Ep. 877: Foundations - The Deer That Change Us

just change the arc of our hunting. I hadn't figured out why it really matters or what to say about it before then, but sometimes the pieces just fall into place and the picture becomes so much clearer. So what I'm going to talk about now are the moments with deer that alter the course of me as a hunter, and why you should think about this stuff too, because there's something important to be learned from this thought exercise

that will make you a better hunter. My daughter and I walked across a mostly snowless wheat field in southwest Wisconsin in the middle of January. Our destination was a redneck blind on a clover plot that was situated on the top of a bluff above the Mississippi River Valley. You'd really have a hard time drawing up sort of dreamier deer country than that. I think there is one hell of an important education to be had in the outdoors.

So I had pulled her out of school that day to try to get her on a dough or two before the clock ran out on the late season there. And when we crested the rise and the plot came into view, I realized we were about to spook a whole herd of them. It didn't matter that they all ran off, because I knew that a bunch of them would probably come back. The deer density there and that part of the state is real high, and they are the kind of babysat deer that shake off getting spooked

pretty easily. To me. It was most meat mission where I expected a specific outcome that I really don't expect on most of my hunts. We settled into the blind opened up one of the windows and my daughter practiced aiming with her crossbow. She had a buck tag and a dough tag, but the goal was just a good shot on a dough now. Naturally, the first year to show up were bucks, a button buck and a little

five pointer. I texted my buddy to gauge his interest in her shooting the buck, and he gave her the green light, but I also knew that it would probably be better if she just shot a dough. Well, the bucks made the decision for us anyway, when they spooked. Later, a whole bunch of doughs came out and they got super close to shooting range, and then all spooked from something that we just didn't understand. Later, the floodgates opened and we had probably about fifteen of them munching on

the clover and heading our way. It was truly candy land hunting and honestly, just not really my thing. But she didn't know that, and after only seeing a handful of deer all season in northern Wisconsin and our hunts in Minnesota, she was just enjoying every second of being snowed in with deer. We were two feet apart, having

a totally different experience now. When we finally had a mature dough feed into her range, I gave her the thumbs up and watched as she made an absolutely perfect shot that cleared the field except for four doughs that didn't seem to have the best survival instincts. I managed to get the crossbow cocked again, but they were far enough to the side of the blind that she couldn't shoot. So she looked at me and she said, you should

shoot them. It really hadn't occurred to me to do that, mostly because I was in the guide mindset, but I thought it'd be really nice to cap off our season with two more doughs from a property where the deer could stand a little thinning than just the one that we already had shot. The dough spooked, and I didn't really care. We had done what we set out to do, and that's about all you can ask out of any hunt. She was bummed, and it occurred to me how different

the experience was for her than me. So when a lone dough popped up literally out of nowhere at twenty yards and practically begged me to shoot her, my daughter looked at me and she said, Dad, you have to. So Dad did, and that dough died maybe twenty yards from her dough. She was ecstatic, and she said, other than the buck we decoyed in last year together, that was the coolest hunt she's ever had. Now that kind

of floored me, honestly. But she doesn't know the same challenge as I know, and she isn't wired the same way I am. And quite honestly, what I want out of a hunt and what she wants out of a hunt are just different. That deer, or I should say those deer. They didn't represent any real hunting challenge to me, but to her it was incredible. And I'll say this before I looked like too much of an asshole. The whole trip down there to my buddies was so fun

with her. We made some cheeseburgers that night, watched a few hunting shows on TV, and spent the next day butchering. On the way home, we stopped at her favorite fast food place, which is Arbi's, where they couldn't have screwed up our order anymore if they tried, But that didn't matter. It was a good weekend for her and for me. Even if we got vastly different things out of it. The deer she shot and the deer she watched me

shoot will change her forever. Now you might be thinking that, well, no shit, man, when you kill a deer, it's a good thing and it changes you for the better. But that's not where I want to go with this episode. I think about the deer encounters I've had throughout my career that put me in a different space and help me level up my skills, or made me take blood tracking more seriously, or made me feel like absolute shit

as a human and as a hunter. I think about how, in a matter of two seasons I killed two different doughs in Minnesota because someone else bumped them directly to me.

One was a farmer on an ATV that put a doll right in my lap, and another was a woodcock hunter on public land here in the Cities that pushed a trio of doughs from nearly out of rifle range to twenty five yards out in broadside, which made me think about how often I think of someone else messing up my hunts, but never about how they might actually

do me a favor. About the first time I really patterned any deer with trail cameras, and how the first morning I hunted acrossing in a swamp here in central Minnesota and I saw a specific dough coming that had been like clockwork on my camera, it all sort of became clearer that this tool that was mostly an interesting novelty to me up to that point, could actually be much more. You see, we think it's the big bucks we killed it matter the most, that changes the most.

But I don't think so, at least not always. There is a tendency to be dismissive about DOES in general, often because the biggest trophy hunters out there have places where killing DOES is like going to the grocery store. But for a lot of us, it's not so simple, and it's not so easy. I've talked about this a few times, but back in twenty seventeen, I spent six days in northern Wisconsin hunting the big woods with a buck and a dough tag in my pocket during what

should have been somewhat of a chase fest. Well, you don't get much of a chase fest where there aren't very many deep but I did manage to see a handful of bucks and doze every dough that got anywhere near me busted me, and it started to give me kind of a complex. I couldn't get it done with quite a bit of time and a lot of whatever it is that helps me get it done in other places.

So when I sat down on my second to last night, twenty yards from a pounded trail on the edge of a public land creek bottom, and I finally heard the footfalls of deer coming, I drew the instant I saw a flash of brown in the brush. That old doe walked out, looked right at me, and was about to spook when I shot. She was more of a challenge than most of the big Bucks I've killed, and it was a good reminder to me that how we present hunting to the masses is rarely a true view of

what it is actually like out there. For most folks. It's not always the deer you kill that change us either. We all have the ones we missed that haunt us. Adam Moore just wrote a piece for the Mediatter Dot about this, which highlights some of our crew's biggest white tail misses. They involve, as I'm sure you'd expect, shooting at big Bucks. Mostly missing big Bucks sucks a lot, But what that teaches us usually is that we have buck fever and we just don't want to admit it. Now,

I know that's not all that newsworthy. There are other misses or times when you get caught drawing that sting just as much, and that can change you as a hunter. There are times when you don't shoot that do as well. One of those deer that taught me a real valuable lesson was a nice two and a half year old eight pointer that was as big as any deer I had shot at that time in my life. I was in a stand in a poplar tree when he walked

by during an early morning sit in October. I didn't draw or shoot, even though I wanted to kill him badly. But I was sitting there with a recurve in my hand, and the year before I had killed a doe in a very similar buck with it. But the year before I shot a lot, and by that I mean a lot. I was prepared for that season with that trad bow, and the results showed it, but I hadn't practiced enough the following season, so when that buck walked through, I

was terrified to shoot because I expected to screw it. Up. That is not a good way to go about the whole hunting thing. But that buck arcing into and out of my life, and the feeling that I hadn't done enough to be confident in a totally doable shot situation stuck with me in a way that gives me anxiety

to write about even now. Nearly two decades later, when I first got into the hunting industry and the free gear started to show up and the invites to media hunts started coming in, I didn't know anything about how most of the industry really operated. The first white tail and I did for work was in Texas, and it was so easy that I could scarcely believe it. I'm not saying it wasn't fun, because it was. I saw more bucks and more rod activity in one sit that

I'd seen in an entire season back home. But the buck I killed meant really nothing to me, and worse, it made me realize how many deer were killed like that by people who hadn't worked for them to present the image that they really knew what they were doing with hunting. Maybe that sounds too harsh, but that first Texas buck I killed, and the others that I saw come back to camp and Dusty side by sides made me realize that the whispers I heard from the audience

were justified. We were doing things that were easy and yet presenting them as something else. It sparks something in me that still burns to this day, and I owe that to those tiny bodied, big racked Texas deer that knew nothing other than to go right to the feeder when it turned on. The deer we encounter teach us a lot, and if we are open to their lessons, we can become better hunters, not just in the skill department, although that's undeniably true, but also when it comes to

our personal ethics. There is nothing that says you have to blood trail deer until you're brain dead from exhaustion and staring at the leaves for the tiniest, slightest little pin prick of blood that tells you he or she went this way or that way. You can give it a half assed quick grid search the minute things get tough, and you're not gonna get arrested. It's not like that. Just like you can take the shot when it's a half a minute before legal shooting light ends and maybe

it'll work out. But maybe it won't. No one's gonna stop you, and no one will really care. But if you find yourself looking at an arrow covered in gut material when you know you have to go to work in the morning, that almost dark shot takes on a different feel, and that can change how you operate from here until it's time to hang up your bow forever. Sometimes it's just the deer we see do something that

challenges our thoughts to change us. I've watched fawns hide in the grass while dogs and people walk by, and they've always made me think about how often mature deer must do that to me and other hunters. Does that change how I hunt? I don't know. Probably not, but it makes me think about this stuff more. So, maybe

it doesn't. I don't even know it. The bucks that we encounter pheasant hunting almost always teach me something about how important cover is to them and how much of a survival mechanism it is to tuck themselves away into that good wind blocking geothermal cover and then sit so tight you would bet real good money they aren't there. And then when you and your buddies and the dogs are about thirty yards past, you hear them get up

and run like greyhounds out behind you. There are some lessons there that will probably would help me if I was more of a bed hunter, but maybe they help me anyway. I know it doesn't hurt us to learn about the quarry we hunt, and those lessons carry a hell of a lot more weight than a series of trail camera photos usually do. But there are lessons obvious and not so obvious in that type of scouting too.

This will come as no surprise to anyone who regularly listens to this show that I sometimes don't know where I'm going with these episodes, and the aha moment just hits me in time with this one. The biggest takeaway I can give you is a parallel to something I talk about a lot. If you do the same thing over and over, you might kill deer, but you won't learn about hunting nearly as much. To many of us,

that doesn't matter at all, and that's good enough. But if you want to get better, if you want to meet up with the deer that might teach you something real, valuable, you often have to do something a tiny bit outside of your comfort zone. The obvious route is to travel to hunt, but I'm not going to talk about that here. You know how I feel about that and why I

think it's valuable. Instead, I think it's better to look at the year ahead and try to identify those opportunities in which you can meet the deer where they'll be in a way that you normally wouldn't If you only ever run cameras to scout, you might want to get out the summer and glass hunt the big woods up north, or you're a Southern white tail hunter down in the swampy grounds in Louisiana or Florida, Alabama, wherever you might not have easy fields to glass, then trail cameras are

probably a big part of your process, but so should winter scouting be, and just walking through the woods at any point in the air. If you always sit the same three tree stands all fall across your fingers that a buck will come by, you have so many options to learn something about the deer and encounter them in a different way. One of the main reasons I push this point is because I don't think most of us

understand how well the deer actually pattern us. Now. I know that's a cliche, but as a rabid pheasant hunter, something struck me this year while following my labs around the cattails. Pheasants are masters at patterning most hunters. This tiny brain disco chicken of a bird that spent most of its evolutionary journey in China, of all places, completely understands where the hunting pressure originates from and how it's going to proceed through their home turf, and those pheasants

react accordingly to survive. You think deer don't do that better, I promise you that they do, and they do it to the same level, which might seem crazy until you realize the winning result is just them surviving and avoiding us, and whether it's a rooster who does that or one hundred and forty inch buck, that result is them winning and us not making a plan to sit in a ground blind or still hunt, or find a new property that comes with a whole new set of riddles to

figure out, or traveling across state lines the first time to wade into unfamiliar habitat will eventually expose you to the deer that will take what you think you know, squat right over it, and piss away. If you're a student of the game, that lesson will stick and it will usher you into some new phase of hunting and of being a better hunter. Not only is that a good way to get better at killing deer, but is probably the most overlooked and easiest way to learn to

enjoy the whole thing just a little bit more. So think about that and think about coming back next week, because I'm gonna talk about stress, which is something we're all dealing with in our lives right now, but I'm gonna relate it to deer hunting and how we can help ourselves relax a little and enjoy hunting more throughout the year. That's it. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wire to Hunt Foundations podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I want to say thank you.

I do this every week because I mean it. All of your support, all your loyalty. You know, when I'm at a shields somewhere and I see somebody in a beargreas hat or a meat eater's shirt, whatever's it truly means the world to us that you guys show up and you support us and we're all kind of on

the same team together. So thank you for that. If you want some more content, you know, maybe you want to watch a video of I don't know, clay hunting mountain goats, maybe Steve hunting something somewhere, mark, whatever the

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