The journey, not the antler size, is what really
defines the trophy A friend of mine once told me that without the journey,
there could be no trophy. It was very wise advice and that statement really crystalizes
what this article is all about. After all these years of hunting nearly every
day of the deer season, I have learned a few things. The most humbling thing I have
learned is that I rarely shoot big deer despite my best intentions. But I shoot
mature bucks fairly often, many of which I have a long history with.
Interestingly,
I feel just as good, if not better, about taking these old bucks with the long
history as I do from taking bucks with bigger antlers. It truly is all about
the journey. In this feature, I am going to focus on the journey and how you
can rid yourself of antler mania and get back to what really matters — the joy
of the hunt. You will never enjoy a deer season more than you will when you
adopt the attitude that the journey is its own reward. Let’s face reality. As
hard as we try, most of us aren’t going to grow giant bucks every year, but we
can probably grow mature bucks consistently — with a real story behind them.
Going after bucks like this produces a very satisfying hunting experience.
MAKING IT PERSONAL
I
get much more satisfaction out of hunting a specific buck than I get from just
going deer hunting. Making it personal is one key to increasing the level of
enjoyment we gain from deer hunting. There are several ways to do this, but the
two most obvious ones I have found are video and trail cameras. I started
videotaping my hunts in 2005 when I invited a TV show to send a cameraman to my
farm to capture my hunting season. I was hunting a particular big buck, and I
decided that even if I didn’t get him, I really wanted to have professional
video footage of the deer that I could keep and watch forever. Think of the
most memorable encounters you have had in the field; I bet you wish you could
go back and relive them a thousand times. You invest so much time for those 10
seconds of thrill and adrenaline. But then they are gone way too quickly, and
all you have is memories. It would sure be nice to have something more
permanent than a mental image. No matter how well you burn that moment into
your memory, it will never be as brilliant or as beautiful as it will be when
you watch it back in HD video. The 2005 season started me down a road that I am
still traveling. I still have a cameraman in the tree with me every time I go
deer hunting. I also do this for business reasons now, but it has the side
benefit of giving me the ability to go back and watch video footage of hunts
years later. I can identify bucks I have passed up that I am hunting now. It is
fun to see how they have changed and grown. While they might not have meant
much at the time we filmed them, now they mean much more. That kind of history helps
me to form a better idea of the range and movement patterns of the bucks, but
it also makes the hunt more personal. Video has made it much easier for me to
identify specific bucks, to organize them (even to name a few of them) and to
go back later and start to form a timeline of development for those bucks. I
love watching them get larger and change their behavior as they grow older. They
are like a part of the farm. Not only are these individual buck stories the
basis for my continued education in deer behavior, they are what make it so
interesting and satisfying when I finally kill one of the bucks. The story
(more correctly, the history) really makes the harvest much more satisfying
regardless of the buck’s size. It isn’t all that hard to self-film bucks as
they move past your stands. Sometimes, you can even get lucky and actually film
a buck as you shoot it. Self-filming hunts is a very fast growing aspect of
deer hunting. All you need is a decent camera, a camera arm that attaches to
the tree and some patience to learn. This article really isn’t about how to
film — it's about how get to know bucks — so I am going to leave that part of
the discussion for another day. It is enough for now to leave you with this
thought: Filming bucks from your stand is not as hard or expensive as you might
think. And it is a lot of fun.
TWO BUCKS I HAVE KNOWN
Let
me give you two polar opposite examples of how the journey becomes the reward
so you can see why I love deer hunting more now than I ever have. This past
season, I shot one of my biggest bucks to date. But in keeping with this theme,
we must first go back a few years to establish the story. This buck was an
average looking 3-1/2-year-old in 2009. I paid him very little mind that
season, even though he seemed to be everywhere my cameraman and I went. He came
within bow range at least five or six times. Once, he actually bedded down only
20 yards from the stand and stayed there while Chad and I snuck out of the tree
at midday. He never knew we were there. We still laugh about it. We filmed the
buck often doing all kinds of things, like walking through the fog of an early morning
sunrise, chasing does and eating acorns. You could already see in his
personality at that age that he was a buck that liked to cover ground and
wasn’t overly worried about moving during day. He seemed almost dumb compared
to other bucks on the farm. Fortunately, he made it through the season, and in
2010 he grew into a very good-looking 11- pointer. He still had the same basic
rack structure and home range and that made it easy to identify him. He was
still covering tons of ground during the daylight. Only now, he was 4- 1/2
years old and had become a target buck on my hit list. I called him the G5 Buck
because he had grown a crab-claw G5 on his right beam. During the 2010 season,
G5 came within bow range four times. Twice, he came by right at last light, and
once he heard me move on the stand and left without offering a shot. Once, I
hit him high and he got away. He recovered easily from the high hit and made it
through the winter in fine shape. During Summer 2011, we found him back again,
eating soybeans on one of the commercial crop fields on the farm. He had really
blown up into a dandy. Because of the history I had with the G5 Buck, I was
excited to hunt him again. You can imagine my satisfaction when I was able to
kill him Nov. 9 as he cold-trailed a doe right past my stand. That is one
example. Now, let’s go back a year to the 2010 season again. That season, after
the G5 Buck got away, I ended up shooting a very old buck that I had only seen
four times during daylight during the previous four hunting seasons. In 2008, I
filmed a friend miss the buck. After that, the deer became known as Jamie — in
honor of my friend’s ill-fated evening. Jamie the deer was apparent on trail
cameras at night, but never showed himself in daylight during the remainder of
the 2008 season, nor did he show up during the day during the 2009 season. He was
like a ghost — a legend, maybe a myth. To me he had become like the Easter
Bunny and Santa Claus. Jamie even made it most of the way through the 2010
season without yet offering daylight photo or sighting. Finally, toward the end
of November that year, I saw a heavy-horned old buck one evening. The next
morning, I was back in the same stand when the buck came in to my grunt call.
He had a familiar look to him. When I recognized the deer as Jamie, I was
overwhelmed with satisfaction at finally besting that old buck. Whereas the G5
Buck was pushing 190 inches, Jamie was pushing 135 inches. Yet, both bucks
brought out the same sense of satisfaction in me. What I appreciated about both
of these deer was the hunt they led me on — the years of getting to know them
and the hours spent trying to see them. When it finally came together, I felt a
great sense of joy that had nothing to do with antler size.
TRAIL CAMERA PHOTOS
OK,
so video is one way you can get to know the bucks you hunt better, but there is
also a much easier and less expensive method: trail cameras. You can learn tons
about the bucks you are hunting from trail camera photos. However, just as
importantly, you can also gain a history with the deer. You can select certain bucks
to hunt and form a strategy for going after them. In other words, you can make
it personal. Finally, you have a way to gain that personal feel that was
lacking in the past. You can realistically start to hunt individual bucks with
some hope of actually seeing and shooting them. Without trail cameras, it takes
tons of scouting time and tons of luck to pull that off. Even with the trail
camera photos it is still not easy by any stretch, but at least you are in the
game. It gives you a tool to increase the joy of the hunt even if you can’t
afford the hundreds of hours of scouting and glassing that otherwise accompany
patterning specific deer.
DEFINING THE JOURNEY
Making
it personal — hunting a specific buck — is just one part of the journey to me.
Almost as important to me is the ability to learn more about the animals. Every
year I learn something new, if only that what I thought was true in the past
actually wasn’t. Even when I am failing, I am learning. I might be figuring out
that one of my strategies doesn’t work or I may be learning how deer relate to
a certain terrain feature near my stand or I may be learning something about the
different personalities of mature bucks. Whatever it is, this quest for
information and knowledge about deer makes the season more enjoyable. I now
enter the season with some fresh ideas, untested strategies and new theories on
what deer do, and then I try my best to prove or disprove them as I spend days
in the tree. When you combine that with what I learn from my video and trail
camera photos, my understanding really moves forward each season. If you really
start to embrace the quest for knowledge, it becomes its own reward. While filling
tags is always a lot of fun, it becomes less important when you enter the
season with other goals that are just as important. It is all part of the
journey.
A NEW DAY, A NEW PHILOSOPHY
Bringing
this full circle, we aren’t going to be hunting giant bucks very often, but
that shouldn’t detract from the pure joy of matching wits with mature
whitetails. Forget the antlers and focus on the age of the bucks. Focus on the hunt,
on the history you have with the deer and what you have learned about that buck
through years of failing to kill him, and soon you will come to the same
conclusion I did: Antler size is overrated. I will always try to shoot the
bucks on the farm with the biggest antlers, but that is not going to detract
from the joy and satisfaction I feel when I shoot a mature smaller-antlered buck
with which I have a long history. Any mature buck is a trophy and when you set
out to hunt a specific buck on his terms, the hunt turns into a journey. That
is when things really start to get interesting.
