Big Game

After crawling on my hands and knees some 200 yards up a wrinkle in the prairie, I slipped my binos from my bino harness and carefully looked back over my shoulder. In the distance behind me, I could see my white pickup on the roadside, wavering in mirage, and my buddy, Hunter, watching me through...

While scoring antlers is a long and complicated process, scoring bears for record books like Boone and Crockett or Pope and Young simply requires two skull measurements. The skull is a good tool for comparison because it’s the most accurate way to compare bears to each other. Skulls must be dried...

I watched the big cinnamon bear blow out about 300 yards from the two orange dots working their way up the mountain. “There goes that,” I said, peering at them through my spotter. I waved a white game bag back and forth overhead until those little orange dots seemed to take notice and began...

This video shows a herd of elk booking it over a fence. Who knows what’s making them move—could be predators, could be hunting pressure, or maybe they just felt like running. The cows and calves make it over the barbed wire with some effort, but they’re moving remarkably faster than the 6x7 bull in...

Jason Phelps is quick to admit that you don’t need to sound like a verbatim elk to get one inside arrow range. He’s spent a lot of his life building tools for us to speak with the big tan-and-chocolate creatures, but he says a simple mastery of truck-cab bugling won’t prepare you well for actually...

There are three knives I use for the vast majority of my hunting purposes. I'm not making this up to be cute; these are just the blades that have found their way into a consistent rotation. The first is my utility rig, the Benchmade Pardue Hunter. It's a sheath knife that lives on my hip and gets...

A lot of folks get nervous when you start throwing wild pig into the dinner table conversation. Log onto any hunting forum and the majority of people will say they don’t bother eating hogs for any number of reasons—smell, taste, unfounded rumors, you name it. It’s simply the majority mindset, or at...

In this video, I’ll demonstrate how to score a mule deer buck. The main difference between scoring a whitetail and a muley is how you handle the tines. You’ll begin by measuring both main beams, all tines, four circumferences, and adding those numbers up. The last measurement you’ll take is the...

As antler-obsessed humans, we usually look at pointy beams with awe and excitement. Rarely do we consider their potential for destruction. That is, until we come face-to-face with with a strong-willed animal like Tyler and Sheena Terryberry of Parshall, Colorado, did during a morning drive on Jan....

Every day, our fellow meateaters send us more than 100 emails regarding hunting, fishing, cooking, conservation, and more. So, we decided to publish a series dedicated to our favorite FAQs. Ask MeatEater is powered by onX, creators of the best digital mapping tool for hunters and anglers. My...

Scoring a bull elk is quite similar to scoring a deer but with some added complexity due to the sheer length of those much bigger antlers. The total score number will include the inches in the length of the main beams, length of the tines, the inside spread, and the volume of the antlers. And we'll...