December 2020 • Nebraskaland 25
I
know when I'm the outsider. As a longtime Nebraskaland
Magazine writer and photographer, I'm well aware when
I'm interrupting someone's hunting or fishing trip. So
when I went on a top-secret hunt near Ashland with a group
of hunters I barely knew, I had been gifted an exclusive trip.
But it wasn't the fi rst time I had been on a hunt like this.
On the night before the open day of pheasant season in
2008, I was at Frank's Bar with Scott Miller of Lincoln and
his friends before hunting his dad's land near Trenton. I
was about to witness my first true Nebraska pheasant hunt,
complete with the stop-off trip at Cabela's on the way out
for last-second supplies, a group dinner and hunting on land
that had been in the family since 1942.
So when Russ Schellpeper, a close friend of Scott's, came
up to me in the bar — his 6'3 frame gazing down at me in
a not quite grimacing, but definitely not inviting, glare — I
was ready for just about anything.
"It was Scott's idea to bring you here," he said. "Not mine."
I took a sip of my beer and continued to stare at him,
knowing he wasn't finished.
"We do this every year, and we do things a certain way.
Don't mess it up."
"I won't," I smiled. "I can promise you that."
As a Nebraskaland photographer, you're along for the ride.
I've never been put in an illegal or compromising position,
but I've been with multiple people who were unfazed by my
fancy camera equipment, people who simply wanted me to
take whatever was thrown my way.
I received one of these potential curveballs in 2014
while covering the Patriot Hunts program, an organization
dedicated to planning hunts for wounded veterans, first
responders and their families. I walked into a cabin that
housed a group of Purple Heart recipients and knew the
ABOVE LEFT: Hunters arrange goose decoys on New Year's
Day outside of Ashland.
BELOW LEFT: A Lab retrieves a Canada goose.
BELOW RIGHT: A hunter looks out of the blind, his lanyard
of calls and bands indicative of his time in a waterfowl blind
throughout the years.
