10 Things You Need to Know as a New Hunter

In the last three years, the world of hunting has taken off in terms of clothing, gear, strategies, and complaints—coincidentally also the time frame when I walked into this new-to-me domain so that may not be true to anyone other than me. I blew any sense of a budget on the latest and greatest products and attire while simultaneously capping any boundary I had on time and availability.  I wondered many things, and still do, as I contemplate the complexities of each hunt but here is a list of 10 things in random order (with a couple name drops) that I would have found useful when I first crossed over to … that side.

1.         Research Your Opponent. As a former legal assistant to a trial attorney, I will be the first to tell you that a majority of pre-court time is spent in research.  It is the grunt-work of the profession to not only know the case, their client, the judge, but also the opponent.  Clearly a hunter is on the same level as an attorney, except for the one small fact that a hunter generally does not make an income from this.  It is wildly important for a hunter to know about the animal he is hunting.

Unless dumb luck has been your secret ace-in-the-hole up until now, it helps to know a thing or two about their habits, the topography of their habitat, their diet, and their distinguishing characteristics.  Start studying what you can whenever you can.  In Washington state at least, the Department of Fish and Wildlife produces a yearly synopsis of the kill counts in each GMU (also good to learn popular acronyms, i.e., Game Management Unit), how to hunt each species, etc.  I also dedicated way too much time after my kids were put to bed (early, on purpose) watching documentaries and searching for hunting advice on YouTube.

2.         Capitalism is No Stranger to Hunting Camps. I love that in America (and elsewhere) we are fortunate enough to have a plethora of options for nearly every item we could ever want or need.  My husband and I disagree greatly on what he refers to as a “need” for an exorbitantly expensive item where he could see a mole inside the eardrum of a deer 500 miles away.  While I do care if a deer has such obvious deformities, I would care more to clothe my kids.  There are limitless options if you feel like blowing paychecks, but here are my three favorite items aside from weapons that are used every hunting trip: binoculars with a pouch or strap to prevent flailing all over while hiking, rangefinder (read reviews on accuracy!), and GPS with private/public property locator (onXmaps is a personal favorite).

3.         Treat Yo’ Self. This rather new adage makes prep work better than a sugar donut with morning coffee.  For men, there are hundreds of stores and brands with 4 bajillion options for socks, gloves, hats, and everything in between.  For a typical man, it is (finally) a much different shopping experience to happily sift through all of the options, with great competition among brands to be the best.  For women, well there is the hope that more quality brands will surface.  For now, a couple I am familiar with are Cabela’s and Prois’.  Both have their pros and cons but I personally love the humor and verbiage used by Prois in their materials, it is quite endearing actually (scroll through their website and you will likely find yourself smiling).  Make sure to try it on though and practice hiking in the dressing room when it is really quiet—not for the entertainment of the staff, but so you can test out if the clothes make noise while you move because there is nothing more fun than swooshing through the forest glades when trying to be stealth.

Evidence points strongly that most advanced hikers wear layers, it is no different than hunters.  Hunters are hikers with special skills, after all.  It would do you well to have warm weather, chilly weather, rainy weather, and straight up Arctic weather clothing options.  My experience being as cold as an ice cube in a cotton undershirt while also mastering dripping sweat down my back and experiencing a completely soaked shirt, um, not exactly pleasant. Wicking is winning, people.  Sheep are friends, go with the wool.

4.        Research to the nth degree. Again with the research, I know—what can I say but it is in my blood.  Seriously though, know the area you plan to hunt.  We had a weekend away sans kids but could not decide where to hunt beforehand.  It certainly would have been advisable to know which mountains are overrun with bovines (and their less than pleasant fresh mound of droppings), the elevations of each (for high elevation bucks), which side the deer like to bed on, what time of day, where the water and food sources are, if there are wolf packs in that area, etc.  If you can study that ahead of time, you will be that much more prepared.

Or buy game cameras; they are the best.  If near an area you can check regularly, it is beyond handy to watch activity and track the times of day your prey are in/passing through the area you want to traverse.

5.         Patience. I should have delayed until the end of the list to add this one, but I was not able to wait. Similarly, this also creates problems when hunting because bucks are elusive little introverts.  I would imagine elk are easier as they travel in herds, I have yet to try that though. (Another example of exerting great patience until the correct season begins.) When watching a half hour long hunting show on tv, it is remarkable how I never quite picked up on it when they said they were unsuccessful for x number of days when 97/100ths of the show is killing and eating their spoils.  It is so very different when you have dedicated the time to go and realize one hunting trip may not be enough even after hiking for a good 10 hours in a given day.

6.         Quiet Food. If I were to create a brand of healthy snacks for hunting, it would be named ‘Crunch Less’ and it would be wrapped in paper towels and teddy bears, be the consistency of gummy worms, and contain the healthiness of apples.  When trying to be covert in nature, nothing but chipmunks seem as loud as a plastic baggie with trail mix.  Also, keep in mind that if your traveling companion triggers your Misophonia, you may want to avoid packing carrots because they are loud (plus, you really don’t want to be any sort of trigger happy while hunting).

7.         Attitude is Key. Now, I am not saying you cannot successfully put food on the table when you find yourself getting annoyed to exasperation. If nothing is crossing your path, even with steaming fresh pellets squishing beneath your new boots, your attitude (and knees) can make or break the rest of the hunt.  The shows on television are the highlight reels after the drudgery that no one else wants to bore themselves watching.  Not every state or area is wrought with options.  I find myself gaping sometimes that a 3x3 is passed over for a “Monster Buck”.  My reality is not that reality, and I need to be okay with that.

8.         Mathematics is over-rated.  Grocery shopping for food is essentially hunting for the best deal, $1.97/pound is a great price for chicken. Back when my husband brought home his first deer, even with the savings of us butchering it ourselves, I gave a rough calculation that it cost about $8,000/pound.  Math holds no bounds in our house—it makes homework for our kids a challenge, but with real world word problems.

Okay, kids: The hunting clothes cost $1,272.53, the licenses cost $138.87, the weaponry comes to about $3100.00. If the 92-pound buck is butchered, how much does each pound weigh?  Is it financially worth it to hunt to put food on the table?

9.         Health. Jokes abound about getting in “hunting shape” to get the “hunting body” back.  Keep in mind, this paragraph likely holds no value if you are a rifle/muzzleloader sit and shoot, blind hunter, or tree stand hunter.  For the rest of the crew, there’s an insane amount of hiking and walking involved. Not just any hiking, but vast expanses are crossed with trepidatious tip-toeing and monitored steps.  Your hunting partner will greatly thank you if you have exercised in preparation for hunting.

The first trip out ever with my husband, I thought the chipmunks were squawking to the beat of my heart pounding out of my chest.  My labored panting sufficiently hid my investigation into the matter. Just think of a mountain like a stair climber, throw 500,000 sticks and twigs on it, and poop for good measure because you want to not only look for fresh signs below but also at the wilderness around you (as well as behind to ensure a cat is not about to take out the weakest link). Don’t even get me started on the hike down the mountain after meeting exhaustion face to face, because if you had bad knees before, they will want to climb out from behind their caps and sock you across the head out of pissed off agony.

10.    Slicing and Dicing. Last but not least, prepare yourself for the possibility that your hunting trip will be fruitful.  Know what you need to do as soon as you pronounce death on your target (think tags), then think about preservation of the meat.  It helps to know what you should do first and how to do it in the field so you are not sitting there at o’dark thirty pondering if you should bathe it in water to cleanse the innards (you should not, so please refrain!), all while inviting predators far and wide to follow the scent.

{This blog post was originally posted at https://repentancenfaith.blogspot.com/2018/10/10-things-every-new-hunter-should-know.html.)

The Second Hunt

We did it, we had an overnight babysitter and took off to go hunt again.

We packed up our car late at night and took off around midnight on a Thursday. Yes, midnight. We looked at each other with smiles in our eyes and carefree laughter as we embarked on our second hunting vacay in as many weeks.

At about 2 am when we switched drivers, we were excessively less jovial. In fact, we were downright solemn. I was anyway. I'm sure the pillow, blanket, and snoring from the passenger seat kept the full weight of the boringly, long drive from sending me over the edge. It's amazing how someone can be so peacefully at rest while another one enviously watches them through side-eye glares.

I wasn't actually ticked off, but I was a bit jealous even though I had just woken up to take over the driving responsibilities. Come 3 am and I was beginning to question our last minute strategy to drive through the night. Come 4 am when we arrived, I was really wondering where our sanity went as we got our gear on to go for a 5 hour hunt. Gah. If you will remember, coffee and I really enjoy our morning time together. This was not exactly an option the local coffee shop took upon themselves to accommodate my inane cravings.

Yet, we carried on as though our brains were fully functioning; I mean we attempted to carry on. My legs weren't moving like they should. Sleep deprivation and hiking were clearly not a positive combo, nor one that I would recommend. Plus, we weren't even able to talk the whole drive there, what a waste of all those quiet hours in the car without the blissful earplug-worthy little yaps from the backseat.

We moved a lot slower this time though and proceeded with a wait and see tactic where we parked our behinds down where we thought the whitetails would magically appear. Looking back, it may not have been the wisest strategy. Dusty took a picture of me though, "How sweet", you say. I had other thoughts after I saw it.

If there was a deer that kicked me in the stomach and spit on my face I would not have noticed nor cared. I was in my own blissful hibernation. Eventually I woke up and it was at this moment that it struck me: We. Are. Old. Traveling all night at 30+ with 4 kids at home, expecting to stay up the entire day was nothing short of madness. We were nuts. Nothing else to it. Since we were already up on the mountain, though, we decided to embrace it.

We trekked up to the spot where we had witnessed our one proof of animal existence (aside from the random bird or furiously angry chipmunks) from our prior hunting trip. One chipmunk climbed up a tree to get to our eye level as we were sitting near a cliff, stared at us while squawking furiously, this lasted for a good couple of minutes straight before we told it to stop, because reasoning with woodland creatures is what happens when you're old. The deer must pay them off in some way for sounding the alarm when they see humans, because that little sucker was loud. Dirty little bribes happening in the underbrush.

We hiked, and hiked, and hiked some more.

Then we drove to go eat and HAVE COFFEE. Finally. Priorities were being set in their proper place again. We stopped at the local hunting shop first to chat with the owner and he shared that the deer still have not come back to the area since the fires and the smoke. Sigh. He told us where he did see some awhile ago so we wasted no time and headed straight there.

After, of course, we got a coffee for the road.

Our trip took a bit of a turn as my hunting partner literally blazed his own path. As in, I hunkered down in the truck to sleep. He searched and searched in the grasses while I slept and slept.

When that was over we went driving to see if we could spot any from the road as I was still content in my seat. It was at this time that Dust started to yawn. Keep in mind, we were still 4 something hours away from home and hadn't left yet. We had "been up" for longer than any normal person ever should be and staying the night was not an option because of the deadline we had for our babysitter.

The drive back started well enough. By well enough, I mean the first 23 minutes where the truck didn't traverse over the turtles or truck gates rattling me awake went well enough.

I asked Dust how he was doing and he openly shared that his eyes seemed glued shut. Guess it was my turn. I was surprisingly awake, I assumed I could attribute it to my continual cat naps throughout the day. I drove nearly all the way home and know I was awake the whole time because of the lynx I saw on the hillside in front of us as well as all the deer I had to swerve away from. That last hour left was when we switched again.

After the first 4 minutes of his newly acquired shift he realized he was still too tired to drive, we switched again. The glue was apparently still there. We finally made it home--Dusty made a beeline for the bed while I chatted with our babysitter about how it went for her.

The next morning was a soccer game at 9 and it honestly felt like I was ripped from bed at 3 am by a tiger shark.

On Saturday, we spent a good deal of time nursing our wounds, sleeping, and utilizing every single screen we owned for the kids.

Moral of the story: We are old. Really old. We will never do that again.  Unless we can find another babysitter….

The Hunt

Recently, I went bow-hunting for the first time with my husband. It was such an exciting trip to go on... we were going for two nights sans kids, aka sans schedules. There was a glorious hope involved for freedom from work, freedom from feeding, re-feeding, and even more feeding of 4 little chicklets, freedom from a schedule determined by my chicklets’ needs to eat/survive/sleep, freedom for alone time sparked by a really long drive where we could talk uninterrupted for a cool 4 hours (I'm sure that was the most anticipated event for Dusty, too).

To say I was excited was an understatement, I was near giddy.

I learned a whole lot about hunting in our 48-hour camping trip. First, the camper we took ended up being for looks, and for terrifying me on the drive that the back tire might catch the edge of the road and pull us down the cliff not even a yard away from the white line. I will say, though, that the camper was nice for the exhausted freefall into it each night as I prepared for a glorious couple hours of sleep because we "had to get up the mountain before the deer". Sure, okay.

Boy, 4 am comes early when you have just driven for 4 hours, hurriedly unpacked, set up the trailer in 30 minutes, tried on new hunting gear for the first time, zipped out to hunt the night before for a couple hours, and had dinner at 9—let me sideline this train of thought to say dinner really was delicious, because again, we were eating dinner at 9 with no one screaming at us or throwing food at the waitress. Coming off the dinner, we were headed to the one grocery store in town so we could grab food for the morning, but more importantly, creamer because, hello, it will be the crack of dawn, and coffee is a must on a normal day.

The one grocery store in this remote little town decided that closing time happened before we arrived. I will freely admit this was my biggest concern the whole trip. Getting attacked and eaten by a black bear, falling off a cliff while driving there--these had nothing on the fact that I wasn't going to have a good cup of coffee in my hands for our early morning jaunt in the woods, let alone any food for breakfast. I was assured we would go out for breakfast after and all would be well again in my world, so we pressed on and purchased a Starbucks cold drink from the gas station to mix that in with our black coffee. I would advise munching on watered down coffee grounds rather than ever doing that again. But we paired it well with our dried out turkey sandwiches from the "deli" section. A breakfast for kings. Kings who don't plan well.

We arrived at our morning hunting spot, sat down on some really comfy rocks, and began to glass. Glass, in hunter's wife lingo, means you pull out your brand new binoculars that your husband bought hoping you would have something to do with your time instead of talk as you are supposed to be really "quiet" when you hunt because the animals have exceptional hearing.

My husband knows me well, he knows I love puzzles and used it to his advantage by telling me that glassing is essentially like taking the entire mountainous hillside and dividing it into itty bitty puzzle pieces that you spend all too long analyzing in hopes of seeing some antlers stick up higher than the grasses. In reality he was right, it was just more like one of those 50,000 piece puzzles of a polar bear in a blizzard.

Luckily, Dusty spotted a bush swaying back and forth and although I wasn't able to see any hint of what type of animal, I imagined by the raucous nature that it was some sort of beastly creature that would not welcome us invading his space with weapons.

By the looks of it, we were a good day and a half hike away from The Bush. Apparently, we were going to risk it anyway. We drove to a closer location to start the hike. Now, "hike" in hunter's wife lingo, means extremely deliberate and calculated stepping, all while staring at where your next step will be and simultaneously keeping my eyes on my husband because if he stops, I stop. That is all while also looking around to prevent a potential bear attack or possibly that a buck would be staring me in the face because I most assuredly would have gotten that close with how quiet I was. Except my breathing, it was horrendously loud. Looking back, the wheezing may have scared away the deer. It took me awhile to recognize that sometimes Dust stopped to generously give me time to catch up and not because he heard something. Take note that the word generously is the key takeaway from that revelation. Love him.

I had heard of hunters training in the gym for hunting season, and I'll openly admit that I scoffed. Until this trip. I had no idea just how much stamina is involved with hunting. There's an overly tired body that wakes up entirely too early and is fueled by mostly coffee and protein bars that has to scale a mountain in a couple hours’ time *quietly*, hopefully have the strength after that to pull back your bow in order to achieve the purpose of the whole trip, then dissect your victim, and traipse down the mountain with it on your back. It was nothing short of impressive to me understanding the level of endurance involved.

There was a lot of looking down while hiking which I wasn't expecting. If there was a twig that would crack, I stepped around it if I could. If there was a rock that might slip, I stepped around it if I could. If there was deer or bear droppings, I stepped around those if I could. In fact, on that hike there was a lot of poop. I had been expecting a weekend free from analyzing excrement but found myself getting overly excited when I would see those fresh brown berries because it felt like the deer were close. I almost imagined the steam rising because it was that fresh. I'm a Mom, I'm used to fresh.

The first hunting session we saw a lot of signs. The next 2 hunting sessions were not as exciting in terms of fresh evidence. Yet, when we took a break to eat something, we saw our one and only legal buck. It got spooked and took off, and we unfortunately couldn't track it down after a solid 2 1/2 more hours of hiking. I had been expecting to see a lot of deer, almost so much so that we would have our pick of the choicest rack. That was far from reality since we ended up only seeing one during our entire trip. It felt very much like a game of luck. So not a game really at all. Just pure luck. If a deer was to my left and I was looking to my right I very well could have missed him.

Another thing that surprised me was how far we could travel in a mere 2 hours of hiking without stopping. I haven't really worked out consistently for a good couple of years now and I just deliberately traveled with my legs as my vehicle for 2 hours up a steep incline. And I made it. We actually made it to The Bush that first day but the deer/mountain lion/mammoth beast had left already. And let's not forget that if it took a couple hours to get up there, one still must come down.

With hunting, there's always another ridge to scale. Always. Seriously, looking up at a behemoth of an incline only to summit and peer over the ridge and see another looming hillside is a bit discouraging... it's like a constant nature delusion that you think this is the top after 40 more carefully placed steps and it's not.

We headed back down soon after that as I was starting to get concerned my muscles would lock up and he'd have to pack me out. Packing out, in hunter's wife lingo, so I'm told, is a concerted effort by those in your hunting party to help you divvy up your proof of hunting prowess and assist you in heaving 100 or so pounds of a carved up animal onto your already heavy pack down the steep hillside to your vehicle. This would have been most unfortunate for Dusty to have to pack out his pack, me, my pack, and a buck. I'm almost certain he would have been fine. Since I did decide to not take a ride down, let me tell you, trekking down a mountain in exhaustion is a lot louder than the concentrated movements when anticipation of running into a buck is a possibility.

What I also didn't realize was how little down time there would be during The Hunt. When I imagined hunting, I foresaw a hike to a destination where we would sip our coffees, eat some snacks, and wait for a buck to walk right in front of us. I also expected that afterward there would be cuddling by the fire as we talked about our hopes and dreams, sipping our decaf coffees, after we had time to meander through the shops in town while drinking coffee. (Again, please take note that my expectation here may better explain the intense desire earlier to have creamer as coffee clearly plays a major role in my life.) There was none of that. Any of that. My expectations and reality were worlds apart.

We had a blast though, other than me breaking down in anxiety-racked tears on a logging road (logging road is hunter's wife lingo for a rocky, rutted 5 foot wide span of dirt and boulders that would better be termed a wider-than-average hiking trail) with a cliff as he backed up (on a cliff) and away from 3 Jeeps (on a cliff--1 of which nearly tipped over as they tried to "climb" the side of the mountain to "give us room to pass" on a cliff) (another story for another time though). It was so much fun to hang out with each other alone, with no schedule, learning about a hobby that interests my husband so much.

We made it back and would do it again in a heartbeat! I would anyway, I might need to double check with Dusty whether or not he came to the same conclusion.