Ep. 620: Foundations - Tough Bucks

right now. Maybe you live in a place like I live in and it's miserable and stupid outside, and you realize people probably shouldn't live here. Maybe you think, like for some reason a lot of Wyoming residents do, that the place you live makes you tough. The winter is hard in you, and you know you and your people and well you know the badass or he comes oozing out and everything you do from flossing with a chainsaw

to cattle roping bull moose in your spare time. Sure you're kind of tough, but not as tough as your average one and a half year old six pointer. Thems the breaks, my friends, and that's what this episode is actually really all about. If you head on down to the local watering hole where Garth Brooks is still playing on the jukebox, and the crowd leans heavily toward long necks and not necessarily drinks like cosmos or chocolate martinis. You probably don't have to look too hard to find

some dude who thinks he's pretty tough. There's one in every bar, I guess, and I'll bet that hypothetical but also very real archetype of a person. If you were to switch the dusty TV on and turn it to some random UFC event, I bet you'd hear from them stories about how the competitors weren't really that tough, and your new bar friend could probably take them in a no rules, bare knuckle brawl in the back alley amongst

the dumpsters and the cigarette butts. I'm sure the tough guy would tell you, you you know, over the drone of manicured cowboy hat wearing fellows singing I don't know, dirt road songs and short shorts in a life they probably never have seen. And Shirley can't see from their beachfront place in Malibu that toughness doesn't come from earning no stupid belt or having a bunch of rules so that

no one really gets hurt. It comes from the heart, he'd say, Or I don't know, growing up with twelve older brothers and a drunk for a dad or whatever.

But the truth is that's sitting on a bar stool in a place like Newell, South Dakota telling people how tough you are is a far cry from stepping into that octagon improving it against someone who has trained for a decade or two on how to fold people into neat little packages of pain and sadness, or strike them from their calves to their skull with a wild repertoire

of practice elbows, ches and kicks. It's not the same thing, and everybody knows it, kind of like how when you occasionally get a living wild animal in your hands that doesn't want to be there, and you can just feel the raw power in them. Many folks have taken a beating from turkey wings after they've dumped them with a load of fours in the spring, or a few people have taken spurs to the hands or the neck or the face. Animals are strong, generally, but some animals are

just tough, real tough. Not sit at the bar and not prove it tough, but tough. Anybody who's hunted squirrels knows they're tough. The cling to life aspect of squirrels is real and will show itself if you hunt them enough. Rabbits, on the other hand, not that tough. They're like the clueless city dweller who instantly gets bit by the first zombies in an outbreak. Just not smart enough for a long life and just not tough. Rough grouser like that too.

They catch a single baby from your shatka pattern. They're coming down. Not a rooster, though. Pheasants are tough. You knocked them down, they just run and hide. Their will to live is impressive. Take antelope not so much, not so tough. I actually kind of don't think elk are that tough either, but I don't have enough experience to make that call, so I could be way off based on that one. And of course, those white tails we love so much. They are as Mark would probably put

it tough some bitches, and they are. The second year I ever shot was a button buck on a late September morning. I actually got shot him twice and had to cut his throat when we blood trailed him to his bed where he was very much alive. Now, I don't know if you know much about button bucks in September, but they aren't very big. And I also don't know if you know anything about the old style broadheads, like bare razor heads or wikies, but they were big and

covered in a lot of utting surface. And the fact that he took one through himself broadside at one down through his back and still had the grit to go and bed down and be alive when we got there tells you something. And it was ugly. That was an ugly encounter that stuck with me as a hunter. I did a terrible job and that left a mark, but

so did that Dear's toughness. Since then, I've seen so many examples of the great deer really have and it comes in many forms, but one of the most obvious is how often they have significant but healed over wounds on them. A good buddy of mine shot a buck

in southern Minnesota with his muzzleloader in December. That buck, it was nice, dear had a normal four point side on one side, but also kind of a smaller, droopier looking messed upside, and Ben said it looked like someone had shot the buck with a shotgun slug the year before, because although it was healed up, he said the scar tissue and the damage to the shoulder was in intent now. That same buck also had several time wounds in his

rear quarter that were full of puss. I don't know which injury I'd pick, the shotgun blast of the shoulder or some blunt tines digging into your glutes. That neither is all that appealing. If you're hunting a high pressure area, you have probably shot a few deer with bullets or broadheads in them. I have. I've shot deer with muzzle loader bullets in their legs and in their backstraps. I've shot a buck one time in Minnesota that had an

enormous but old wound on his back. I don't know if he got hit by a grain truck or what, but a whole section of his back dipped down lower than the rest. Can you imagine the amount of deer out there making a go of it on three legs. It's pretty incredible too. If some random blaze orange clad asshole and his buddies walked through my living room in a line and shot off one of my legs when I tried to get away, I think I'd lay right there in my yard and beg for a merciful second shot. Dear,

are just tough. I already told his story, so I won't give it full details here. But I shot a buck through the ribs in Texas one time. When that buck came back to the feet or two days later, I shot him again, thankfully better that time. And what was crazy is I got to see how much that original wound had healed up in two days. It was incredible. The skin had fused back together, and while it would bleed a little bit when I pushed on the wound, it wasn't like the kind of wound you'd expect from

fixed blade broadhead going right through your chest. Imagine that. Imagine what it would be like to have an arrow go through your ribs, magically miss all the good stuff that keeps you out there in the mesquite, and then being damned near fully healed a few days later. They are truly incredible, and I think it's probably a little bit of genetic hardwaring and a little bit that they don't have pity parties like we do. I've interviewed quite

a few veterinarians in my life. Over the years, they used to produce and host a podcast all about sporting dogs, and for like a decade I wrote the retriever health column for Wildfall magazine. And while I got a crash course and dog health through those years, one thing that's stuck with me was all of the injuries to dogs that have heard about from veterinarians. One fellow who's a friend of mine named Ira Macaulay has his own clinic

down in Missouri. I asked him what the most gnarly dog injuries are that he sees, thinking he'd talk about dogs getting shot or busting their legs up or something, but he said they all involved catfishing. And as most of you know, dogs don't discriminate a whole lot on what they'll put in their mouths, just like toddlers now think about using cut up hot dogs or a glob of chicken liver or a bunch of stink bait for catfish.

If you think a laborator retriever is gonna gobble that ship up the way you would have you bumbled into an edible in an hour later, someone set down some Reese's peanut butter cups in front of you. You're wrong. The problem with eating catfish bait is that it's often stuck to a treble hook, which is tied to some pretty stout line. Iras said that he sees dogs more often than you'd imagine with a trouble hook lodged in their esophagus or deeper into their stomach, depending on where.

They either have to go in through the throat or cut a new hole into the side of the dog to work on that hook. He then went on to say that you wouldn't believe how fast they heal from that, and he's right, I wouldn't. But dogs don't feel sorry for themselves. They have emotions just like I'm sure, dear dude, but they don't have the luxury or hell probably the burden of being able to think of themselves in main

character mode like we do. Your average lab isn't thinking about how sad it is he's missing out on a play date with another dog, or how he has a big week at work and now he's hobbling around on crutches, or about how his stupid boss is always making him work late and never appreciates him and only really cares about the other white toil guys on the team. We have better mustaches, but questionable hunting skills. Dogs don't have

that problem, and neither do Dear. They live in the moment, and they heed that call, that deep in the bones call that says you will see another sunrise, you will do what it takes to live, period and stop. Done and done, my friends. That's one of the many, many things that makes dogs so damn cool and deer so damn special. It's also something you can use to be a better hunter on a couple of different fronts. The

first is the pure survival instinct. As I mentioned, if you butcher your own deer and you hunt where other people hunt, you're gonna start to see some old wounds on your deer. Imagine how many encounters a deer probably goes through in its life to suffer bullet or arrow wounds and survive. That is a deer that isn't going to risk its life unnecessarily. Think about it from this perspective.

Let's say you had someone from some quaint little town in Iowa where everybody knows everyone in the last murder happened in nine when the postman got caught delivering more than the mail to some dude's wife, and the old rabbit shotgun came out, and for a while the mail was a little late, and it was the talk of the county. Take that person and put them in like the south side of Chicago on the fourth of July, one's a hundred degrees out, maybe the sun setting. That

world's going to be different for them. They'll be like a year and a half old buck out there wandering around at noon during the public land. There's gonna be different survival instincts, and maybe not that sharp might get into some trouble. Now, take someone who has grown up in that city environment. Imagine how different they would travel, how they look at the world from a different view.

Imagine the difference in decision make Now imagine that in the dear world, if you'd be lucky to live for five years, and during three months of those five years, every year someone tried to kill you every day, and worse yet, got close enough to wound you a time or two, how risky do you think you'd be after that? You probably wouldn't tolerate too many close encounters with humans unless you were positive you had as many advantages as possible.

If you're better than a deadfall. And see you're here hunter walking below you. It's time for concern. But the advantage is yours and you know it now. If you get up to brows and head towards the nearest south alfa field and suddenly catch movement out of your peripheral vision, then you see some dude in a tree drawing his bow, you're going to realize quickly you gave up your advantage and now it's danger time. Those experiences are going to

leave a mark. The second part of this ties into something I've said a billion times, but I'll say it again. We condition the deer to our danger. Just think about the average deer on an average hunting property that contains some agriculture. Where are those deer that live there most likely to encounter a hunter? Where are they most likely to get shot at? Where are they most likely to see a human or smell where a human has been. Where are they most likely to spot a brand new

trail camera on a tree. Where are they most likely to bump into what they perceive as a concentration of danger? And then when is it most dangerous? Is it at midnight or twenty minutes before dark? What would most of the deer have to do to avoid that danger on any given day during the hunting season. Think about it, and now you know that, So what do you do like everyone else? Nope, nope, nope. It pays to hunt

deer to get hunted for this very reason. You'll learn how tough they are and how they get to be so tough. Now, I'm not saying don't hunt in private land or don't go hunt where others don't or can't, because that would be stupid, and I don't want to sound any more stupid than I already do on any

given day. I'm just saying it's a good idea to think about things from the dearest perspective and give credit where that credit is due, Just like I said a couple of weeks ago when I talked about how we almost always sell the act of shooting a dough so short because in some situations it can be incredibly easy. In others, though, it can be just as hard as

killing them ature buck. That's because in some situations, those does in those bucks are subjected to real danger on a daily basis, or at least in a concentrated fashion, for like ninety days a year. That's a lot of looking out for yourself and enough close calls to really really leave a mark, and it's a great way to create the kind of deer that cannot only shrug off.

I don't know, a non lethal hit from a rifle or a bow, but that will also structure the daylight hours of their life to stay away from those rifle toating and bow carrying threats. I honestly love that about them, well most of the time. I don't love it when I'm getting my ass kicked for weeks by the deer. And I know part of the reason they keep winning and I keep losing is because they've got a better plan to survive than I have a better plan to

make them not survive. But that's good too. Those tough bucks and those doughs out there that are kicking my ass and maybe yours, they've earned it. They've dropped at the sound of a bow going off to only suffer a superficial wound to the backstraps versus a couple of

deflated lungs. They've zigged and zagged at the right time as the orange clad drivers on the side of the bluff pushed their way through the brush and nearly sent them into the lapse of the posters who likely shot off hand with a spray and pray mentality that saved the deer and taught them some real important lessons. And I guess lastly I want to sign off with this.

If you recognize how tough deer are, whether just by hunting and shooting enough of them or getting in on every butcher job you can, it really makes you appreciate shot selection and gear choice. I'm not going to get into that because I've covered it a lot, but when you respect an animal that doesn't die easy, it's a

powerful motivator to do things right. Stack the odds in your favor, to practice the way you should tune your bow, choose the right arrows that don't have to be seven grains of bad cape buffalo medicine, but should fly real straight and deliver enough energy on target to take a questionable hit and make it lethal, or to go through the range and burn through an extra box of shells, even when those shells cost twice as much as they did I don't know two years ago, and you need

nearly a master degree in navigating the dark web to find them. To do our part, I guess that is what I'm saying. It really drives that home when you start to understand how tough deer are and how hard they will fight to survive. Puts a little extra onus, on us to be better and to appreciate the times when it all comes together and we do our job and we watch those lights go out in five or ten seconds. The whole thing is pretty cool, and it's made possible by the white tails who are just made

to live. That's it. Next week, I'm gonna have some fun on the show, and I'm gonna talk about always and never. I've touched on that topic a few times, but I've never done a deep dive into it. So that's what I'm gonna do, because always a net for beliefs really make us make some bad decisions out there in the field. That's it for this show, my white tail loving friends. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which has brought to

you by First Light. As I always, thank you so much for your support. And if you think you need a little bit more of a white tail fix, feel free to check out my latest article on the medior dot Com slash Wire. If you read all those, don't fret because we dropped several new pieces each week from some of the best white tail hunters in the country.