a good place to build a cabin.

“And now I’m 80 years old, and we’re building it,” he said. “I’ve never been one for rushing into a thing without first thinking it over.” We agreed this was a wise attitude, and after Willy had told me about his hide-bound hog, that didn’t grow or gain weight until he’d rubbed it all over with neat’s-foot oil, Dana and I crawled back into the Piper and flew back to camp.