Author: Gary Lewis

It’s the tension, three-toed tracks by the waterhole and a bird hidden in the bunchgrass. It’s the ache you feel in your muscles, a blur of wings and the thump of the gun. By Gary Lewis Seth O’Hare, 32-years-old, was on the first bird hunt of his life. In one hand he held a borrowed Remington 870 and in the other he held a bird aloft. He had just made a beautiful shot on a towering rooster pheasant. “Can you do this without a dog?” “You can, but it’s a lot harder.” On the other side of a strip...

U.S. Army vet Kyle James returns to his homeland for a late-summer elk hunt By Gary Lewis After I got back from Iraq, I didn’t want to hunt for a long time.” A lot of things change for a soldier back from war. “After I got back, even most music, I didn’t want to listen to.” It was a time to heal. Kyle James, who makes his home in Oregon City, is a soft-spoken 30-year-old who used to sit in the turret on an armored Humvee with his finger light on the 240 Bravo trigger. We hunted with him...

One man’s limit of valley quail, a rooster and a hare to split By Gary Lewis What pheasants and quail want are layers of cover. Russian olive trees growing out of tangles of blackberry bushes, tall grass and tangle of cattails and more blackberry bushes. There may be no shortage of sharp-toothed critters that eat them and the hook-beaked birds that pounce on them from above, but if there are enough layers of habitat, Chinese pheasant and valley quail thrive. There are still places like that in Malheur County, in Umatilla County and in the Columbia Basin. We were...