“Field Ready” outdoor Column

The wind shifted. That peculiar scent of damp earth, wood smoke, and the first stirrings of green rising from winter’s quiet breath. The hedgerows outside my window whispered of coming rain, the kind that soaks slow and steady, not in the dramatic rage of winter’s storms but with a patient insistence that everything must bloom, ready or not. Spring, then. Time to step outside again, time to loose arrows beneath skies no longer grey with foreboding but streaked with hopeful gold. And with spring’s arrival comes the great gear reckoning. If you’ve spent the last few months wrestling damp fletchings, losing boots in the muck, or cursing the slow seep of water through what once claimed to be waterproof, I have a list for you. Not just any list—this is the kit that I, and many archers like me, have found to be worth its weight in gold (or at least in dry socks). And…