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Field Honest Audio Stories

Field Honest

Honest hunting, fishing, field skills, gear, wild food, conservation, and outdoor stories, read by Field Honest.

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90 episodes
Avg 6 min
English

Episodes 90

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Today · 8 min
The Lease That Cost More Than the Truck
The Lease That Cost More Than the Truck The first time I watched a hunting property slip away to an outfitter with a bigger checkbook, I did not feel angry. I felt something worse. I felt like I had been standing in the wrong line my whole life and nobody had told me. The ground […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Today · 8 min
The Porcini That Waited Three Years in the Yard
The Thing the Woods Had Been Showing Me All Along Three years I spent looking for porcini. Three years of boot leather, gas money, wrong turns down logging roads that petered out into brush, and afternoons squinting at every brown lump under every white oak from here to the county line. Three years, and nothing […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Today · 8 min
The Rifle Is a Slow Gun for a Fast Country. Now Choose the Gun That Feeds a Family Across Open Ground.
Late May, 1848. Somewhere on the North Platte, a Day East of Fort Laramie. You wake because Sam is already awake, which almost never happens, and he is standing over the wagon box with your father’s smoothbore laid flat across both palms the way a man holds something he has stopped trusting. The morning is […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Thursday · 2 min
Amos’s Diary: Thursday, February 4, 1904
A cold come through the holler last week and took the old mule in the chest. She aint a young mule, that gray one, and she’s pulled every plow line and dragged every cord I ever piled on her, so when she stood in the lean-to this morning with her head down and her ears […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Thursday · 7 min
The Drag That Wrecked a Perfect Buck
The Shot Was the Easy Part The buck was down before I could lower the rifle. A clean double-lung at sixty yards, broadside over a scrape he had been working since first light. The shot felt better than it had any right to. I sat in the stand for the full thirty minutes, ticking off […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Thursday · 8 min
The Trout That Showed Up When the Line Was Old
The Trout That Showed Up When the Line Was Old I had been fishing the same six pound fluorocarbon for three weeks. That is a confession, not a boast. Any angler who thinks that is a boast is telling themselves the same lie I told myself, which was that the line was still good because […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Wednesday · 7 min
The White Gas Fireball in the Camp Kitchen
The Man Who Thought Fuel Was Fuel Here is the thing I did not understand until a small fireball told me so. A Coleman stove and the little green canister stove in my garage are both called stoves. That is where the resemblance ends, and I spent twenty minutes learning the difference with my eyebrows […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Wednesday · 8 min
The Scope Knock That Cost a Season
The buck was at forty yards and I did everything right except the one thing that mattered. I had practiced on paper for three weekends straight. I had a rangefinder that talked to me. I had a rifle that cost more than every tool in my dad’s garage put together. And I had a scope […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Wednesday · 8 min
The Wheel Came Down on His Leg and the Nearest Surgeon Is Five Hundred Miles Away. Now Take It Off With a Saw and a Bottle.
The Snapping Sound Is Not Wood Mid-June, 1850. You are two days past Fort Bridger, coming down off the rocky bench toward the Snake, and the left rear wheel catches a slab of quartz no one saw. You hear the axle go, then a sound that is not wood. Sam is underneath before anyone can […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Tuesday · 6 min
Eighty Acres of Big Deer and a Man Who’d Never Once Stood Still
A friend of my father’s died and left behind a piece of ground. Nothing dramatic, just eighty acres of river bottom and second-growth timber in the middle of nowhere, the kind of place a man talks about owning his whole life and then finally does. Because I was the only person left who still hunted, […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Tuesday · 7 min
The Gut Shot That Turned a Clean Morning Into a Mess
The Shot That Was Supposed to Be Over Every hunter rehearses the clean one. The broadside deer, the breath held, the squeeze that puts a bullet behind the shoulder and drops it in sight. You picture the walk over, the knife, the light work, the drive home with the tailgate warm against your gloves. Nobody […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Tuesday · 6 min
An Empty Powder Horn and Two Hundred Miles of Prairie Ahead
A fictional frontier family faces a dwindling powder supply and learns that supper depends on provisions, trade, and judgment as much as hunting. Read the full story at Field Honest.
Monday · 3 min
Amos’s Diary: Friday, January 15, 1904
The leather folder held seventeen recipes, and after the last one Amos told the whole household to flop the book shut and go eat. But the folder was never the whole of the man, and tucked flat against the back cover, held in by an old boot lace, was a sheaf of loose pages that […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Monday · 8 min
The Bank Where Everyone Caught Fish
The Company of Strangers Who Were All Catching It started as a good morning, the kind you believe in. Cold enough to keep the mosquitoes honest, warm enough that your fingers stay useful in the first hour. I had the exact rod three different forums told me to buy, the reel that cost more than […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Monday · 8 min
The Deer That Looked Fine
The Deer That Looked Fine The buck looked like every other buck I have killed. Broad chest, decent rack, bright eye. He came out of the tag alders at last light, walked like he owned the draw, and folded clean at seventy yards. Nothing about him said sick. Nothing ever does, which was exactly the […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Sunday · 7 min
The Chanterelle Haul That Turned to Mush Before Dinner
The Gold That Grows Out of the Ground There is a forest behind the house I rented three years ago, and for the first two of those years I walked past a very ordinary patch of beech and oak without ever looking down hard enough. Then a friend posted a photo of a paper bag […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
Sunday · 8 min
The Down Jacket That Lost Its Loft the Week Winter Showed Up
The Four Hundred Dollar Feather Pillow I spent four hundred dollars on a down jacket the way a nervous man buys flood insurance. I read the fill power number like it was scripture. I held the thing in the store and squeezed it until my knuckles went white, the way you squeeze a handshake from […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
October 31 · 8 min
The Moose That Makes a Man Swear Never Again
The First Ten Minutes Are Free Every solo pack out starts the same way, with the animal on the ground and the gun still leaning against a tree while you stand there feeling like a man who just won something. That part costs nothing. The moose was standing in a wet meadow a little after […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
October 31 · 7 min
The Shake That Comes Before You Touch the Trigger
The Part Nobody Trains For twenty years I practiced everything about the shot except the part that kept ruining it. I burned powder at the rifle range until my shoulder bruised. I read every piece of advice about bullet weight and bedding and breath control. I practiced trigger squeeze in the living room with an […] Read the full story at Field Honest.
October 31 · 7 min
The Horse Is Down and Dinner Is Standing on Four Legs
The Horse Is Down and Dinner Is Standing on Four Legs You wake to the smell of it before your eyes open. The roan mare lies on her side thirty yards from the wagon, and the smell that finds you is ripe, sweet, and wrong. It is late August, 1847, somewhere east of the Sweetwater, […] Read the full story at Field Honest.

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