The best sleep you’ll ever get happens when you’re deep in the woods, tucked in a small cabin during a rainstorm.

There’s something magical about lying in your bed with the windows open, and hearing rain approach.

Maybe it’s because you can’t hear a storm coming when you’re in a busy city.

But you can when you’re in the middle of nowhere. It plays out like a song.

First the wind picks up and whispers through the trees.

Then the thunder rolls somewhere off in the distance.

A heavy rain drop plops onto the roof and the wind grows stronger.

One rain drop turns into two, then three, then four.

A flash of lightning turns night into day, but only for a split second.

Then comes the steady rain, a percussion of water splashing onto the roof above you.

Until finally, the peak of the storm is upon you.

Lightning, thunder, wind, rain.

The world outside is soaked. But you’re warm and dry in your bed, being lulled to sleep by the noises of the natural world.

At some point in the night, the rain stops. But you don’t know when. You’re in a kind of deep sleep that you only get on these stormy nights.

In the morning, the sun is shining again. Water from the night before trickles lazily off the trees and soaks into the earth. Fog rises and twirls off the water.

And another day of adventure is upon you.

— Rob Wormley, Publisher

On September 16, 1913, at Little Loch Broom in the Scottish Highlands, Muriel Foster made the first entry in her fishing diary. She was twenty-nine years old. She kept it for the next thirty-five years.

Muriel was born in Surrey, England in 1884, the kind of kid who wanted to do whatever her brothers were doing. Fencing. Fishing. Anything outside. She also had a real gift for drawing, enough that she was enrolled at the Slade School of Art in London and studied under Henry Tonks, one of the most respected art teachers of the era. She was good. She exhibited a drawing at the Royal Academy.

But she never became a professional artist, and by her mid-forties, unmarried, she set up her own household at a place called Ivy Cottage in Wiltshire. She spent the rest of her life there drawing, painting, gardening, and fishing, with nieces and nephews coming and going.

On the surface, her diary was exactly what you'd expect from a fishing log. Dates. Locations. What she caught. The flies she used. Annual totals tallied up at the end of each year.

But what sets it apart is everything she put around the numbers.

She painted the fish she caught, in full color, down to the spots on a brown trout. She painted the flies she tied them on. She painted the seals off the islands, the grebes on Loch Farralin, the rivers at Hildersham, the pontoon bridge at Lough Conn. She painted her dogs. She painted the people who fished with her, named them, and put them on the page. She painted Ivy Cottage itself. She wrote observations and bits of poetry alongside the entries, and she kept doing it, year after year, for three and a half decades.

The result isn't a record of fish. It's a record of a life spent outside.

Her diary became a family heirloom, passed down after she died in 1963. Her great-niece finally had it published in 1980, and a facsimile edition came out from Penguin Studio in 1996.

I've been thinking about that diary a lot lately, because it's essentially what we're building with Tally.

Not the paintings. I can't paint, and I'd guess most of you can't either. But the instinct behind it, the idea that a season is worth writing down and worth returning to, is the whole thing. Muriel wasn't documenting for an audience. There was no audience. She was doing it because the days on the water meant something to her and she wanted a way to hold onto them.

We've mostly lost that. Not because we stopped caring about our hobbies, but because documenting them got so easy that it stopped meaning anything. A photo takes a second. It goes into a camera roll with forty thousand other photos and it never comes back out. There's no act of recording, no moment of sitting down and thinking about the day. Just capture, and then nothing.

The old way was slower and better. Writing something down forces you to decide what mattered. Muriel spent her winters going back through her season with a paintbrush, which meant she lived every one of those days at least twice.

That's what a field journal is supposed to do. It's not a scoreboard. It's a way of paying attention to your own life, one season at a time, so that thirty-five years from now there's something to show for it beyond a vague memory of a lot of good mornings.

A few things worth knowing before you head out this week.

Most kids don't fall in love with hunting because of the hunt. They fall in love with it because of everything that happens around it. A few tips this week for bringing a kid into their first season.

Give them a job.
Nobody wants to be a passenger. Put them in charge of carrying the pack, checking the wind with a puffer bottle, watching one direction while you watch the other. It doesn't matter how small the job is. What matters is that they're part of the hunt instead of watching one.

Take them scouting before the season starts.
Hang a camera together. Walk a field edge. Let them see the place when there's no pressure and nothing to be quiet about. When you bring them back to hunt, they already know where they are and why you picked the spot, and that makes sitting still a lot easier to ask for.

Talk on the drive.
Some of the best conversations you'll have with your kid happen in the truck at 5am when neither of you is looking at each other. That drive is part of the experience, not the boring part before it. Don't fill it with a podcast or allow them to scroll on their iPad alone.

Don't make the harvest the point.
Plenty of first seasons end without a shot fired and the kid comes back anyway. What sticks is the cold morning, the hot chocolate, the deer you saw but didn't take, the story you both told at dinner. If they end the day wanting to go again, the trip worked.

White-Tailed Deer

Everybody hunts whitetails, and almost everybody hunts them in November. But archery seasons open in September across most of the country, and early season is a completely different animal than the rut. Deer are still on summer patterns, still predictable, and still relatively unpressured.

Where to find them.
Early season deer are running food to bed and back, and that's about it. Find the food and you've found the pattern. Standing beans, alfalfa, clover plots, and oak flats once acorns start dropping are all worth attention depending on where you are. Bedding is usually close, often closer than people expect, in thick cover with easy access to that food. The trick is finding the transition between the two without walking through it. If you can hunt the edge of a food source with the wind right and get out clean afterward, that's your setup.

What they want.
Food and cover, in that order. Bucks are still in bachelor groups in early September, still velvet or just out of it, and they haven't started thinking about anything but eating. That makes them patternable in a way they won't be again all season. Trail cameras on food sources will tell you almost everything you need to know. Calling and rattling are mostly wasted effort this time of year.

One thing worth knowing.
Early season success is almost entirely about access. The deer are patternable, but they're also completely unpressured, which means the first time you bump them getting to your stand, the pattern is gone. Have an entry route figured out before opening morning that doesn't cross the food source or the bedding area. Most people lose their early season opportunity on the walk in, not from the stand.

That's it for this week. Get out there when you can. We'll see you next time.

— OUTFIT