On the Subject of Fish and Game
There is a school of thought — held principally by gentlemen who have never been genuinely hungry in the woods — that the proper woodsman keeps his fishing purely sporting and his hunting strictly honorable, and will on no account stoop to methods that are not quite the thing. These gentlemen fish with the most exquisite tackle money can procure, strike only at the surface rise, and return any fish that does not meet their precise standard of sporting excellence.
I have no quarrel with this philosophy, provided the gentleman is carrying sufficient salt pork and hard bread to see him through the week. But the man who goes into the woods to actually live there — who depends on what the forest provides — takes a more practical view of the matter.
The honest woodsman catches fish to eat them. He hunts because the alternatives are going hungry or carrying more weight than his constitution permits. He wastes nothing. He takes no more than he needs. And in my experience, this practical, grateful approach to wild game is in fact the more ethical one — more honest about the nature of the transaction between man and wilderness than the elaborate sporting ritual that pretends the fish is a partner in a game.
The Philosophy of Hunting and Fishing
Before I instruct you in the methods, let me say something about the spirit in which they ought to be practiced.
The wilderness is not a storehouse to be plundered. Every man who enters the forest takes something from it. The sportsman who kills twelve grouse in a morning and leaves eight to rot in his game bag is not a sportsman — he is a vandal with a shotgun. The fisherman who drains a pool of its trout and leaves half of them floating is not fishing — he is conducting a massacre.
The standard I have held to in forty years of woodland travel is this: kill only what you can use. Use everything you kill. It sounds simple, and it is. The man who follows this rule leaves the forest a little better than he found it — or at least no worse. The man who ignores it is not welcome to the company of any woodsman I respect.
The forest of 1884 is not inexhaustible. I have seen streams that held trout in abundance within my own memory reduced to near emptiness by the sort of "sportsmen" who count their catch by the bushel. I have watched the ruffed grouse thin from every covert in a district within five years of its being discovered by the city hunter. If this continues — and I have no great confidence that it will not — our grandchildren will inherit bare hillsides and empty streams.
Hunt thoughtfully. Fish with gratitude. These are the first ethics of the woods.
Nessmuk's Ethics Hold Up Over 140 Years
Nessmuk wrote about sustainable harvest in 1884 — decades before any organized conservation movement. His observation that market hunting and over-shooting were destroying game populations proved entirely correct. The bag limits, seasons, and catch-and-release practices modern sportsmen follow are the institutional expression of exactly the personal ethics Nessmuk advocated: take only what you need, waste nothing, leave something for the forest to recover.
Reading Streams for Trout
The trout stream is a readable document, if you approach it with attention rather than haste. The man who crashes through the bankside brush to the nearest likely pool will catch nothing but frogs. The man who moves slowly, keeps low, keeps quiet, and reads the water will catch supper.
What the trout stream tells you:
Current breaks and seams: Trout do not hold in fast current — they are built for short bursts, not sustained swimming. They hold in the quiet water behind a rock, below a falls, in the eddy behind a log or root mass — where the current brings them food but does not demand that they work for their position. The seam between fast and slow water is always worth a presentation.
Depth and shade: In bright midday sun, trout move to deeper water or shade. The undercut bank overhung with grass, the dark pool beneath a leaning hemlock, the foam line under the overhang of a log — these are midday lies. In morning and evening, fish move to shallower riffles and flats to feed.
Surface activity: A trout that is rising to the surface is feeding on hatching insects. A trout that is holding deep is either resting or waiting for subsurface food. Reading the surface tells you which game you are playing.
Sound and approach: Walk softly. Keep your shadow off the water. Trout, particularly in clear streams, are easily alarmed by ground vibration and overhead silhouettes. The shadow of a man across a pool will put every fish to the bottom for ten minutes. Approach from downstream, stay below the bank, and reach the bank edge only at the last moment before presenting your fly or bait.
Trout Fishing Methods
For the practical woodsman who needs supper, I recommend two approaches, each suited to its conditions:
Wet fly fishing is the most satisfying method and requires the least equipment. A light rod of eight to nine feet — cane or lancewood, well-made and responsive — a simple dressed silk line, and two or three soft-hackle flies tied on small hooks. The soft hackle — a partridge body hackle over a silk body — imitates the drowned nymph or emerger that trout feed on subsurface during most hatches.
Work downstream and across the current. Cast to the near bank first, then extend your reach as you move downstream, covering the water systematically. The fly swings across the current on a tight line — the strike, when it comes, is unmistakable. No drag indicators required, no complicated mending. The method has not changed substantially in two hundred years, and it will not need to change for two hundred more.
Bait fishing with a worm is the method I recommend for high, muddy, or cold water when the trout are not rising and will not look at an artificial. A fat angle-worm, hooked through the collar and allowed to drift naturally along the bottom of a run, catches trout when nothing else does. There is no shame in it. The fish eating a worm is eating something that belongs in its world. The fish deceived by a clever artificial is doing something altogether more athletic. Both wind up in the pan equally well.
Simple Tackle for Forest Streams
Nessmuk's insistence on simple tackle was not merely philosophical — it was practical. A forest stream is hard on equipment. Branches grab flies, logs eat leaders, rocks abrade lines. Expensive, complicated gear accumulates expensive, complicated problems. A simple rig with two flies, a short leader, and a light line can be repaired or replaced from materials in your camp kit. The complicated one cannot.
Small Game: The Practical Hunter
For the man traveling light through the woods — which is to say, for any sensible man traveling through the woods — small game is the hunter's proper quarry. The deer is a noble animal and fine eating, but processing a white-tail in the field is half a day's work for a man traveling alone, and he can carry only a small portion of the result. The squirrel, the rabbit, and the ruffed grouse are taken quickly, cleaned in minutes, and cooked whole over the fire with nothing wasted.
The gray squirrel is my standard woodland provision. They are found in every quality hardwood forest, active from first light until mid-morning and again in late afternoon, and they advertise their presence with considerable enthusiasm. A single small-bore rifle is all that is needed. Shoot for the head — the body shot is wasteful, and the squirrel is small enough that a body-struck specimen and a clean miss are nearly equivalent.
The ruffed grouse is the finest upland game bird on the continent, in my judgment, and it is taken either with a light shotgun at close range from a dog's point, or by the stalk and still-hunt that the rifleman employs. In the deep woods of New York and Pennsylvania where I have done most of my traveling, grouse lie remarkably tight and can be approached within range of a careful man who moves slowly and watches the forest floor.
The snowshoe hare, in northern forests, is as reliable a provision as anything the woods offer. In winter they are everywhere and relatively easy to take. A figure-four snare of green wood, baited with a cabbage leaf or a handful of winter grass, catches hare as reliably as a gun and without the noise that frightens other game.
Stalking and Tracking
The stalk is the whole art of hunting concentrated into a single activity. Everything the woodsman knows about wind, terrain, game behavior, and patient movement comes to bear in those final hundred yards between the hunter and his quarry.
Wind is everything. A deer — and most game animals — will smell you at a quarter mile before they see or hear you. Always approach from the downwind side. When the wind is uncertain, test it with a pinch of dry ash or powder from the fire, released in the air and watched. Your approach must be planned around where the wind takes your scent.
Move slowly. The hunter who moves through the woods at walking pace sees only the tails of the animals that have already heard him. The hunter who stops every four or five steps — who stands still for a full minute listening and watching — sees the woods as it actually is. Most game is spotted not in motion but while the hunter is motionless.
Read the sign. Tracks, droppings, scratched bark, nipped browse — the woods are full of evidence of where the animals have been and, by inference, where they are going. Fresh deer tracks in soft mud, pressed within the hour, tell you the direction of travel, the pace (walking, trotting, running), and the approximate size of the animal. A fresh rub on a sapling tells you where a buck is working his territory. These signs are the chapter headings of a book the forest is constantly writing.
Cleaning and Preparing Wild Game
The most important rule of field-dressed game: work quickly and keep everything clean.
For small game — squirrel, rabbit, grouse — the procedure takes under five minutes once practiced. Skin the squirrel by cutting through the hide around the mid-back and pulling the skin toward the head and tail simultaneously. Slit the belly cavity and remove the viscera. Cut off the head and feet. Rinse in cold stream water if available. Spear on a green wood skewer and roast over the coals — or quarter and fry in the pan with a little salt pork for fat.
For birds, pluck or skin as preference and time dictate. Plucking takes longer but produces a better roast — the skin renders its fat and bastes the flesh during cooking. For the man in a hurry, skin the breast and cut out the breast meat alone; it is the best part, and the rest of the cleaning can wait while the fire builds.
Preserving Meat in the Field
In warm weather, field-dressed small game must be cooked within a few hours or preserved. The practical methods:
Smoking is the most reliable preservation for a forest camp. Split the meat into thin strips, no more than a quarter inch thick. Build a frame of green sticks over a slow fire of green hardwood — hickory, apple, or maple are traditional. Lay the strips on the frame, six to eight inches above the smoke but below the direct heat. A slow, dense smoke cures the meat in four to six hours. Properly smoked strips will keep for several days in cool weather without going bad.
Drying works in combination with smoking, or on its own in hot, dry weather. Thin strips hung in direct sun with good air circulation will dry to jerked meat in a day if conditions are right. In forest shade or humid weather, smoking is more reliable.
Cold-weather storage in northern forests requires no technique at all. In winter, nature provides the largest and most reliable icebox ever constructed. Hang your game in the shade, out of reach of the camp dogs, and the cold will keep it indefinitely.
The principle, in any case, is the same as the hunting principle: waste nothing. The animal gave its life to provision you. The least you can do is make proper use of it.
The Modern Relevance of Nessmuk's Food Ethic
Nessmuk wrote at a time when market hunters were stripping the continent of game. His insistence on taking only what you need and using everything you kill was a minority position in 1884 — but it was the right one. Today it is codified in law and sporting ethics both. The deeper truth he grasped is still underappreciated: the wild animal taken with care, gratitude, and skill, and prepared properly by the hunter's own hands, represents a relationship to food and to wildness that no supermarket or restaurant can provide. Learn these skills not because you will need to survive on them, but because they connect you to something essential and true.