My first Fall back in Montana was a great one and I'm very grateful to have been able to hunt as much as I did with my dad. This Fall was also my first season bowhunting doubling the length of the hunting season, which brought twice as much joy as it did suffering and misery. I mean, who in their right mind would spend so much time at something without being "successful"?
Hunting is a lot like life. And all that time wandering silently through the woods allows one to ponder quite a bit. I came up with some not so obvious traits that you need to have to be a good hunter. I feel like they are easily carried over into normal life as well...
A great hunting buddy gazing at an overwhelming amount of terrain.
2. You have to have a short memory. This one isn't all that hard because I think us humans are hard-wired to have this trait already. Think about a little kid fishing. If she is out there with her pole for hours catching nothing, she'll get bored and discouraged, start complaining and wanting to go home. But now let that kid catch a fish after all that time and she'll be rearing to go the next couple of uneventful hours. We remember the good times more than the bad because it allows us to move forward.
Not something you see everyday, especially sitting on your couch. Even after a rainy day I had a great after-work evening hunt.
While hunting, if you remember all the blisters, the cold and the wet, and the missed opportunities, then you'd never go hunting again. For me this season, I was burnt out half-way through archery season. I was ready to take a break and not hunt for a weekend. Then I called in a bull with a friend of mine and I was immediately fired up to go out again! Then I think about all the hunting of seasons' past where Dad and I killed whitetail bucks on the last weekend of the season. When someone asks me how those hunting seasons went I respond by remembering and retelling the tale of that day, not the 6 weeks prior of not seeing any animals. Keep remembering the good and you'll be itchin' to get back out there year after year.
3. When I get back from hunt, the first question people ask is, "Did you get anything?" I may be more excited about answering if I were more consistent in harvesting game so maybe this is a cop-out. However, there is so much more to hunting than just pulling the trigger or letting loose an arrow. Success needs to be defined more along the lines of having a good time, getting out alive and well, experiencing the glory of God's creation, and building better relationships with your hunting buddies. Getting an animal is just icing on top of an already delicious cake of experience. Define success along these lines instead of killing a trophy and I think you will have a lifetime of fulfillment.
2010's "icing on the cake": I harvested a whitetail doe filling my B-tag and putting fresh meat in the freezer.
4. Learn from your mistakes. I've heard people define insanity as "doing something over and over again while expecting different results." If it's not working, fix it. One of the best ways to get better at something is to figure out what went wrong and find a way to make it work. Next hunting season I'm going to be a lot better at calling, knowing when to draw back my bow, and finding the best hunting areas mostly because I didn't do a very good job at it this year. It's pretty easy to climb a ladder when you set the rungs pretty low, but you still have to climb it, eh?
On the flip side of this, don't second guess yourself. Don't beat yourself up with "woulda's" and "shoulda's" and "coulda's". Let's think scientifically about it. All you know about a mistake is that the results didn't turn out the way you wanted it to. If you had done something different, the hunt has a good chance of not going the way you planned it too. You have no way of performing the experiment again on that same day with the same situation. For example, I drew my bow back on that bull in September and he trotted away. I can speculate on what would have happened had I drawn back earlier or later, but will never know for sure. He may have turned and ran the same way. All I can do is learn from the experience and try something else the next chance I get. There would be nothing worse than freezing on the next opportunity because I was still thinking about making the same mistake.
5. Finally, don't fear the nap. You can be as extreme and hardcore as you want, but if you don't tone it down every once in a while you're going to fall apart...literally. Our bodies need rest to have recover and gain energy back for the next big push. I have never really been a nap person. I struggle to fall asleep and then am worthless for about an hour after I have to wake up, stumbling around with my brain in a fog. But I am learning that if I listen to my body and nap when it needs it, then I don't have that problem. Some of the best hunting days this season were those that started way before the crack of dawn and saw us hiking out to the truck in the dark, mostly because it also usually meant a nap on a sunny, warm, grassy slope.
Ahh, that's the life.
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