letter from the EDITOR Growing up, I learned to hunt in a vast wilderness. Carrying a .22, I spent entire days roving the immense woodland. Several times I got lost and was scared I wouldn’t be able to find my way back home. Sometimes I would bring our farm dog Buddy, although he scared off more game than he turned up. Together we discovered old, abandoned tree stands, chased fleeing rabbits, and occasionally surprised a deer. Eventually I felt more comfortable and began exploring further and further into the woods. I wasn’t sure how far they actually went, and at the time it wouldn’t have surprised me to find out they went on forever. That patch of woods that once seemed endless was less than a half-mile long and never more than a quarter-mile wide. The trees that made up “the timber,” as I called it, were only left standing because the deep creek that snaked through the trees made it impossible to clear for farmland. Despite its meager size, I had some big adventures in those woods. I shot my first squirrel and my first rabbit there. After reading a story about coyote hunting in an outdoor magazine, I took a bag of leftover chicken nuggets and placed them 20 yards in front of a hiding place where I then sat and waited for a coyote to appear. I lasted less than an hour before deciding squirrel hunting was more fun. I ate the chicken nuggets on my walk home. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, those experiences taught me how to move through the woods, the habits of different animals, how to play the wind, and the seasonal changes in the forest. When I was old enough, I arrowed my first deer in “the timber.” As I grew older, I learned other things, too. Outdoor magazines and hunting shows gave me the impression that real hunting adventures only happened in far-off places and involved hard-to-draw tags, months of planning, bush planes, and pack horses. I still loved hunting the family farm, but I craved wilder, more remote places like the ones I read
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STRUNG MAGAZINE
WINTER
2021
about. Since then, I’ve had my share of backcountry adventures, and if I’m being honest, I still love traveling to remote places. My wanderlust is as strong now as it has ever been. For years I’ve told people that one of the most enjoyable things about hunting is its ability to lead you to places you would otherwise never visit. But until this last year, I didn’t realize that sometimes those places are in your own backyard. There is a small nature center within walking distance of my home. Situated on the edge of town, it has several trails where my wife and I run, bike, and exercise our dogs. It’s also teeming with deer and turkeys. Early last year I learned that the nature center was having an earn-a-buck hunt to reduce the deer population. Twenty hunters would be drawn for the hunt, and once you arrowed a doe, you could kill a buck. I threw my name in the hat and was lucky enough to draw a tag. Scouting was simple because I already knew where the deer were from my daily run with the dogs. On the opening morning of the hunt, it was snowing. I dressed in my garage, hopped on my bike, rode two miles into the nature center, hung my stand in the dark, and waited for dawn. Thirty minutes after sunup I spotted a doe coming my way. She stopped broadside at 20 yards
and put her head down to eat. An hour later I was sliding her hind quarters into a game bag as flakes of snow danced in the air. I spent the next five days perched in a tree, and several times I spotted two nice bucks following the creek about 100 yards below me. On the last day of the hunt, I decided to move my stand into the bottom, although the wind was questionable. I hadn’t seen a single deer the entire day, but 20 minutes before the end of shooting light on the last day of the hunt, one of the bucks walked under my stand. I watched him fall 30 yards from where I shot him. As I quartered the buck in the dark, I heard a twig snap and the tamping of feet in the leaves. Switching my headlamp on high, I saw the glow of eyes as a pack of coyotes circled around the carcass waiting for me to finish. I sent my wife a pin of my location, and she met me with a thermos of hot coffee. Four hours after dark, the two of us packed the buck three miles back to our home—about the same distance I had to walk back to the farmhouse after hunting squirrels in “the timber.” It felt as adventurous and rewarding as any hunt I’ve ever been on. The experience opened my eyes to the fact that we can find as much adventure and childlike wonder close to home as we can in some remote mountain basin. The reality and all-encompassing beauty of nature is there. It just takes the right set of eyes to see it. I hope you enjoy our Big Game Issue and that this hunting season finds you on adventures both near and far. Keep Casting,
