By Scott Bestul

Know what you need? A Motive for hunting next fall.

No, I’m not talking about an incentive to get in a tree stand, or some extra inspiration to hike up that ridge. I’m talking Bear’s brand new Motive 6, their flagship compound bow for 2013.

At last month’s ATA show, Hurteau and I shot a whole slew of new compounds, but we only drooled over a few. Because the Motive 6—fast (350 IBO), quiet, and a joy to shoot—was one of the primary drool-inducers, we called up the folks at Bear and said, “Hey, you want give a bow away to one of our blog readers?” And they said, “Heck yeah.”

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By Scott Bestul

The skull looks a century old, even though it was pulled from an Iowa creek bed just six winters ago. The rack is stained orange by mud and black by water. There’s a deep muskrat chew in the fourth tine on the left. The bones of the face are like ocher rawhide. The teeth bring to mind an old river rat I knew—a man who slept with a chaw of Red Man in his mouth. When I tip the skull, sand, grit, and little white beads of bone rattle in the cavities and spill on my shirt.

I put this buck—probably the only net Boone and Crockett typical I’ll ever encounter—in that creek bed, and the knowledge of it has gnawed at me since. [ Read Full Post ]

By Dave Hurteau

I’m sure you’ve read many times, as I have, that “whitetail bucks bed with the wind at their backs and a good view out front.” That sounds pretty darn good. This way they can detect danger from front and back. It makes so much sense, in fact, that it’s almost a little annoying that so many deer don’t bother to follow along.

By the same token, I recently read that bucks bed on slopes and below the points of ridges because falling thermals warn them of danger from behind while their eyes, scanning downhill, catch danger out front. That sounds darn good, too—unless you’re a person who actually hunts in hilly terrain, in which case you know that thermals don’t really start falling until pretty darn late in the day, often right before sunset. And so all those bucks bedded on slopes and below points, the poor dim-witted creatures, actually don’t have the wind at their backs, like they’re supposed to, for most of the day.

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By Chad Love

Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis is denying reports that he used a banned substance derived from deer antlers to help recover from an injury.
 
From this story in the Washington Post:
When Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis tore his triceps last fall and worked his way back onto the field with a remarkably quick recovery, he was given a product that contains a substance banned by the NFL, Sports Illustrated reports. [ Read Full Post ]

By Steven Rinella

Sometimes it’s difficult to anticipate sources of danger when you’re hunting in the backcountry. But on this sunny day, while hunting Coues deer in eastern Arizona, we never had any doubt that rattlesnakes were the things to be watching for.

I was hunting with the crew that films my TV show, Meat Eater. The last few days had been cold and wet. Now that it was warming up, our cameraman, Mo Fallon, commented that every rattlesnake in the neighborhood would be coming out of the ground. He also mentioned that this area was known for green Mojave rattlesnakes, a breed whose venom includes a rare neurotoxin that can make their bites 10 times more dangerous than typical rattlers. Because I was walking in the lead, I figured it was my responsibility to be extra vigilant. But I was distracted from my duties by the fact that we were traveling across fresh terrain, where I was more interested in looking for deer than reptiles. [ Read Full Post ]

By Hal Herring

There was a lot of hubbub around the West when NASA revealed the beautiful “Black Marble” satellite images of America and the world, showing the intensity of our settlements through the brilliance of our electrical lights. So much of the eastern and southern U.S. is lit, and the lights only began to fade as you reach the northern Great Plains, and then look to the northern Rocky Mountains, which remain fairly dark. [ Read Full Post ]