By David E. Petzal

One of the problems with something the size of the SHOT Show (This year’s set another record for size.) is that a great many deserving but non-glamorous items get lost in the herd. Here are two that deserve your attention and your money.

One of my greatest regrets as I shuffle off this mortal coil is that I’ve kept poor records of my hunting trips, or no records. If you’d like to end up at the end of the trail in better shape, record-wise, I suggest you get hold of Rite in the Rain’s Big Game Journal Kit. This weatherproof spiral-binder pad (and they are weatherproof, too, by God; I’ve used RiR pads for years) has listings for 35 items of information plus a blank reverse for any random intel you care to include.

By David E. Petzal

Well, the End of Days has fizzled, and if you listen carefully, you can hear Mayan ghosts saying, “A**holes, it’s a circular calendar.” In any event, there’s always hope that life as we know it will end sometime soon. Just have a good view of the proceedings, and rest assured that whatever takes over from us will do a better job than we have.

But that’s not important now. What is important is that the editors of Field & Stream have given me a new column called “Ask Petzal.” (What would you call it? “Ask Biden?”) It will consist of questions from readers and answers from me, and while it will mostly be about guns, it will range to other subjects, such as “Why are you such a curmudgeon?”

By Phil Bourjaily

Response to the caption contest of me biting down on a Federal Prairie Storm round was outstanding.

At first, I thought I could pick a winner myself. Of course I preferred the ones that made me seem awesome and mythological, such as Duke123’s entry:

By David E. Petzal

So, there I was, sitting in a box blind in Maine 10 minutes before last shooting light, looking through my scope at a hillside with a whitetail on it, trying to decide whether the creature had horns or not. This was complicated by the fact that the whitetail was already in deep shadow, and that the hillside was backlighted by the setting sun, and by the fact that it (the deer, not the sun) had its buttocks toward me and its head down in an infernal tangle of branches, weeds, and other annoying plant life.

I was looking at the critter through a Zeiss Conquest rifle scope and, good as the scope is, I was unable to tell if it was time to pull the trigger. Finally, since the light was running out, I said the hell with it and picked up a Zeiss 10x42 Conquest HD binocular (a loaner; sent it back yesterday) and saw at a glance what I could not see through the scope—that the beast was a doe and that the day was over.