Diaries of a Deer Hunter - Chapter 1

Diaries of a Deer Hunter……Well… a hunter who tries to hunt deer.

Chapter 1

I want to start by giving you a little background about myself. I am in no way a

seasoned deer hunter. I am the same as everyone else, just out here trying to learn a

little at a time. When I was little, I did not hunt. I did not shoot my first buck at four years

old. I did not shoot my first pheasant at nine. It was not until middle school that I even

held a shotgun in my hand. I am not sure where the idea came from because my dad

was not a hunter, but one day out of the blue he said, “Hey, let’s go try pheasant

hunting.”

The next day we went and shot clay targets for the first time and then had to look

up pictures of what a pheasant even looked like because I had no idea. Dad had not

hunted since he was a kid, and I of course had never been. So, with all of our expertise

the next Saturday we loaded up and went north of Wichita near Marion to some public

land. It was late in the season, so the public land had been picked over by everyone

else. Hunting was not great but I was doing something new with my old man so life

couldn’t have been better. The biggest thing I do remember from that hunt was my first

pheasant. Or at least the first pheasant I ever saw. We were walking through a cut milo

field and right in front of me, probably 20 to 30 feet away, something moved. I can still

picture it vividly in my head as the day it happened. In my completely naive, non-hunting

eyes, I really thought I saw a squirrel tail dragging across the milo row in front of me. I

even looked over at Dad and said, “There’s a squirrel out here.” New hunter Nate forgot

that pheasants have long tails also! Right then, the “squirrel” exploded out of the milo

and took off. It was a pheasant and I locked up tighter than a bank vault. I finally

snapped the gun up and tried to shoot, but I forgot one very important thing. You have to

take the safety off if you actually want the gun to fire. I squeezed the trigger with every

bit of my twelve-year-old strength, and absolutely nothing happened. Dad got a pretty

good laugh out of that, pretty much the whole drive home, and when he told mom, his

buddies, and my friends, and whoever else needed to hear about it! So that was my first

hunting story. It did not go well, but instead of discouraging me, it lit a fire in me. I was

hooked on hunting.

We went on a few more trips through middle school, but high school came and

something changed to improve my hunting situation, a truck! From that point forward

was me and a group of friends almost every weekend. We drove west and knocked on

doors back when you could still get permission to hunt that way. Unfortunately, my son

will never experience that. Times have changed. But between 2001-2005 we were road

warriors. Sometimes I would tell my parents how far we actually drove west, but the

majority of time they didn’t need to know.

One of the great trips I remember with Dad was in 2002. We went with a small

group of Dad’s old friends and one of their sons. I for the life of me couldn’t tell you if we

shot a single bird, but I will tell you what I do remember about the trip. We were staying

in a cheap western Kansas motel, and Dad had not been with his friends for years. So,

they of course found the local watering hole and left us boys to our own devices. The

other son on the trip was Daryl. He was a senior at our High School while I was just a

sophomore. I was perfectly happy with sitting in the room, but Daryl was more worried

about the High School kids who were driving up and down the main street in Ness City

Kansas. What else did they have to do on a Friday night? Long story short we ended up

in a maroon early 90s Chevy pickup (I could still pick it out of a parking lot) with a couple

of farmers daughters. We got to do the drive up and down Main a few times but then we

got the tour of the backroads later as well if you are following my drift. Like I said, I don’t

know how many birds we got on that trip, but I will tell you I had another passion in my

life after that drive!

We had some great hunts over the years, but after the first couple of years

hunting, Dad’s health started declining. Through high school, college, and early

adulthood, I probably only had two or three hunts where Dad could actually walk the

field. Most of the time he was stuck acting as a blocker because he could not walk the

ground anymore. Somewhere during those years, I also discovered duck hunting. A

good friend of mine, probably when we were 15-16, came from a big duck hunting

family. He finally convinced me to go one morning. They gave me the leakiest pair of

waders that had been sitting in their attic for ten years, but once wings started whisling I

did not care that my feet were soaked, the birds were coming to us! No more miles of

walking just to find birds! We kept those traditions, both duck and pheasant, all through

high school and a couple of years into college.

Fast forward to early 20s. Kids came along. Hunting went on the back burner. A

couple years later, once my kids got out of the toddler stage, mama was okay with me

getting up early and going again. The problem was that my kids were a little older, and

all my close hunting friends were having newborns. Suddenly their hunting slowed down

while mine was picking back up. Cue my solo hunting years.

For the next two to three years, I hunted about eighty percent of the time by

myself. Duck hunting slowly faded because sitting alone in a blind, while freezing cold,

walking into the water in the dark by myself did not feel safe or fun anymore. Around

2019 my hunting really picked up again. I convinced my wife to get a lab, and he has

been my hunting buddy ever since. Honestly, I got him for duck hunting and found the

widest chested, biggest headed yellow lab I could find. The only problem was I was not

duck hunting as much anymore. The land I hunt has more than just a good duck pond.

Every time we left the duck blind, we walked the draws and almost always found a

couple coveys of quail. And then it turned into strictly quail hunting. But then I started to

pay attention to the deer. I had never deer hunted in my life, but a little light started

flickering in my head. I began paying more attention to them, how they moved, where

they were bedded, food sources, and where they traveled. That light kept getting

brighter. And eventually the thought hit me. Maybe I could try deer hunting.