00:00:00 Speaker 1: What's up, y'all. I'm Casey and I'm Tyler and this is another big Buck breakdown from the Element podcast, brought to you by Exodus Trail Cameras. All right, so now on the phone, we've got Aaron war Brittain from the Hunting Public. Aaron, you just told me that it's been raining up there? Is it raining pretty much everywhere in the country right now? Man, it seems like it's been raining on a non stop for a couple of days. Now. We throws our butts off, but we found some good sign And I wish I was out there with Tad right now, but I had to come back to health get some work done. So yeah, he's out there in it. Yeah, that's good. Good luck to him. Man, that's a It's kind of stinks when you gotta you gotta have a work day, you know, during good weather. But that's just part of life sometimes, man. That's right. So you did get to hunt some recently, and uh, Man, that deer that you killed there is just a stud man. I know you've been told that several times, but uh, tell us a story about how it all went down, man, And I know there was a little bit of tracking involved on that deer, wasn't it Well, there was a little bit. Yeah, I thought there was gonna be a lot more than what there was there was, but luckily it didn't go very far at all. But yeah, we uh we dove in there in that spot. Um, I don't remember the exact date, but it was there around mid October. We dove in mid day. It was you know we had here in the Midwest. We had a real long stretch of just hot weather, kind of you know, stagnant days if you will. And uh we we did finally get some wind. And that's one thing I like a lot, is is any sort of high wind days. Um, whether it's hot or cold. I want to be in the woods when it's windy because dear just they have a hard time detecting you and that stuff. Sure, So anyway, Gooch and I ran out to a spot, uh dove straight in there. It was like eighty degrees but the wind was blown twenty miles and we just started scouting through. It's it's kind of uh an area that's just all would um. There's not a lot of habits at diversity in there. There's hills and just mostly hardwood that bucked up against some water, and he started just hitting those ridges and scouting them one by one by one until we ran into buck sign. And by the time we ran into buck sign, we jumped up a big buck. The buck I actually ended up killing out of his bed. That was about can in the morning, I think, on that really hot day. But it was so windy. When deer got up, we saw him run off about sixty yards and then he stopped and he turned around to look, and what the heck just startled him. And when they do that, um, when you bump them like that. That's why I said it like windy days a lot for for just being in the woods and generals, because they have a hard time pinpoint you unless they unless they catch a whip of you, you know, And we were scouting into the wind. So when we bumped him, uh, he either heard us or just caught a glimpse of us moving through the woods. Took off, but then turned around because he was second guessing it. He didn't know what the heck we were, and it was it was obvious that it was frustrating him, you know, because he kept looking and kept looking and kept looking, and then finally he turned and bounded off over the hill. But I turned around a gooch and told him, I'm like, man, that dear is not spook very bad at all. Like he's there's a good chance he's gonna run over that hill. Calm down and go right back to his normal routine. Um. So with that said, we moved on past the deer, ran in, went to the next betting area down a little and a little bit more remote location, and I think we found two big rubs going down into that draw there were there wasn't a lot of sign, but there was two huge fresh rubs. So we we dropped a pin on that spot and got the heck out of there, and then came the next morning and killed him in that spot. Nice man. So so why was the why were you worried about the tracking job being a long tracking job? I hit the deer a little bit forward. Uh he was. He was slightly quartering to me. Um, And I mean slightly. I mean the thing was almost broadside because he had that fore leg um forward. But I put my pen right in the right, straight up the leg um where that shoulder bends back, you know. Uh. I put the pin right there at ten yards and it hit a stick barrow did about a foot in front of the deer, and it deflected a little bit to the right, and I hit the deer body about two inches right of where I was aiming, hit him right at the ball and socket joined in the shoulder. And I didn't get a kind of penetration, at least it didn't look like it like the arrow didn't go clear through the deer. It bounced back out and broke off been him. So I was immediately nervous. Um. Anytime you don't get a pass through hit on a deer, uh, you know there is there's cause for concern, um, because you know, if you don't get clear through that chest cavity, then you're not gonna cut everything that you need to to put them down really fast. Um. And then I showed the footage just some dog trackers that I know that it got a lot of experienced blood tracking and trailing deer with dogs, and and all of them said the same thing. They were like, best case, he's dead right over the hill, um. Perfect. The worst case is single lung, in which case you may want to get a dog. So I just went ahead and got the dog, just as kind of an insurance policy. Um, in case we did hit him single long and we needed the dog to help push the deer. So uh didn't end up turning out to need it. I mean the deer. The deer pretty much just ran right over the hill and died fairly out of sight. The thing didn't make it for the yard. Yeah, well that's awesome, man. Did you end up sitting up on his bed or did you sit up on that those big rubs that you found, Um, well, the big rugs that we found were leading into a betting area, like we bumped him. And when I'm saying betting areas in these hills, they're just they're bedding at the top of these little drainages. Um, it's open timber. I mean, there's there's not a lot of half get diversity in there. And where we bumped him was just at the top of one of those little drainages where it formed kind of a bowl right there where he could get you know, winds swirling around from different directions. We bumped him out of that and then we went for the next spot down It looked like that, and that's where we saw those big rubs going into. So uh, we set up we didn't set up over those big rubs. Um the big rubs were just leading down into that bowl, and that morning we slid in there in the dark an hour before daylight, and we set up directly over that bowl, not the same one that we bumped him out of, but the one a little bit deeper about two yards from there. You just heard Aaron talk about how bucks are betting at the top of drainage is kind of in the bowl of where those drainages head out. And actually Tyler and I looked at each other while he said that, because it reminded us so much of a place that we checked out and the map Scout Challenge videos up in Oklahoma, and not in that particular spot, but in a lot of the other stuff that we did in the map Scout Challenge. We used a ton of Exitus trail cameras that actually helped us get the maps Goot Challenged going. They're great for public land for many reasons, one of the big ones being their theft prevention warranty. Okay, if you get a camera stolen on public land, Exus will help you cover the cost of the replacement camera that you purchased from them. I don't know if any other trail camera company doing that. And I can tell you this, that's just a small snippet of the representation of the good guys that the guys that Exodus are, So go check out Exodus outdoor gear dot com. Did you assume that he was going to bed there when you saw him that morning or did or did he look like he was gonna pass you up and go back to where he betted the day before? We weren't real sure. I mean, it's kind of a crapshoot in those hills like that because they do move around. They won't bed in the same spot every day. They'll bounce around, um pretty regularly. But we look for something similar. It wasn't the same. It wasn't the same bed. I was thinking like, there's a chance because we bumped him deeper that he's gonna go to the more remote area, and that's why we went to that next bed down. Do you feel like, um, this is something that you could do, even like in real heavy pressure states, you know, I you know with the draw and stuff that you know, it's didn get quite the pressure. And but say you go one stake south, you know where you're from, Missouri, is that stills on the deer. Yep. It all depends on how you spook the deer um. Because we've done the same thing in other states as well. I mean, heck, Dan and Joe from the honey Bees just did this a couple of days ago in p a Uh, you know, while we were there for the challenge. It's the hunting pressure thing gets overblown in my mind a little bit for in different areas. For people, the main thing to remember is that, for the most part, if you're hunting mature buck um and they smell you, you're in trouble if they don't. And and that goes back to what I was saying about, like scouting on a windy day like that, or jumping the deer and almost catching him by surprise, It all depends on that that specific situation in the nature in which you bump them. If you spook a big buck and he takes off like a bat out of hell, running really hard, and you know you see him go half a mile or something, there's a good chance he's not gonna come back for a while. Yeah. Then when you're entire in close with deer, big bucks and particularly things can just get haywire, and one thing that I can rely on is my cover release to do what I needed to do. So, for instance, when I was in Illinois and this big buck, actually two big bucks are with and twenty yards of me, I've got my release folded back because I'm tethered to the tree and you're constantly kind of holding onto this tether and doing things. But then when you're ready to shoot, all it is is just kind of almost brushing your hand against your chest and it's folded back into the normal position and it's ready to fire. And so, for for instance, with that buck in Illinois, I was able to make very little movement and not alert any of the bucks in the area by doing that, and be ready to go when it was time to make a shot on that big old buck. So to check out any of the features on these Cobra releases, go to Cobra Archery dot com. It seems like if they smell me, if they get a whiff of me, even if it takes them a while to kind of figure it out, if my wind is blowing to them and it's obvious that they smelled me, then you gotta, you know, you gotta look at it. A A little bit differently, But in this situation, we didn't We didn't kill him out of the same bed. We killed him deeper. You know, we kind of almost pushed him back there, I think. But I'm saying that, you know, inspect elation because we found a bunch of you know, we found those those fresh rugs leading into that betting area, that more remote betting area where we killed him. I think he was using both of them. Yeah, you know, you know you titled that video bumping dump, which I guess is what that is, and it's it's kind of sisters with the idea of wind bumping. But can you kind of explain how those two things hurt are different? Yeah, wind bumping, you're intentionally trying to spook the deer to a to another hunter. Um, It's it's just like a deer drive, except you're using your wind to spook the deer got you. And when you when you let your wind drift into a betting area, a lot of times the mature buff will get up and he'll slide out of there, nice and quiet and stealthy without you even knowing it, because he smelled your way before you saw him. But he'll come out the back side of that area, moving slow where somebody can get a shot at him. If you go through. There were ten guys blazing. You know they're gonna go. They're either gonna hold tight and run out the back door, or they're gonna take off like a bat out of hell and run past your standards. So that's why we like the wind bumpy technique. Um. But this this in particular was opposite, like I um, Like I said earlier, we were working into the wind so that anything that we got up in front of us wouldn't be able to smell us unless it circled way down when we bumped in. He didn't he didn't know what what the heck was even going on. Yeah, yeah, Well it's awesome, man, it's great story. Man. Congrats on on that. And UH really appreciate the insight into the tactics and that kind of thing. Man. I know a lot of people learned a lot of things from you guys, and uh, you guys are constantly putting out uh informational stuff, and I know a ton of people that appreciate that, man. And then there's also the entertainment value as well, namely from Zach. But uh, you all got all. You guys have it. So we appreciate you spending a few minutes in the time with us during this busy on the phone with us during this busy time of year, and and good luck the rest of the year, man, especially during the rut. Thanks Man, you too. We'll talk to you soon, ar Man. What an awesome story about a big buck. Guys, we want to say big thanks to Exitus, Trail Camers and Cobra Archery for being a part of this big buck breakdown for sure, Man. And also if you want to check out what we do on a daily basis, maybe even see some of these big bucks, go to Instagram and follow us at the Element Wild and then also subscribe on YouTube to keep up with what we're doing throughout the season, and subscribe on the podcast. And remember this is your element living in. Why we even can't have a fucking grew up being in the same situation pretty river tween. It's causing a lot of frustrations. Brothers. Let's forgiving for games