Tall tales. Yarns. Fish stories. Bullcrap. Whatever you call them, half-true or entirely fabricated stories have been favorites among hunters, probably since the first nomadic peoples started chasing animals with pointy sticks. The great thing about tall tales, and why they’ve stuck around so long...

Francis Macomber… was thirty-five years old, kept himself very fit, was good at court games, had a number of big-game fishing records, and had just shown himself, very publicly, to be a coward. Ernest Hemingway, “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” In retrospect, it’s tough to blame poor...