By David E. Petzal

“The only time I ever got my s**t together, I couldn’t pick it up.”—Roger Miller

Packing successfully for a hunting trip is far more important than making out a will which will hold up. If you die and your will is successfully contested, what do you care? You’re dead. If, however, you bring only longjohn bottoms on a hunt and leave the tops at home, you’ll regret it bitterly for a week or more.

Because I’m at the age when I have trouble remembering who I am, much less all the stuff that I have to take along, I’ve developed a system that’s worked pretty well. First, take out all the hunting gear you own. I mean everything, even if it has no place where you’re going.

Second, assemble what you need, and don’t do this by simply slinging it into a duffle bag. Don’t assume that you have patches and gun oil in your cleaning kit. You may have taken them out on the last trip because the TSA doesn’t allow gun oil. Are all your batteries fresh? Have you gained so much weight since last season that, when you button your heavy pants, little purple veins erupt on your nose?

By Editors

Those long waits in the stand or the blind can be a little easier with these gloves that let you access your spartphones' features, like the Rut Reporter app...or, you know, Fruit Ninja.

By David E. Petzal

I’ll spare you the usual litany of reasons why the world as we know it is coming unglued. Needless to say, you should be shopping for the occasion, and if you’re looking for a good fixed-blade knife, here are two that are so similar in purpose and construction that I decided to review them together.

The Ranger Puuko is made in Finland, where it was designed as a survival knife by a Finnish officer named J.P. Peltonen. The original Ranger has a 6-inch blade, but people noticed that if you lopped an inch off that, it would make a dandy hunting knife. And so the Ranger Puuko you see here has a 5-inch drop-point blade made of forged tool steel hardened to Rc 58 and coated with Teflon, a 5-inch handle of hardened rubber, and a totally cool leather sheath with a safety liner and an internal rubber keeper that snaps down on the handle and holds it firmly in place.

It’s not a pretty knife, or a finely finished one. It’s meant to be used very hard. The blade is thick and strong, sharpens very easily to a blood-curdling edge, and holds that edge reasonably well. The price for the either the 5-inch-blade Ranger or the 6-inch is $169.50 from kellamknives.com.

The second knife is a brand new one from Cold Steel, and can best be described as a Ka-Bar on steroids (pictured below). It’s called the Leatherneck SF (for “Semper Fi”) and follows the general lines of the Ka-Bar, but with improvements. The 6 ¾-inch blade is made of a steel called SK-5, which is the Japanese equivalent of American 1080, a high-carbon tool steel. It’s hardened to Rc57-58 and came to me with an appallingly sharp edge and kept it extremely well. As with the Ranger, this blade will rust, and so it, too, is coated.