The day I lost my duck blind, I was standing in a parking lot holding a cup of gas station coffee and staring at a Bobcat that had already pushed half my marsh into a pile. The guy driving it waved at me. I waved back. What else are you going to do? It was […]

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I shot my bow 147 times a week for four months. I counted. I had a range set up behind the office — 20, 40, 60, and a faded orange dot at 80 yards that I could hit more often than I missed. My groups at 40 were tight enough that I stopped worrying about […]

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I watched four YouTube videos the night before my first solo field dressing. Four. I sat on the couch with a beer, nodding along like I was studying for a final. Guy on screen made it look easy—clean cuts, no mess, stomach out in one piece. I paused it twice to re-watch the part about […]

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My buddy Dave has this thing where he describes terrible ideas like they’re facts. “We’re gonna fly into the Adirondacks,” he said over a beer in March. “Remote pond. Brook trout the size of your leg. Nobody’s fished it in years.” He said it the way you’d say “the grocery store is on Main Street.” […]

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Some bucks stop being deer. They become neighbors, ghosts, characters with names — and when they disappear, they leave a hole no new set of antlers can fill.

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I’ve been shooting rifles since I was twelve. I know how to find deer, how to read sign, how to sit still when my ass is frozen to a tree and my toes stopped feeling things an hour ago. I figured bowhunting would be the same thing, just closer. Same skills, different tool. First season […]

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I shot my first deer with a rifle when I was twenty-two. Nothing special — a spike buck at about eighty yards, Remington 700 in .30-06, cheap Bushnell scope. Dropped him where he stood. I remember thinking, well, that was easy. For the next six years I rifle-hunted whitetails in Wisconsin public land and got […]

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When the first humans walked into North America roughly 15,000 years ago, they walked into a continent absolutely stacked with game. Mammoths, mastodons, giant bison, saber-toothed cats, camels, horses, ground sloths the size of a small car. If you could throw a spear, dinner was basically everywhere. And for a while, that’s exactly what happened. […]

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I was 26 the first time I tried still hunting. Not the kind where you walk to a stand and sit there for six hours — actual still hunting, where you move through the woods on foot, slow enough that the deer don’t know you exist until you’re close enough to smell their morning breath. […]

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My first season with a deer tag, I shot the first buck I saw. Button buck. I didn’t know the difference. He was brown, he had tiny nubs, and my brain screamed “antlers.” I pulled the trigger at forty yards and felt like Daniel Boone. Then I walked up to him and realized he was […]

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