My hunting education was in the mountains.
I've hiked miles, climbed rock faces, carried around a 50-pound pack while my bow rested on my shoulders, and glassed vast open public lands. Not infrequently, I find myself in the timbers, among the bears, and routinely walking up to bedded moose. I move and sit and glass and move and move some more. I stalk the animals I'm hunting.
So when Can-Am invited me to hunt white-tailed deer on Doug Duren's farm in western Wisconsin for his annual Doe Derby—a hunt mostly consisting of sitting in deer blinds waiting for first or last light—I had no context of what that would entail. Nor if my aggressive ADHD would allow me to sit still for that long. In fact, I'm fidgeting with my knife as I edit this story.
Likewise, it'd be my first big-game hunt with a rifle. A rifle I wouldn't have a lot of practice with. In a place I'd never seen, or walked, or even knew. All I had was some basic e-scouting using onX. And the first day of our hunt would be cold. Like negative five degrees-cold. The type of cold that freezes your boogers when you inhale. So, everything would be new. Everything novel.
I couldn't wait.
Little did I know that my two-day doe hunt would test my patience to the degree it did, as well as reinforce some things I've learned by reading hunting columns and listening to podcasts. Nor that it would make me yearn to both try more rifle hunting, as well as head back to the white-tail woods next season.
