Hunting hasn’t lost its soul. And social media is not real life. This is what I thought about throughout my 2021 season.
“Far and away, the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” — Theodore Roosevelt
This past weekend, I stood in a small clearing on the side of a mountain ridge thick with Douglas fir and stands of quaking aspen. I was alone. The weather was hot, like really hot — 65 degrees is not the norm for the final weekend of the rifle season in Montana. It was November 28, and I overdressed.
“I could be swimming in a river,” I thought. “I could be laying out and getting a tan.” Instead, I was hunting.
For a moment, I stopped to cool down, grab some water, and take a waypoint. And as I stood there in the dry open grass, I heard a snuffle. I lifted my eyes to see a young mule deer on the opposite edge of the clearing, about 20 yards from where I stood. This spike was legal tender in this district. I had the wind.
The buck sniffed at the ground and began to walk across the clearing. Yards closed. He paused. Took another step. Five yards from me now, and boom! He hit my scent like a brick wall, spun, and leaped three huge strides away. He still hadn’t seen me, though I was right there.
In the curious way of the mule deer, he turned broadside and finally pegged me. Both of us maintained a stillness that burst like thin glass once I took a step forward. He bounded into the thick trees to my right.
I kept heading left. Up the ridge, I went.
A story now lived in my back pocket, when a deer could have been coming out with me on my back.
Miles Upon Miles in the Mountains, Plains, and Woods
Since the first week of September, I absconded to the woods whenever possible. I’ve chased mountain grouse, pheasant, sharptail grouse, Hungarian partridge, doves, deer, pronghorn, and elk. Bow, shotgun, or rifle in hand.

I felt more a hunter than I ever have. The miles fled under my feet, a welcome change from years past. Birds rip roared into the sky out of the tall grass at my feet, satellite bull elk bugled in golden cottonwood river bottoms, and deer bounded through sage flats and peeked at me through the timber.
I encountered moose, songbirds, raptors, coyotes, enormous jackrabbits, a lost and bleating bighorn ewe lamb, and stark white ermine in a dowdy brown snowless scene.
The sun shone hotly for so much of the season that my late-season clothes never made an appearance. Areas that I’d hunted before were food-scarce and lacked their usual water sources.
The land was browsed down and thirsty, and animals were on the move. I found them tucked in new spaces near reliable water sources and piled onto food-thick private lands where no doubt their presence wasn’t always welcome.
And for the first time since my knee surgeries, I felt like an asset to friends in the field. After 4 years of limiting knee problems, the liberation from pain freed me from physical uncertainty in the field.
A girlfriend and I doubled on pronghorn does in winds that nearly took the skin off my face. I helped strangers pack elk off a high sagebrush bench when my truck broke down on the side of a highway. I packed the hide of a dear friend’s mule deer doe; she kept it as a totem to her first successful solo hunt in Montana.
It was also a season of growth for me, my friends, and our bird dogs. My Boykin spaniel retrieved his first pheasant. My friend’s young Gordon setter set a new standard for elegance afield. And a Brittany by the name of Chief continued to earn stripes in many miles covered. Birds were pointed, flushed, and retrieved by all.
And in another feat of teamwork, I kept a watchful eye from on high as my friend Danielle Prewett of both MeatEater and Wild and Whole put an incredible and successful stalk on her first mule deer buck after days of hard hunting. We were worried he might get bumped; no such thing happened.
Stepping Away From Work and Into the Present

Where the Hunting Ego Meets Its Counterparts

Committing the Personal to the Professional

It Only Gets Better
