I don’t know why I thought it would be different this time. I’d hunted the same public land spot for three seasons — a patch of oak flat I could navigate blindfolded. Park at the pull-off by the old cattle gate, walk east twenty minutes, climb the ridge, sit. It was boring. But boring works. […]

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The first deer I butchered myself was a disaster. I had YouTube pulled up on my phone, a dull knife I’d sharpened badly, and the kind of confidence that only comes from never having tried something before. The deer hung in my buddy’s garage for two days while I watched videos and read articles, telling […]

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There’s a piece of public land about forty minutes from my house. I’ve hunted it for eight years. I know which ridges the deer bed on when the wind is out of the northwest. I know where the creek pools hold trout in August. I know the spot where a downed white oak drops acorns […]

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I wasn't trying to call anything in. I was just sitting there, bored, playing a free predator call app. Then a coyote showed up at thirty yards, and I had no plan.

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The first deer I shot wasn’t with a rifle. It was with a compound bow I bought on Craigslist for $200. It came with a dozen arrows, a release that was two sizes too big, and the previous owner’s handwritten sight tape that was definitely wrong. I practiced all summer in my backyard. Twenty yards, […]

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I didn’t catch anything my first three trips. Not a single fish. I watched YouTube, bought the recommended gear, tied the knots like the guy showed me, and… nothing. Cast, drift, strip, repeat. Eight hours. Zero. Twice. The third time I went with a buddy who actually knows what he’s doing. He watched me cast […]

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I used to carry way too much stuff into the woods. Like, embarrassing amounts. My first elk hunt I brought a 55-pound pack for a day trip. Spare socks, spare knife, backup flashlight, backup to the backup flashlight, three kinds of fire starter, a hatchet (a hatchet, for a day hunt), and enough food for […]

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I pulled into the gravel lot at 5 a.m. and there it was. A For Sale sign. On the gate. The gate to the 300-acre piece of public-adjacent private land I’d been hunting for seven years. The sign said “Zoned for Development.” Seven years of pre-dawn coffee in this exact spot, boots crunching the same […]

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I shot a whitetail at 275 yards two seasons ago. Good hit — double lung. She ran about sixty yards and dropped. Standard stuff. But when I walked up and rolled her over, I realized I had zero memory of my trigger pull. Not a clue. I’d practiced all summer from a bench. Sandbags. Steady […]

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My first time butchering a deer I watched two YouTube videos, bought a $40 knife set from Amazon, and told myself “how hard can it be?” About four hours later I had a kitchen that looked like a crime scene, two garbage bags of bone-and-silver-skin scraps, and some very confused-looking chunks of meat that were […]

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