Episode art by Sarah C. Rose, black bear paw, pen, colored pencil and gouache on paper. Western North Carolina opened a new chapter this year: the first regulated black bear hunts in some of the steepest, coldest, and most tangled country in the state. Sarah and Matt both drew tags for this historic hunt. In…

[Episode Art by Sarah Rose] In this episode, Sarah and I sit down with Hal Herring, host of the Backcountry Hunters & Anglers Cast and Blast, for a wide-ranging conversation about hunting, conservation, and what it really means to be in relationship with land. Hal brings decades of experience as an outdoor journalist, conservation advocate,…

Episode Art: Mule Deer, Pen & Ink by Sarah Rose. Magical practices – communicating and negotiating with the more-than-human to bring our desire into the world, through ritual, petitioning or augury – is the foundation of human thought and spirituality. Hunting practices shaped our species and was the basis of our life-ways for all but…

Our friend Jeremy tells the story he kept quiet for years: a close, unnerving encounter deep in Ohio’s Tar Hollow State Forest that changed the way he moves through the woods. In 2010, bowhunting miles from the road, he watched something come straight through a six-foot wall of greenbrier no person could walk, smelled it…

Episode Art: Whitetail Deer 2025, North Carolina – Ink on Paper by Sarah C. Rose. Dr. Peggy Smith Eppig (environmental historian, longtime ranger, and Goucher professor) joins us to talk about how stories shape land ethics, from St. Hubert and St. Cuthbert to fieldwork in West Virginia where a small chapel’s stag icon sparks a conversation…