Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundations podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting, presented by first Light, creating proven versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle or blind. First Light Go Farther, Stay Longer, and now your host Tony Peterson.
Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast, which has brought to you by first Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today I'm going to talk about learning to move on from your deer hunting mistakes. All right, before I get into this, I need to do this because I'm bound by the reality that I need a job to buy food for my kids, and I don't know. There is the reality that phishing lures are really expensive. So employment is a good thing for me. Right now,
we have an enormous Black Friday sale going on. You want hunting, You're at a steep discount.
This is it.
I know you've heard it before, you're going to hear it again, but this is a good one. In fact, it's the biggest sale of the year here at Meat Eater. I want to find some good hunting gear. Go check it out at the media dot Com. At least take a look around, you might find something you absolutely have to have, and if you do, it's very likely you're not going to pay full price for it. All Right, this episode is one I really don't want to do,
but I'm going to. I'm having a weird season, and it's mostly weird because I don't feel like I hunted very well. I mean a lot of mistakes this year, and some of them really bother me. I'm going to talk about that, but also the reality of us all out there doing our thing and making huge mistakes, and of course how to get past them. It's hard for us today to realize how crazy it is that companies like SpaceX and rocket Lab can put dozens of rockets
in their payloads into space in any given year. Hell, SpaceX is on track to launch like two hundred times next year. It wasn't that long ago that there was no reliability in getting anything out of Earth's gravity well, and if we did, it wasn't guarantee that whatever we sent up would function at all. The history of our space race with Russia, in our space program in general,
is rife with mistakes. One of the first occurred when NASA decided it was time to send something to Venus to take a look around way back in nineteen sixty two. Back then, we were trying real hard to make Russia look like total amateurs when it came to rocket technology, so we poured some serious years into developing interplanetary technology. So on July twenty second of that year, the big brains at NASA sent the Mariner one probe toward Venus.
Its job was to gather info on the planet and help us learn better how to send more stuff into space for scientific research. This might seem a little mundane these days, but it was a different story back then. Hell, that was only fifty nine years after Orville and Wilbur Wright took the first man flight ever in their little airplane, which was get this, powered by a twelve horsepower gas engine.
We moved the tech needle a long ways in those six decades, and sending a crude robot to another planet in our Solar system.
Was a huge, huge deal.
The whole thing costs eighty million dollars, which in today's money would be ten x that. It only took a few seconds after the highly anticipated launch that it became clear the rocket wasn't headed to Venus, but was far more likely to crash into one of the busier shipping lanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Instead of letting that happen, the flight director had to do what flight directors hope they never have to do, which has essentially hit the
self destruct button and blow that sum bitch up. When they started to do a post mortem on what went wrong, they ended up realizing that someone who had written code for the guidance program had misplaced a hyphen, a simple bit of punctuation, and suddenly years of work and an unfathomable amount of money went literally up in smoke. Imagine being the engineer who wrote that code when the word
got out. I can't prove this, so I'm just filling in the blanks here, but I'm guessing he finished out his career doing some landscaping or something non rocket science related. I need stories like this in my life, and maybe you do too. One thing I've noticed with a lot of folks who reach out to me about deer hunting is how they want to share their successes with me
after a long road of mistakes. Sometimes it's people who have actually overcome the worst of them and have killed a good one, And sometimes it's people who are stuck in the mistake zone and they don't see a way out. I have good news and bad news on that front. The mistake zone doesn't ever really leave you. If you think the best of the best do this stuff and don't make mistakes, you're way wrong. They do all the time.
They just make a few more of the right decisions and a lot of folks, and they don't let the mistakes derail them for their mission. I have a hard time with this. Last season, I danuear killed every buck that walked by me. Public land, private land, you name it. The season just went well. This year, it feels different, even though on paper, I've had a decent season. My daughters have killed two deer and a bear, which is great.
I'm up to four deer as of this writing, and for most folks four deer in a season would be a pretty good one.
But here's the thing.
I didn't do my job very well on a couple of them, and that bothers me so much. If I'm being totally honest, most of my mistakes this year have been while filming hunts, which happens. There's a different level of pressure there, and it doesn't do a head case like me much good. I started out in North Dakota this year and missed a giant buck right away, simply because I guessed what distance he'd be when he walked through and didn't realize he was much closer when I
finally settled in to shoot. It was dumb, dumb, dumb, but I've missed big bucks before. What sucks when you do that is hunting your ass off for several days after and then deciding that a doe would be just a fine option to wrap up a trip, because venison in the cooler is better than not in my opinion.
So when I went to do just that, I was sitting in a very awkward position, and I had told myself roughly I don't know a thousand times during that sit that I needed to check and recheck my site's bubble level because I was bound to cant my bow. That's exactly what I did, and the shot was ugly. It was pure luck to catch an artery and she piled up seventy yards away. My buddy Tim Kent calls those happy accidents, and I think that's about all you
need to say about that. So I tried to shake off two bad shots and go to Iowa and kill something on public land down there. The buck that I ended up decoying in wasn't the giant I was hoping for, but he put on a hell of a show, and I wanted to go see my kids and stop sleeping in a tent for a few days. The shot was close from the ground and by all accounts, a done deal. When my arrow ticked a little willow branch and spiral toward that buck, I had half of a second of terror,
followed by what is now several weeks of dread. That arrow smacked right into his guts, and it did not look good.
Now.
When we slowed down the footage, it did show me a better angle than my brain remembered, and it showed me far more penetration than I assumed. In fact, I've had a couple of times on film where I've thought there is no way I got much penetration. But when you can go back and watch it frame by frame, you can see the arrow go in way farther than you think instantly back out.
It's kind of interesting. Anyway.
Well, we gave that buck seven hours, but when we found him, we probably could have given him maybe half an hour.
The exit wound was behind his.
Off side shoulder, and he took a two inch cut to the gut's liver.
In one lung.
My broadhead had also broken a blade, which tells me it was probably open on impact, and that is not good. That's also topic for a different podcast. I started this year with a perfect shot on a do in Minnesota, and then had three dreadful shots on film, and then I came home and killed a buck in Minnesota that had a great big hole in his heart when I was done with him. So two perfect shots, but they don't make up for the other ones, and that sucks.
I also managed to let a great Wisconsin Big Woods bucket right on top of me before I knew he was there, and watched as he winded me at ten yards when I was just about to shoot him. You don't get public land opportunities in the big woods like that very often, which made it even worse when I took my daughter in there and we had the very same thing happen with like one hundred and thirty inch year. That would have made her her and me very happy.
So many mistakes. You know the jokes about anxiety where you're about to fall asleep and suddenly you remember something dumb you did in sixth grade, like maybe you shit your pants in Fayette or something. Well, I knock out something like that about every other time I go hunting, and boy do I think about them a lot at night when all I want is a quiet mind and
some deep sleep. And added bonus of this job of mine is that not only do I have to live with those mistakes, but I also have to think about them for a full year before we share them with thousands and thousands of people, many of whom will let me know personally that they could do a much better job than me. And that might be true. Hell, there are a lot of days where I'd give them the job just to see if that was true. The thing is,
we are all total f ups. I recently had a conversation with a sheriff down in Iowa who was looking for some stolen kayaks and and to find some dipshit dragging a buck down the middle of the river at like two in the morning, and he mentioned that he listens to this podcast and appreciates the message that we are all struggling. I don't know who would be in a better position to see the general struggle of many, many people than a law enforcement officer these days.
But that was nice to hear.
In fact, I hope he listens to this, and I hope by the time he hears it, he's killed a buck in that spot where I killed mine, because it turns out we were both on the same deer pattern down there. So here's the thing I want to tell you, and I want all of you to understand. We are all pretending we are better at this than we are. Every one of us. We don't want to admit to our mistakes, and we don't want anyone to know that we have flaws.
But guess what, that's dumb. Let me give you an example of a time when this became apparent to me. A couple buddies and I were on a combo hunt for antelopen deer quite a few years ago.
This is when we were young and.
Going real hard out there, and I don't remember the exact circumstances, but I had nearly empty to quiver on a mule deer and I hadn't touched it. Now, over a glass a wild turkey around the campfire, I told the story of shooting over, then under, then over a deer, and we got a good laugh out of it. And then one of my other buddies piped in and mentioned that he had whiffed not once, not twice, but also
thrice on an antelope that day. He had kept that to himself on the off chance that it might make him look like a total idiot. Only when one of his total idiot buddies admitted to a similar oh for three performance did he chime in, this is the world we live in. Deer hunting is full of ego. That's dumb. The trophy obsession is dumb. The fact that we take ourselves so seriously that we lie to cover up our awards is dumb.
But we do it.
And instead we should just accept that we make mistakes. I mean, think about it this way. What other outdoor pursuits do you do where you dwell on one mistake?
Fishing? Get out of here.
I can make multiple mistakes in fishing on the same cast, and I make a lot of casts, and by that I mean a lot of casts. Pheasant hunting, Get out of here. Do you know how many gift roosters I've missed with both barrels enough to make me realize that my vision of myself as an amazing wingshot is just total horseshit on as many days as it might be true. Turkey hunting, mm mmm. How many times have you had a gobbler walk in to see you move without you
having a clue he was there? Ever make a sound with your box call like a wildebeest just caught his nuts and a picket fence? I have ever had one just right in and with with a shotgun.
I have.
The reason we are all obsessed with white tail hunting and why a hell of a lot of us try to do it in a way that is a little more challenging than it has to be, is because we want the feeling of getting it right. But that feeling comes with a tax, and that tax is that you are going to feel like a complete moron a lot far more than you're going to feel like the kind of guy who can make Andy may look like an
amateur in the field. The truth is, you're going to make a ton of mistakes, and you know what, who cares talk about them?
Own them.
They're a part of the process. If you miss an easy shot, you think you're the only one.
You're not.
If you set your baseline off of what you consume for outdoor content, or worse, just the success photos in your social feeds. You're going to want to hide the truth. But that's dumb. I've hunted with a hell of a lot of famous hunters in my life, and I can tell you they are not immune to doing really, really dumb shit. They have the luxury of telling you about that or not, but it exists. We're all in the same boat, and do you know how to get over them.
It's not to strive for perfection because you won't get there one time, let alone in a general state of being.
It's not going to happen.
What you do is just keep doing the work, the prep work.
The scouting, the shooting, the whatever.
Just build up the skills you can and understand that the mistakes are just teaching you something, which I know sounds corny as hell, but it is true.
It really is.
It's not the success that makes us better, it's the failure. Think about it this way. If you were to go to candy Land, where the bucks are everywhere and they are dumb, and you spend a week hunting there and kill a giant, what will happen to you? Sure you'll be happy to have that grippingrin. You'll be happy to have had a really fun hunt. Nothing wrong with those things. But now go from that to a week on public land where you're lucky to see a few deer on
any given day. You get busted, You hear a lot of snorting. You hang and hunt and hang and hunt and hang and hunt, and you look for sign and you work the people and the deer. Which week will make you a better hunter? You know the answer to this, It's the one that's full of real challenge, because real challenge produces.
Failure as a byproduct.
If you haunt a place with tons of big bucks that never look up into trees and don't live off the wind to detect danger, you're not learning how to be better at this.
Stuff can be great, can be fun. It's not teaching you much. Now. I know that's an extreme example.
Now, But if you go out on a list or grandma's farm and make mistakes, they sting a lot. But so what everyone is out there screwing up and so are you. What do they teach you?
Though?
Maybe you reach for your boat at exactly the wrong time and he saw you. Maybe you didn't clear out your entrance road as well as you know you should, and you made a lot more noise than you needed to on the way in. What does that teach you? And maybe you're hard on yourself over your mistakes, and I get that, I really do. I'm my own worst critic, which is saying something, because boy do I have some critics.
I'm sure you're harder on yourself than you need to be, And honestly, you should give yourself some grace, give yourself a chance with this stuff. You're trying something super difficult, and that means the mistakes are just built into the code. They're there waiting for you. And while it sucks so much to watch a dear slip from your grip because of a dumb decision, you know for sure that you shouldn't have made. It's done, and it might keep you from doing it again. We all leaven extra hyphen in
the code. Sometimes when that happens, we want to self destruct. But you gotta pick up the pieces. You gotta keep working the process, and you don't beat yourself up too much. You're doing fine if you're learning and growing as a hunter. I mean that because I believe it to be true. So do that for yourself and come back next week because I'm going to talk about how to kill more deer by understanding the connective tissue of different properties and how to read the land on a bigger level. That's
it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired to Hunt Foundation's podcast. As always, thank you
so much for your support. If you're listening to this in the week that it drops, you can head on over to the mediat dot com and see one hell of a Black Friday sale, so much good stuff on sale there, or you just want to head over there and maybe find a new podcast to listen to, like Brent Reeves This Country Life, or maybe test your knowledge on media or trivia, maybe find a recipe, maybe you read an article, whatever, There's so much good stuff over
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