00:00:00 Speaker 1: I case, and you're listening to the Element podcast. What is happening in folks? Guess what? You're listening to the Element podcast and it is like hunting season, man, Holly, I don't think so. I don't think so, but it almost is. You know, like we're actually going antlo punting next week. Super stoked about that. But it is time to start zoning in on the deer stuff, and if you haven't, it's also time to start kind of getting your gear lined out. Uh. The Element Podcast is brought to you by first Light Gear. Go to first Light dot com and you can find out all kinds of stuff about the stuff you might need for the early season. Might I suggest the trace system. We're gonna be wearing a lot of that with our antelo punt that's coming up pretty soon. And we've been kind of sitting around thinking and talking about the way we're gonna approach this thing because it's a new deal for us, right hunting an lope especially. They're gonna be mostly on the ground from what we understand, and it kind of relates back to, of course, deer hunting forest. As weird as it sounds, Kyler and I can be outside picking cucumbers and zucchinis and just find a way to relate it back to deer. 00:01:23 Speaker 2: So we just put it in the same video back in the day. 00:01:25 Speaker 1: That's it, man. We've been looking at some old Element videos. So if you've been around since Sheds and Beds, we appreciate you. 00:01:32 Speaker 2: Actually we apologize to you. 00:01:34 Speaker 1: Thank you for sticking through the hard times. So today we're going to talk about some of our biggest mess ups, our biggest mistakes. Deer hunting white tail from the ground from a tree with bow in hand. I don't know you might have some gun stuff on yours. I haven't looked at your list, and makes it kind of fun if we don't know what each other's going to talk about here. But we're gonna talk a lot about the stuff that we've done wrong and the lessons that we have learned to circumvent that to maybe get just a little bit better at this thing we love doing. And Tyler, I will just go ahead and say, as I went through my list, I went chronological over the past five years or so. I do believe this is trying to be pragmatic, not just like the way I feel right, but it looks like I got a little bit better, which is kind of what we want to do, right, Like, I had a lot of dumb mistakes. I had many to choose from from like the twenty teens, you know, but as we got into the twenty twenties, those kind of got to tighten up a bit. So I'm kind of thankful. I'm sure this year will remind me that I still have a lot to learn. 00:02:36 Speaker 3: Last year reminded me so good. I have lots of things to choose from too, and I've probably forgotten the worst mistakes, but they're mistakes on this list regardless. 00:02:49 Speaker 1: So what do you think, just looking after going through your list and adding some overall your what situation is tough for you? 00:02:59 Speaker 2: Man? That's good question. 00:03:00 Speaker 1: If it might be hard to do an overarching thing because. 00:03:03 Speaker 3: I tried, I tried to have some diversity in my mistakes here, So that's a hard one looking through my mistakes. 00:03:13 Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't know. 00:03:14 Speaker 1: We'll good. It's glad you mess up in a lot of different ways. 00:03:16 Speaker 3: Yeah, Yeah, there's no like, I don't know if there's a you know, this is a thing for me. It's just like these are thing mistakes have made through through the years. 00:03:25 Speaker 1: You know, yeah, I think that like encounters seem to not be too much of an issue for me, But getting something killed with archery equipment is where the mistake usually happens. Like closing that distance to get in an archery ranging to go ahead and get a shot off seems to be a difficult thing. So why don't you tell us? We're gonna be chronological here, all right? In the format is, guys, we're gonna talk about the situation. We're gonna talk about the hunt itself. We're gonna talk about the thing we messed up, the thing we did wrong, our mistakes, and the we're gonna talk about the lessons learned from that and how we circummitted that in the future to maybe try to not be so dumb. 00:04:05 Speaker 3: Can I tell this in a kind of a fluid story or do a lot of address each thing? 00:04:10 Speaker 1: Okay, I'm just telling them so that we know just kind of what they can garner from our story. 00:04:18 Speaker 3: Okay, So, Kansas twenty eighteen, we were hunting a property that we had permission to hunt that was a really cool property for where we hunt. It had cover, which is something we don't have a ton of. It had food, which is something we don't have a ton of options on. And it also had some of the stuff that we do normally hunt, which is a little more like kind of grassland type of habitat. Right, it had a lot of different edge habitat and these kind of things. Well, we got permission on this thing, and you know, I don't know how we did it. 00:04:57 Speaker 2: Things like four. 00:04:57 Speaker 3: Hundred is four or five hundred acres and it was a really cool place. So it had a shelter belt that went east and west on it, and that was kind of the main piece of cover that we typically tried to hunt. And the first time we ever went walking down the edge of that shelter belt there's corn on the north side of it, we found like two sheds. You found like two sheds walking in it was the first arc, yeah, and one was like an old, gnarly looking buck with a weird like peticle or something. 00:05:27 Speaker 2: It was really cool little shed. 00:05:28 Speaker 3: But we thought, oh, this thing hasn't been hunted in forever because these are just right here on the edge of his cornfield. There's gonna be some good bucks around. It's gonna be awesome. Well, on the shelter belt on the north side, if you're watching on video, I'll kind of try to draw this out for you with my hands. On the north side was all the main trees that were playing it originally in that shelter belt that were tall, and and then in south of that, for like probably sixty or seventy yards, was a lot of like tumbleweed brush extra hackberries and elms that were growing up. You know, that had come from seed and you know it is like a little brush and all the kind of junk and the junk yard there from the homestead that was nearby, and so it was like brushy on the south side of that, But there was a couple of trees a cedar tree that was really big that I know I could have hung in kind of south of me. Well, so I start thinking about where I'm gonna hunt this morning on the shelter belt, and we're both hunting the property, but we're hunting different areas. And as I think about it, we've got a north wind. It's gonna be really crisp and cold this morning. It's not gonna really be blown much, but it's just enough to be considered a north wind and actually matter. And I'm like, man, I'm just gonna sit on one of them trees on the north side, and I'm gonna try to have good shots out to the corn and that's my main the corners cut, but that was my main consideration. And these deer are gonna come up and down this thing because the sheds are there, right, Who cares? And I had thought about this, but who cares? That the wind is blowing to the south side of this shellter belt. Well, I see a deer enter the shelter belt on the other end, and lo and behold, like fifteen minutes later, this deer comes down the shelter belt behind me at like sixty yards maybe not even by the time he would have gotten straight south of me, and it almost got my wind. He probably been like forty forty yards or so, right, but there's brush everywhere in the way, and he's getting where he's about to be down wind of me. So I give him a little grunt and he ends up coming or maybe I like I think I actually just kind of barely touched the horns again as real quiet, and he comes working towards me, but then decides to work down when before I could get a shot him, he got to probably twenty yards, he smells me, and he gets out of there, and I thought, man, if I had just sat in that cedar tree where I knew they should have been cruising, it's logical to think they're cruising that in that shelter belt in the cover, smelling all that stuff. He ain't really worried about corn in November, and so basically, instead of just wanting to see stuff and shoot one in a cornfield like they see on TV, I went, you know, that's what I went with. But I should have gone with the more practical and logical idea that really you have to hunt the trail from d tree, not the one that lets you see the best or whatever. Because seeing bucks, like we talked about it just a second ago, it is awesome and it's fun, but killing them is a different story. So that's uh, that's the lesson I learned, is like, just take take your logic and hunt that instead of hunting what you really want to hunt or what you want to see sometimes. 00:08:27 Speaker 1: So twenty eighteen was also a year of a lot of learning for me. It was my first year to really hunt out of state, so a lot of things changed, and I've hunted on the ground for deer a decent amount in my life, but it's kind of always been like maybe ground line set ups or kind of sitting wait type stuff. And I'd never done the running gun type thing very much. And we were hunting a piece of public ground that really uh there was a tree to hang in on that place. I think it was all just rolling crp grass, and we were learning as we go out there. It was a new place for us, and there was some deer around. It was a pretty exciting place to hunt. And I didn't know that much about calling deer at that point in time either. I had rattled in deer in Texas South Texas stuff, you know, but that's just I don't know. It's like when you played the South Texas game. You're really just doing the there's so many deer out here, I'm gonna do something. Maybe one of them will come over here. Whereas out there we actually saw this buck at like I don't know, we saw him for a long ways off half mile probably he came from this homestead over there where there's some big old cedar trees and wind row and came down and worked a scrape at like I don't know, three hundred yards from us or something like that, and we rattled to him and he threw his head up and like just came in just on a string. It was really exciting, and at that point in my life, to be honest, it was scary. Like I was just not used to that. And the big deer I've ever drawn my bow back on at that point in my life. He wasn't like a monster antler wise, but he was a mature buck, you know, at least like a four year old deer in the Midwest, a huge body, and it was cold, cold, cold that morning. We were set up in like just this little I don't know, there's like a levee or something there that had some taller grass or like four bee stuff in it, and we're just trying to hide just in the ball to open pretty much. And I drew my bow back on this deer and asked Tyler what the range was. And I don't know if we hadn't really planned it out or whatever, but you really shouldn't have been responsible for the range in that situation. 00:10:40 Speaker 3: It was like I also hadn't been practicing my voice text where you tell him what punctuation you want at the end. 00:10:46 Speaker 1: Of it, so I think that it was just like we couldn't believe it was sort of working. So I was unprepared for the situation. And it's like, hey, how far what's the range? And you said like thirty six, like you're kind of like had one of those at the end of it, and I was just like, okay, sounds good. And I don't even know for sure if the range mattered that much or not. Because I settled my pen everything felt really good. I released the arrow and then about halfway there, I see my arrow just go whoa wha, wha, whah whah wah whah and just boomerang through the air, except it didn't come back and just flew. And then that deer runs off because he didn't know what just happens. I mean, he's not hurt at all. I like knock another arrow and kind of get up on my knees and he looks back. Tyler snort wheze is at him, and he just knows that we are not his friend anymore, so he leaves out. And that was a tough lesson to learn because I just kind of realized, like, man, it was just not gonna go easy for me out there on the ground. Like, that's when we started figuring out that the ground huntings thing was tough. And I also learned at that point in time it was like my first venture into hey, maybe I shoot and shoot these really lightweight arrows with mechanicals, because that's essentially what happened. My ara is pretty lightweight. I was shooting a rage and it hung a piece of grass, I mean just a little blade of grass, and it just threw my arrow just in a tailspin pretty much. And so to fix that in the future, we just really worked on our craft on the ground hunting thing, trying to figure out how to actually do that and kill deer. And then I also went down the rabbit hole of all the foc heavy arrow stuff and ended up now in a pretty good place on that stuff, I believe. So it's gone well. 00:12:36 Speaker 3: So you know, one thing I just realized is that's the pretty close to the same setup that you had when you were successful on the ground this year, as far as same direction that the buck came in, same sun was at the same kind of well we didn't realize at the time is that deer probably couldn't. 00:12:53 Speaker 2: See us at all. 00:12:54 Speaker 3: Probably we should have just let him keep coming but your spook, You're just like to. 00:13:00 Speaker 2: Get a shot on this thing. 00:13:01 Speaker 3: He's in he's in, you know, and in all honesty, like he's in the same situation as that buck this year where you were able to draw and still like make that dear comfortable enough to keep coming with like a snort, wheeze, and just you know situation that also it's another lesson that I feel like I just kind of hit me. It's like, man, that's a good lesson. 00:13:21 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:13:22 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:13:23 Speaker 3: So the next year I drew the old famed Iowa tag Good for You, And this is what this was in one of the good units in Iowa, not just Iowa, but like you know, one of the better units for for us as well for anybody. But you know, for a non resident. Took years to draw, and I was really excited about this thing. So I got actually have a couple of stories from my time there in Iowa because it's a time when there's like pretty immense pressure because I've spent all of my money on this tag. I don't have any money. I barely can afford to even get up there with gas and all that, and I potentially have a chance to shoot the biggest buck ever and video it right like it's in it could be important to our YouTube channel and therefore important to maybe potentially me one day actually been able to tell people with reality that I live as a bow hunter. That's my career, you know or whatever. So that was a huge, a huge moment in time right that season with that tag. So I go up there with k C and we had we had we decided to go the last week of October because we wanted to beat the November rush up there. Right, We're gonna hunt a lot of public, but we had been put in touch with a guy who worked in agriculture and knew a lot of the farmers. So we get to hunt some private and basically the scenario here is we see a buck probably halfway through the hunt that's a like stud. He's not he's not a high scorer. I feel like that deer is like one like low forties to low and fifties maybe type of deer. 00:15:02 Speaker 2: He's kind of had a weird antler. It's hard to him. 00:15:05 Speaker 1: Because those eyowaud de are just so big, right, and he was. 00:15:08 Speaker 3: That's the thing is he was a square body, just mature, big deer that just didn't quite have the the rack that maybe Iowa people are going up there for us, so maybe he's just you know, six years old and nobody wants to shoot him, right, But essentially, we find this deer and we over the course of a couple of days, figure out that he's he's bedding in this drainage that's like topping out in the middle of a gigantic property. So it's actually kind of hard to get to because there's nowhere to park. It's really open beanfields and stuff like that anywhere close to this place, so you have to walk a long way, and people just don't want to walk sometimes, you know. So even even if there was pressure around this is this is a very it's a remote area essentially, even though you wouldn't think of it that way looking at it on a map. So we go and figure out that this deer is. We get closer and closest to him. One afternoon actually I think it was like the afternoon before case, and are set up pretty close to where you think he's betted, and he and another big buck come out, both of which I would have shot, and there's a dough that's hot with them, and they start to kind of chasing around and just preposturing towards each other. 00:16:15 Speaker 1: October twenty nine is that the day, yep? 00:16:17 Speaker 3: And so they they end up the big buck that I'm, you know, the bigger of the two. He kind of just chases this buck off, and the dough kind of gets weird and starts kind of hustling down towards us. And there's like a faint trail at like twenty five yards. I mean, it's this is fixing the She's coming right, and all of a sudden he just turns and starts walking to her, and then he kind of gets up a little bit. Right, they're fixing it. 00:16:38 Speaker 1: Do this thing is wide open, we got shots. 00:16:41 Speaker 3: We're gonna have a video, like everything's gonna be good, right, And he ends up turning out. She turns out and goes and get to a place they didn't have a shot instead of going down that trail. And then so the next day we didn't buck. We didn't mess anything up. So the next day we end up going back in there and trying to do the same thing. In the afternoon, it starts snowing, and we get in there and I'm, I don't know that we have permission to cut any limbs or anything, even though it is private. So I just start tying stuff with all I got a bunch of pair cord. Well, I'm cheap. I don't have any money, so I'm not cutting this pair cord up. I'm just trying to like use the tag ins to tie all these branches and give me some shots on all this stuff. Right, wind was blown decent, but long story short, we call the betted buck in with all the racket that we were making getting dressed, and I'm putting on my last jacket in casey just like boom, hand on my shoulder, like hold on, and and I look up. 00:17:37 Speaker 2: Buck is basically. 00:17:38 Speaker 1: Turning around and bounding off. 00:17:40 Speaker 2: We had called oh he's so close. 00:17:42 Speaker 1: And probably had ended up, you know, within fifty or sixty yards. 00:17:47 Speaker 2: Was bad. So I guess, you know, the. 00:17:50 Speaker 3: The thought there is the lesson learned. The solution is that you know, when you're setting up on a betted buck, got to be super quiet. I mean it's it sounds obvious, but even in like the wind and the snow and stuff, you know, we felt like we had some cover. 00:18:08 Speaker 2: We kind of got. 00:18:09 Speaker 3: Lazy towards the end of that setup and or I did, and I was being just too loud, and I called the buck in. You know, it's happened to be advantageous for you before and probably for me at some point too last year in Oklahoma, you know, but like overall, you usually call him in and they catch it moving around. 00:18:26 Speaker 1: Yeah. I can't imagine how many of them we don't see. Yeah, we do that, you know, we just so happened. I glanced that direction and saw him turning and run. Oh yeah, like we were fixing it not even seeing. You can just sit there all evening and this false hope. Yeah, just be crying. I was trying cards to uh possums. That was the highlight of that evening. 00:18:44 Speaker 3: Well we did see that big seven point Yeah, yeah, you know, I was hoping you did, but you didn't. 00:18:49 Speaker 1: I glad they didn't. 00:18:50 Speaker 2: We had to go home next day. 00:18:51 Speaker 1: Yeah, So it looks like we're gonna learn a little bit more about Iowa here in just a minute. I also have some twenty nineteen stuff. We're gonna back it up a few months, so because that was the year I drew that awesome New Mexico ELK tag. And if you were watching this, there's a high likelihood you've seen the video because it's, you know, one of our original, like very popular videos. If you haven't, you gotta watch it. It's I mean, uh, it has the most pristine, beautiful elk bugle footage that you probably have ever seen in the video insane. So I'll tell you a little bit how we got in that situation. Tyler and O are way back in the back country. We don't have a clue what we're doing. We go in here setting up a camp, right, uh, and we're hearing all these bugles up on top of the hill and we're like, should we go hunt those? And yeah, should go after those? 00:19:40 Speaker 2: You know? 00:19:41 Speaker 1: And uh so we this whole time too, I'm like trying to figure out what's a shooter in this union because I don't know. It's like a coveted unit, you know, I don't know what a big elk looks like. And I did a lot of research in all, but still the whole time, that's all my mind was like, is this elk and he to be shooting? Anyways, We're hiking up and we don't do a lot of calling. Actually, we're just kind of doing like the whole spot and stalk thing. Try to get in close on him and try to get a shot, which actually is a really good technic. But we get fairly close, we see just like a elk rutfest going on, which was awesome. There was like apparently two bulls. There's a lot of bugling going on. We can see a cow. We see this giant bull run down the hill where we can't see him, and we hear and there's like this big elk fight that we don't get to see, and then he runs back up the hill to come back to his cow. She trots off, and Uh, We're like kind of caught out in the open at this point in time. I don't know if we were trying to move to trying to move a little bit better spot, and Tyler is like straight up in the open, like, I mean, I can only imagine how you're feeling back there. He's got a camera and a two dimensional decoy. 00:20:50 Speaker 2: I am going to be a three dimensional guy. 00:20:56 Speaker 1: And he's filming. So he's like operate doing a whole lot of stuff, right And I'm hunter and I've got some brush around me. But I don't really think about our situation. I just think about that elk's going the wrong way. It's the biggest thing I've ever seen in my life. I gotta bring him back here. So I give him a little, ye know, just a little calcol and it's enough to turn him. And here he comes. He's coming back, and I've got some cover around me. I'm feeling pretty good. I don't know what you look like back here. But he comes out and kind of comes down in front of me and like comes up this little rise and just kind of stops. Uh. He probably was seeing both of our heads sticking up there at that point in time. But I come to full drawl when you should. And if you've watched the video, you're probably screaming, shoot, shoot, shoot, because it's just like the perfect frontal shot on Elk. It's it's he's at twenty yards for me, twenty five from Tyler, and he's just straight on looking at us, and I have oak brush in front of me to where all I can see is like this Elk's chin and up, so all I can really see is the stuff you can't shoot. And I in that moment, was just like, Okay, I'm just gonna hold and he's gonna move and I'm gonna be able to get a broadside shot, and there was. 00:22:06 Speaker 2: A cow that if he'd gone to the cow, the only cow in there. 00:22:09 Speaker 1: Yeah, she's just on our left. 00:22:10 Speaker 2: Really good to come right through opening broadside, but he didn't. 00:22:14 Speaker 1: He stood there for three minutes and some change because he bugled at about two thirty while I'm still at full draw, and then goes from like fairly calm to just I'm gonna leave his runs and I have no shot, so I have to let down. I'm rattled. I'm sad as I can be in that situation. Tyler tell you, like, I don't really get down until after the moment, and believe me, that happened. But I am rattled, right, I'm like, crap, it didn't happen. So I move up. We kind of run up the hill in another twenty or thirty yards, and I do get another opportunity at this elk at that point in time was shooting a seven pen side. So if you're looking at home, it looks like this or backwards of that gone very much. There we go, Yeah, I've gone very much of the way. I got that many pins right that I'm looking at as I go full draw, and I have like just a short window to shoot this thing through the juniperse and I pick a pin release it's my sixty instead of my forty, and I shoot over the oaks back. Whew, he's gone. And at that point in time we call in another bull that I then shoot real high on the shoulder. And it's just a really, really really sad evening And I missed the bowl of a lifetime, the bull of a couple of lifetimes. Probably I don't know what this thing would score after watching the footage and evaluating him for hours of my life and dreaming about it and waking up and thinking about it. He's probably well over three p fifty. So just an absolute stud. And you mentioned that that site was the opposite of what I do now. I now shoot a vertical pin that has one main pin and then a one in the same stack, so it's just two pins. But there's only one thing in your side picture, really open side pictures, so I can have no confusion or anything about what pen is what. Because on that side, both of those pins were yellow, and in the heat of the moment, I just picked the bottom yellow one instead of the top yellow one on accident. So that was between that and just learning how to hunt Elk a little bit better. That's just kind of what I've changed since then. 00:24:20 Speaker 2: That's a rough day, dude. 00:24:21 Speaker 1: That was tough. It was awesome, best day of the elk honey of my life, and also really really heartbreaking. 00:24:41 Speaker 2: The rest of the trip was very tough. 00:24:43 Speaker 3: Yes, as You're just like, there were days you just sit there, went here, hardly anything. You're like, what did we do to ourselves? 00:24:49 Speaker 2: You know? Yep, tough tough day. 00:24:52 Speaker 3: So you know, same same year, same stage as I just talked about. Iowa twenty nineteen, Casey and I had had done Our trip was a week long trip ended on Halloween, had some technical difficulties on the way back, and I mean we're just broke as it gets Casey's got to go to work, and I have this tag that I need to go hunt on so we had to or I had back up there probably like the fourteenth or something like that. I can't remember exactly when now, of November, so after like what you traditionally think of as the heat of the rut or the heart of the rut, however you want to say it, and I end up sleeping in the back of a truck and a Casey's parking lot and just you know, poor boy, and at big time up there. I'm working hard because this is you know, that's what you do when you have a great tag. I'm going in a mile and a half in the middle in the dark, slipping down these like creeks and banging the I banged the bow off my head one morning, Like things are just oh dude, I was just struggling mentally, know with what I mean, Physically it was hard, but then that weighs on your mentality because you're physically tired, and you just have a bad attitude when you're tired of me. 00:26:07 Speaker 2: Ask my kids. But anyway, way. 00:26:10 Speaker 3: I I go in one morning. This is probably the maybe the third morning or second morning that I hunted, and I'm gonna hunt a ridge. I don't know how to hunt ridges. I grew up in you know, basically golf coast plains, right. Uh So I got some ideas after listening to some podcasts, talking to a bunch of people that I know, and then just generally hunting deer and knowing what deer like to do. I put some ideas together on this ridge. I get in there in the dark, I kind of busted deer in the dark. I saw his eyes or whatever herizon anyway, So I get up on top of this ridge, I'm like, do I hunt the top? Do hunt what they call the military crest or whatever? And I end up finding out that there are a couple of like secondary drainages that come off the top and drain down into this big riverbed system, right, And so to me, those little draws are things that deer don't really want to go up and down in. So I kind of hunt the top of that draw That one is the one especially, right, But there's a couple of them, and they kind of happen to be on the same elevation line. 00:27:12 Speaker 2: So I'm come and hunt around the top. 00:27:13 Speaker 3: And I'm not exactly up on top, but I'm very very close to the very top of the ridge, right, and I can so I once I get up in the tree, I can see all the ridge, you know, almost pretty much to where it starts to bail off to the other sides. So I can see the top of the ridge. Well, I'm sitting there pretty early on. I think I might already seen a dough and I hear something walking in the leaves and it's to my surprise. It was a buck, but pretty far away, like I felt, I think he was still me. He probably was still like eighty yards or more. And I was surprised I could hear him, you know. It was just a weird thing where the leaves travel down there to me. Right, I've got the wind. He's walking down this ridge towards me, and I'm like, oh, this is good. I get the camera on, I get it pointed in direction, zoomed in a little bit. I'm like, right there, there's about twenty yards and I'm gonna point the camera there. 00:28:03 Speaker 2: So I get it set up. 00:28:04 Speaker 3: I range yep, that's twenty and I get ready. He comes into the end of the frame and he getting ready to stop in the hole right there, and I'm fixing a drawback and I get ready to draw back, and this deer stops in my lane and I'm like, oh, that's great. No, lie, you can see it. It's on video. The camera I had a pretty heavy I've got a pretty heavy lens on it. The fluid head that holds a camera in its spot just kind of gave I don't know, you know, I just didn't turn it tight enough, I guess, and it just goes nose down straight towards the ground, and I'm like, oh my goodness. So he stopped at twenty yards and it's just freaking me out, you know. So I get the camera back and I'm like, I get it kind of straightened back up, and about the time I get it back on him. 00:28:52 Speaker 2: He starts. 00:28:53 Speaker 3: He turns and starts walking right at me from twenty yards and I'm like, this ain't good. You know, could be good, you never know. But he's just he's just doing his thing, is cruising up on top of this the fridge. So I get ready to uh to uh, you know, draw back on him, and he's he's getting to the point where he ends up just walking through my frame. He's getting so close, right and uh, I can't remember if this is on video or not, but I can see it in my mind. He basically gets like within five yards or so and then looks at the tree, kind of gets like this puzzled look all of a sudden, you know, and then follows the tree up slowly and looks right at me in the tree. And I'm like about to put pressure, and I got pressure on the string, you know what I mean. And uh then he just boom, turns, flips, bolts off, goes over the ridge. And I'm crushed because it's like day ten of Iowa hunting, after the seven or eight days before and the two or three days we've got in this trip, right and and I literally have no money, y'all. I have no money, and I'm just I'm just so sad. I didn't get it done, you know, right there, and it should have been. So essentially what I figured out and this is the mistake, and then what I learned from it, and it's pretty obvious is that deer was coming at my tree, and I ended up going up this tree from the uphill side because it made it easier to get higher, right, So instead of putting my sticks on the downhill side and going up and not being quite as high, I gained a little extra footage from going on the uphill side. Well, the thing is, those deer are going to cruise, and you know, essentially the downhill side is the side that I had protected, and I had the wind blown to and everything because the draws that came up it, you know, kept me protected that direction. But I didn't put my sticks on that side. I have black muddy pro sticks. I haven't done any camo taping to them or anything, right, I can. I can look back and almost guarantee you that that deer saw that bottom step and then just was like, that's a weird shape in the woods, right, looked up and fall those sticks all. 00:31:00 Speaker 2: The way up to me. And now there's a giant you. 00:31:02 Speaker 1: Know, snuff up in this tree. 00:31:07 Speaker 2: And so the lesson is. 00:31:09 Speaker 3: That now I almost I mean, I'm very conscious about putting my sticks on what I perceived to be the correct side of the tree. That deer not going to approach. 00:31:19 Speaker 1: From man, that was a tough go of it, but that got a little bit better. 00:31:23 Speaker 2: It did. 00:31:23 Speaker 1: But we're not talking about the good stuff. 00:31:25 Speaker 2: No, no good stuff today, only bad. 00:31:27 Speaker 1: So the same year twenty out team is a tough year, you know, quite honestly, I'm thankful that the element made it through twenty nineteen. Yeah, me too, because we just had just a bunch of bad stuff go down and we had a lot of pep talks, a lot of like, hey, what are we gonna do because of this? And this is one of those situations I was pushing way late in the season that year in Kansas. I had permission on a really nice piece of ground, and there was some big deer around. I've met, stuck a couple opportunities as some bigger bucks, or just had them just not go my way, and was found myself where I really don't like to be, and that is hunting deer in December up north, because it's cold and lonely. You're planes by yourself, and there's just not a lot going on, you know, like in Texas you can always just still feel pretty good about December at least for a little bit, like there's gonna be some road action or something, you know, But at that point in time, there literally is hardly any deer in the landscape who knows where they go, and then they're just like only coming out right at last night to go get something to eat. And that's what I was doing. It's dead calm, because that's also what happens late in the year if you hunted December on the planes, you know, it's like windy in the day and all of a sudden, like at five, the wind just quits and you can't like just move your finger without scaring a deer. Right, So I had one of those situations going on. I had a really great setup where I would come in and just drop off the side of this bluff and climb a tree right there. So like it's just the perfect approach to this setup. And I had corn out here and had a lot of deer coming to it, pretty good show camera pictures went in for an evening hunt, and I was kind of like gunn about near shooting anything, and this like pretty nice eight point comes in and it's two or three year old. I don't know, it's late in the year. I don't have any meat in the freezer because I missed that giant elk, So I'm trying to shoot something right Well, excuse me. Well, this deer pops his head around the end of the bluff and I see him out there like one hundred yards. I'm like, okay, it's about to go down. So I get ready, and I just have this idealized thing about I'm gonna shoot him when he gets to the food because he's gonna be relaxed. So I let this deer walk right underneath my stand at like twelve yards and I film him and everything. I got my bow in my hand and I just let him get over there to the food. Well, lo and behold, it's so quiet. He just just knows him there pretty much like I go to kind of trying to move around. He looks at me and he just goes back to eaton, and I'm like, oh gosh, I tried to draw my bow. He looks at me. I got my bow drawn, and I'm thinking, I'm fine, thirty yards whatever, set on my pen. Shoot he drops. I hit him high on the shoulder and he runs off like one hundred yards and just looking around. And that's never really a good thing whenever that year's got an air in it, and he's just like whatever, what's I don't know what's going on, but I don't get another shot at the deer. He jumps the fence and seems like he's gone. Well, I get down, run up the hill, try to get some footage of this deer, and sure enough I do. I can see the buck. He's like four hundre yards from where I shot him, and he's not dead. He's just standing around looking around. Give him all night. And didn't like that very much. It was one of very fun evening and me and a buddy went out there the next day trying to find the deer. And we found like one little spot of blood and then we found a bunch. We found a dead deer carcass, but you couldn't see there's just like hair and a little bit of stomach content. So I don't know if that was him or not. But either way, I didn't recover the deer, and it was It was kind of a pretty heavy blow for me at that point in my life. I had a pregnant wife at home, you know, like all this kind of stuff like that. Am I even pursuing a pursuit that I need to be after, you know? And I had to had to do some soul searching on that deal. And as y'all know, we are where we're at right now. But in that situation, I learned quite a bit. I learned that you don't shoot an alert deer, and if you do, you need to account for it, because I just put it where you shoot a deer and shot, you know, and he dropped and I hit him high on the shoulder. I was also shooting a really heavy arrow with a thing explayed, and I don't know how confident I was with that at that late in the season, because you just don't end up shooting your bow as much as you should late in the year. So like there's a lot of considerations to that. And really what I learned and it sounds like that you learned too, is that self filming is hard if you want to not kill deer self film. And it's actually something that we kind of addressed after all that, because really, if I hadn't had the camera, I'd have shot that dear twelve yards. I'm trying to get footage of him, you know, and so like going forward, that's something that we addressed a lot. You know, we got a lot of guys that go with us and film our hunts now, so very thankful for that. Yeah, But yep, that's how that went. 00:36:37 Speaker 3: That's that was a big It was a big change for us. We actually, you know, opened up the idea of having an intern to help us with the camera stuff next year and that kind of thing, right, But it didn't really work out, but it was it was the idea that we had and we've kind of pursued and in twenty twenty one. You know, Eric has been big help since then, you know, for for me, twenty and twenty one went well for me, and so I'm basically skipping those years. You want me to do my twenty twenty thing that I have, Yeah, I think so because twenty See, in twenty twenty, I had the best year I've ever had, and I didn't hammer time. I didn't have any like I mean, like, obviously you're gonna have some mess ups, but like I didn't have any like, oh, I missed the deer, shot the deer what like? I pretty much everything I pursued just about I was. I was getting it done. And obviously I'm not. I'm not trying to lift myself up here at all. I'm just saying that's the way it went. Twenty one. Very similar thing I had. I shot five deer in twenty and four and twenty one, and you know, things were good, and then I decided to get knocked down this year a little bit more so. The Lord socided I needed to maybe, but you you had some you have something in between there. 00:37:54 Speaker 1: Yeah. In twenty twenty, I was self filming on the ground. You went with the camera guy because you were going to film in a tree, and we just thought it was a better situation, so that's what we did. I learned a lot on this hunt because I'm on the ground. In plain State. It's early October, which is like kind of just bed to food, which is exactly what I was hunting. It was just awesome. We'd been setting up kind of like uh, you know, playing the short game, just waiting on the day for this spot to open up wind direction wise. We actually waited like five days to we knew we're gonna kill stuff, and sure enough we both this is the same night that Tas shot this year. 00:38:36 Speaker 2: Yeah here, Toad. 00:38:38 Speaker 3: Yeah, if you're if you're watching on YouTube, you're like, oh, that deer actually meant means a lot to me. It's crazy to think about it, but like it is a cool bug. But really the experience and that evening, the whole thing put together, just being out there under the stars, in the middle of nowhere with like no sound, no wind. 00:38:56 Speaker 2: It was just an amazing that. 00:38:57 Speaker 1: It's a cool place. Man. I hope we get to go back there someday. 00:39:00 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:39:00 Speaker 1: Well, I uh, because I have unfinished business. I'm set up in this little clump of plum trees in the middle of a hayfield that has like a little bit of old alfalfa, but there's some real good alfalfa up the hill that all the deer just start filtering to I mean early I had deer on me, like probably like five o'clock, and it don't get dark till seven thirty or eight ors, I don't even remember. Right like early early I had deer on me. And finally, after some younger bucks and some doze filter by, it's getting kind of LAIDs. After sunset, I see like a big rack pop up over there on I can only see like sixty or eighty yards fromhere. I'm set up. It's one of those deals where it's the right spot to kill from, but it ain't a great hunting spot, you know. And I've got my camera strapped to like six of those little plum bushes all pulled up together, and it's kind of helping me have a couple shooting lanes in there. Well, this deer, I can see his trajectory. He's like a big eight point with tall brows, like a poping young type deer, you know, like might have been at that point in my life, the biggest deer I'd ever shoot. So I was like stoked, right, and something about big brow times. They get me going real quick. I see those big brows, like, oh, it's a giant boy. That was I was stoked, and he's like, skyline, it's just beautiful, picturesque, right, But I know that this deer is not going to come any closer than me than maybe like fifty or sixty yards, and I'm not ready to take that shot. So I get out my grunt call early October Grunn at this deer. He responds right away. He knows that I'm over there, and he's starting to kind of circle around, trying to get the wind from where I'm at, but he's not going to make it to the wind before I get a shot. I kind of get ready, get in position, get my camera right in the gap, ready to go. I draw my bow. He comes into the gap. I actually adjust the camera with my bow a little bit. Kind of a weird thing to do, right, but again, my focus was taken off of exactly what I needed to be doing. What I do. A deer was like he's probably twenty yards close. Tyler's looking watching all this from a hill like a quarter mile away, like it's kind of crazy. 00:41:06 Speaker 3: We were already we had already shot guy out of the train, packed up, and we were sitting on a hill just watching what he was looking at you know. 00:41:11 Speaker 1: Yeah, it was weird, and uh, I just put my pen where I thought it needed to be and shot my bow twenty yards you know, like the deer's not gonna move very much. Well, he moved a little bit. It wasn't a ton, but somehow, someway, I just ended up hammering this deer right in the front knuckle just the worst place. Like I was shooting the heaviest setup I've probably ever shot. Maybe I don't. It was five hundred and eighty seven grains with a cut on contact broadhead, like a really heavy setup, like the thing you're supposed to shoot to be able to overcome that. I guess you could always go heavier, right whatever. Uh, either way, I was just astounded as at what happened. No penetration, deer wheels out, runs off. I'm kind of like, don't know what to do. I'm a little bit freaking out because like I pulled it off, but at the same time, he's not lying there dead. And I didn't know much at that point in time, but I knew that, you know there, I don't know if we're gonna find this deer not, you know, And uh, y'all are kind of freaking out because you see him run off like crazy, so you know, a shot and uh yeah, ends up. We let him sit overnight. We go in the next morning, don't find any blood, and end up bumping him and I see him healthy. He's like kind of running around, uh down on this draw and then like runs out across and too different property. So he survived that. He probably got shot with a rifle, but uh he made it through that encounter. And uh what did I learn really from that? Though? I think it was that I needed to uh really hone in on aiming and understand because I was doing like left to right if you can imagine aiming on a deer like body wise, I knew where the vitals were, but I wasn't aiming deer. I don't think. I think a learner needed to be aiming lower on deer. And that was something I really learned from that. And then it just too like what to do with an alert deer and how to take a shot and and to not rush things because honestly, that deer was looking right at me when everything happened. And I think there's this thing that deer do that people don't realize, and that's when they are at alert and have you pinned, it's different than when they're at alert and they're looking in front of them, because they'll always if they're like this and they're thinking about spooking, they'll look in front of them for a second and think about what they're going to do. And that I think is when you should shoot. Because that deer he didn't hear my bow, I mean, because it's so close whatever, but he still saw it before the arrow hit him, right, He like, the motion of you shooting your bow is the first thing that a deer can perceive, right, So I think that you know, he's just looking right down the barrel, and I think that was could have contributed towards. 00:44:08 Speaker 3: Yeah, And that kind of continues from your last story a little bit and with the whole like, you know, pivotal time for you and everything, and you were like you're getting a little bit weary with the bow hunting thing a little bit. You're like, I don't even know if I should be doing the way home, Yeah, I should be a bowl or not. And then November came and Casey had one of the coolest things ever happened. 00:44:32 Speaker 2: But we can't talk about it because we're all talking about the good ones, you know. 00:44:35 Speaker 3: So y'all just had to go back and watch some of the stuff that happened in twenty twenty and came out whenever it came out. But anyway, so as I talked about twenty one or twenty and twenty one were really good for me, and then I got to this year and it was really close to being, uh, you know, right there at the top best year ever as far as just successes and every thing and just like completing and what I was trying to do right, but it ended up being one of It was a rough year, you know, from that standpoint, and it was also just a tough year for me, like in my life as well. Just had some things happen that just were not very fun to go through during deer season. But anyway, so if you've watched buck Truck, you have seen you've probably seen this, But if you watched the South Dakota buck Truck, you definitely have seen this. In South Dakota this year, we got there like a day early before the season started, and I guess long story short, by day two, I am looking in the morning at a buck that is in some of the thickest, nastiest willow stuff I've ever seen, getting ready to bet up, and we bet him, which we didn't really know exactly where he bet it. We just lost sight of him and we knew he hadn't come out of there right, So we had an idea within probably an acre or so, where he was vetted. 00:46:01 Speaker 2: Well. 00:46:02 Speaker 3: I also plan, you know, this tree is the way to get him if we can get him tonight, and he's gonna come out this way, He's gonna head you know, this direction, potentially get a drink here, and then potentially go to food here. So Eric and I head in that afternoon. We went back and got lunch, come back, head in that afternoon, get in there, you know, nice and early, and so we can kind of make sure everything's good. Never been in this spot ever, I was glassing from a long long ways a different direction, long ways away or whatever. But so we go in there. I had all this stuff plotted on on X and we get to the tree that I want to get in and just sure enough, like I thought there would be I couldn't tell for sure from the maps, but I thought there would be water in this low spot, and there was a little bit there, and that made me really pumped because I think I've seen a deer go that direction and dive off in this little low spot the day before, but I didn't know for sure there was water in there. Sure enough was I'm pumped. We're gonna get in this tree. I'm gonna have a shot at this water hole right here and up on top where I expect deer might be coming. You know, this buck especially would be coming, and potentially if he misses or doesn't go to water, he at least comes by me and I get a shot out before he goes to feed that night. So with that in mind, this tree is about the only tree it's gonna hold the both of us. But it's a willow tree and wheel trees getting early, and the bark is like loud, so we're going up as quiet as possible. I've got some super lightweight sticks that want to you know, kind of lift off the tree a little bit because of the bark being kind of just spongy and big and everything. So it's just a loud setup, but we're being as quite as possible. We get up in there, and the best thing I can do is still a very awkward position and I'm holding myself with my left leg the whole time too, so that I can see the right direction. And I want it's wanting to swing me around in that saddle and not give me the best opportunity, so I'm kind of hold myself awkwardly and to get this view back this way and get the shot and everything. Well, we have a dough come by. She gets weird because our wind is blowing at the trail that I'm gonna be shooting at just but it's gonna the deer's gonna give me a shot before he gets my wind. Right, Well, the doe gets her wind. Instead of continuing on, she goes back into the cover, and I was like, man, that might have messed the whole thing up, because there's not a whole lot of cover back in there. And it wasn't hardly ten minutes later probably, I'm looking around and I'm like, I think that's a rack right there. Pull my Bino's up and oh yeah, he's coming. He's like seventy yards away, coming through thick thick willows. And I tell Eric and he finally gets camera on him, and you know, I'm ready or whatever. He's coming just right down the pipe, and I think he might dip down in his water. Well he doesn't. He just kind of carries on. So I had drawn back when he was like at thirty and went behind a big willow. And so I'm following him, and I just like I'm. 00:48:56 Speaker 2: On a shoulder. 00:48:56 Speaker 3: I mean, he's a no doubt shooter for me in this place and on this stand this time, he's a nice, nice eight point and he comes walking down this trail. I'm just following him through my peep side and sight housing and everything, and he's getting kind of where it's like, man, he could get my wind at any point here, I need to kind of get this thing off right. Well, he's so close that I can't even see his full body in my side picture for whatever reason, I can just remember seeing it just his shoulder right, And so I feel like I'm in the pocket at least when I first kind of like close my left eye and dial in, I feel like I'm in the pocket, you know. And I'm following him, and he's going through these willows, and these willows are like more and thicker than I thought they would be probably, you know. And so he's kind of disappearing here and there just for split seconds, and I'm just tracking and tracking and tracking, and finally it gets the point where he's so he's like ten or twelve yards probably he's so close. I've shot I've shot two deer at fifteen yards on the walk and smoked them both, I mean, just watched them fall. So I feel confident in this, you know, putting a putting about a maybe a six inch lead on the spot that I want to hit, you know, And so I pulled the trigger and I am shocked. But the arrow hits front knuckle and doesn't go in at all, and I just got the sick feeling all of a sudden, just anxiety falling out and everything. I want to throw up, I want to pass out, like just I know it's a bad situation. We are more than likely not going to find this deer. I mean nearly one hundred percent. I felt like, but long story short, we didn't find him. We could never locate this buck and you know, finish him out. The blood was not good at all. I had like a one little section that we kind of got excited about, and that was about it. We were falling tracks pretty much, and so you know, it was a it was a big blow because it was day two of like a seven day hunt, and I felt kind of like the deer was going to live. But when you do stuff that you put on video, sometimes you have to kind of try to have a little different perspective. I guess, uh, and just you know, make people not hate you so bad at least. And I saw I decided to eat my tag not a fun thing. I became a bird a bird hunter at that point. 00:51:13 Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a tough one because we're up there for so long. You just we're so far from home. 00:51:18 Speaker 2: You just can't do anything. 00:51:20 Speaker 3: Yeah, And I had fun bird hunting and stuff and scouting with y'all and helping out and stuff. 00:51:23 Speaker 1: But it led to me, like directly lead to me, Well, I. 00:51:28 Speaker 3: Try hard to just like go, okay, well how would I do this and kill one and then give all my information a casey and so thank you? Sorry it went for you. It was it was not funn you know. The lesson I learned is that I probably in that situation with the Willows, I think if I'd have had a clear shot, I'd have probably just shot him on the walk. But I think with the Willows, I should have tried to stop him, and I think that I was afraid to stop him. I know I was because I thought the grunt would spook him. And I've done that before. Actually, we're staring at a place right now out the window that I spooked a buck with a grunt. So what I should have done. This is an idea that Case gave me, is this, give them the old sniff niffe that you it'll lock a deer up. 00:52:09 Speaker 1: That sound it makes a round dose or whatever. 00:52:12 Speaker 2: Yeah, just a sniff. 00:52:14 Speaker 3: It's a frequency I think that has It's similar to like a leaf or a stick popping or something like that. It's a higher frequency, sits in that same range. I think that there's something to it. But I've tried it because I've had stuffy noses over the years. You know, I've tried it. It works, It will make it. It will make a dough pull her head up from a feeder every time. 00:52:32 Speaker 2: You know. It's pretty it's pretty. 00:52:33 Speaker 3: Crazy, and they perceive it at a very low level, so it's not so much like a big sound that all of a sudden just hits them in the side of the head and they decide to take off, you know. 00:52:42 Speaker 2: So that's my that's my solution. 00:52:45 Speaker 1: That sounds like it worked me. Let me give you my last one, because I can see yours over here is a good learning point, so I want to know this is not I feel like I'm I just don't learn very well. So in twenty twenty two, I was hunting some Texas public and the deer whereabouts. That's a good question, Tyler, Really just that question over yonder. The deer in that area were actually really responsive to calling, which was really cool. It was like a late October, like they're getting all their stuff worked out. Between the bucks, you know. Some rattling and grunting worked really well. And I've been hunting this place quite a bit and had a spot that I felt like was like a really good travel corridor, had some bedding to the south and some food to the north. And sure enough I was rattling that morning, rattling a tiny buck and then like on the third sequence, rattling a really nice buck from a direction I didn't expect him to come. It was like a little bit he's coming from the north, but he was like northeast, and expected deer to come from the west northwest, so out of position off the bat right Greg and I are both in the tree. So Greg is like direct to my north and my plan is to shoot deer as they come by us. Right, Well, we rattle in this deer and he's coming to the base of the tree because deer are way better at this than we are, like they know where that sound came from. Well, this deer ends up getting too close, so close that I can't shoot him. He's like at fourteen yards through Greg and I cannot see the deer. I'm all out of position. My my tether is, you know, coming down to the bridge right here. I have my bow on this side, I have a tree tether and a Greg and a deer's on the other side of us. So no shot. And I'm like crying right because dude, I haven't shot anything besides a meat buck one Texas public land you know, like I really want to shoot a public land buck really really bad in Texas, and uh, this is like my opportunity rattling a really nice you know, this doesn't happen often, but like this deer was like not questionable on width, like it's for sure wide enough. Yeah, you know, like oh awesome, it's good feeling. 00:54:53 Speaker 3: I'm so glad he's behind is killing on stone dead and being like I don't. 00:54:57 Speaker 1: Know, yeah, And that's why we don't shoot a lot of them, right, because you just never know because they're just tiny here. But anyways, finally the deer gets weird and kind of like half spooks and goes out and I grunt stop him, and I get over my bridge and I'm doing the whole hangout like a monkey from the tree like this, and he's at thirty two yards or something like that. I can't remember. I didn't range him, but I had ranged the area, so I had a really good idea of how far he was. And he's quartern away. I mean, it was perfect. He was on Ni Gray had him on film like things were good. I was like, this thing's dead to right. So I was like in the moment thinking about the Mexican food, you know what I mean, Like it's like done, squeeze the trigger right over his back. He's gone. What on earth happened? I still to this day don't know what happened. But all I can figure is that I was contorted in a way that I might not have checked my bubble. I usually checked my bubble, just like instinct. So I don't know if I did or not, you know, like I don't remember, but all I can figure is that I was just out of position and through the whole thing, I was out a position, out of position in the hunt for that deer, and out of position on the shot. So now I think that I'm going to it's hard to like change that, but I'm going to be more aware of being out a position. And I guess you might even say forcing shots right, like, they don't all have to die. I want them too, bad, bad, bad bad, And that's like the killer thing that I believe I have, Right, It's just how you are. If you're that kind of person, you're just gonna do what it takes, right. But I do think that, like I'm going to do my best to give a more conscious effort into making sure that everything is right for the shot. 00:56:50 Speaker 2: Yeah. 00:56:51 Speaker 3: Well, so this last story that I have is in the same way something that I focused on this year and what you're saying with trying to you know what you in your case, you missed the deer clean, but if you don't, it makes for like a not fun twenty four hours a lot of times, you know what I mean? And that's what happened in South Dakota. We just worked hard to try to find that deer just couldn't now in this in this situation. It made for a not fun several hours. But you'll you'll you'll get the idea here in a second. So same year, this past year, this footage just we decided that at least for right now, that we would withhold this. 00:57:35 Speaker 1: It's incomplete story. 00:57:37 Speaker 3: It's an incomplete story essentially, so I'm gonna try to complete it this year. 00:57:40 Speaker 2: I think there's a chance, man. 00:57:43 Speaker 3: So essentially, I go way deep into this place one morning with my good buddy Michael Mustache Michael, and he's he's running the camera for me, and we made some good moves, and we also made a couple moves that just weren't great, Like I left a quiver on the ground in a spot, and I can't even remember how the whole thing went. Now, I've told this story for in the podcast, but essentially it was a rough fest going on in the middle of nowhere, out in the grass, and we worked around this ridge finger and I'm coming down the side of it because I think these deer are gonna work downhill a little bit and so I'm coming down the side of it, and all of a sudden, I just like I got this two dimensional decoy and I just see a spike all of a sudden, and I just like dropped the ground and put the two dimensional decoy up, and like he was super alert but never ran off right. There's too much going on with this spike, you know. And I'm like, dad, guming, you know, I got caught bad. And you know, Michael's right behind me. He starts videoing, and all of a sudden, like couple like maybe two minutes later or maybe not even that long, a doe runs out from behind this like you know, finger this ridge right here that we're sitting aside, right in front of the spike, and the spike kind of busts out too, and I'm like, oh no, And so Michael's filming it, dude, all of a sudden, toad Daddy walks out, or not walks out, but kind of jogs out behind that dough, And so I put. 00:59:10 Speaker 1: The decoy straight down. He wasn't looking at me, He's looking at this dough. 00:59:12 Speaker 3: He's perpendicular, you know, basically broadside to me at the time, and I get kind of squared over real quick, and I grabbed my arrange finder and you know, I like put it up. 00:59:22 Speaker 2: I'm like you on him. 00:59:23 Speaker 3: He's like yeah, I arrange him and it says forty seven or did it say forty eight? 00:59:28 Speaker 2: Do you remember? I don't remember. 00:59:29 Speaker 3: It was forty seven or forty eight. There's a long forties shot. And I was like, oh, I got this all day. I got a forty yard pen. I'm gonna hold just a touch high. 00:59:39 Speaker 2: And so I go. 00:59:42 Speaker 3: Get ready to full draw, and when he looks at me, and so I go just a quiet It was quiet down in there, and I saw that a quiet snort wheeze as I drew back, and he didn't really do anything. When I drew back and I took my time, I legit said, you know, like, hey, let's not force this. I don't want to make a bad shot out here in them, you know, literally a mile and a half back into this stuff. I don't want to do it. So I don't want to be chasing this deer. Well I ended up chasing him, but uh, it wasn't because I didn't take an extra second. And really the pen was locked and I shoot and it is looking good. Y'all, it's going, and it was gone, and it ends up, of course, not quite making it too him. It goes right under his brisket and just barely clips the back of his tricep essentially, I guess, you know, just barely clips it and he just mule kicks. Beautiful footage is incredible. It's a he's He would have been the second biggest deer I shot this year. No, probably third, but I don't know. He was pretty big if he'd if he I mean, he was comparable to the Nebraska buck that I shot, but probably a little heavier. And his G three's were maybe a little bigger too, but he didn't have the ninth point. The footage just throw up good. Oh it's so good. It's like, you don't know how bad. I'd love for y'all to see this footage, but we just haven't completed the story yet. Hopefully we're going to. I'm gonna go back in there after him again this year, hopefully. But anyway, so I hit him and it was just low and I really felt great about it. I was really kind of shocked and also had the same like throw up feeling that you know I had in South Dakota. Well, so anyway, I tried to get back on him and we ended up searching for him for a couple hours and search every cane I can get to. We walked probably several miles. I think we walked over four miles that morning, which is you know, quite a lot, and especially at that time of the season, is like mid November. I was probably you know, starting to put weight back on, and anyway, never never could find it, ever jump him out of a canyon or anything, and it just was not you know, it was It was a sad day for me, you know. But I guess the lesson that I really learned was when I got back home that week and we went down to our local bow shop and I don't know what I was doing exactly, but maybe I was gonna just shoot through paper and make sure it was good or whatever. Well my friend Brett comes up to me and he goes, man, your. 01:02:17 Speaker 2: Bow is like way out. 01:02:19 Speaker 3: And I was like really, he goes, yeah, he goes. I don't know what he said how much it was out, but he told me it was. It was pulling sixty seven pounds. It was pulling seventy one. The last time I left the bow shop. So it's pulling four pounds less less, And almost did the Yankee thing. 01:02:38 Speaker 2: Acrossed. 01:02:40 Speaker 3: No, but there's people mad at me right now, so I shouldn't said that. 01:02:43 Speaker 2: I'm sorry. 01:02:44 Speaker 3: Anyway, I was pulling four pounds less, and I just thought, man, that's the difference. I mean, if y'all could see the footage, it's so close to the brisket, it's not even funny. And I mean if I was probably two and a half maybe three inches up, sure that deer's dying insight, you know what I mean. Yeah, And I'm just thinking about it, and I'm like, man, I don't have a whole lot of time in the season, with as much as we travel, but I just need to It's like part of the deal, Like I need to make sure that my bow before I go, after I come back is shooting like it like it is like like I need it to, you know, for for my sake, but also for the deer's sake, you know, just to make sure I'm making great shots on deer that you know I've practiced for. 01:03:28 Speaker 1: Yeah. It's a good point, man, And I think that we can take some measures to make it happen. And I think maybe we just need to be a little more intentional with some things, and that's just kind of how this goes. We got to learn every year. Like if you're not learning, you're dying, you know, like you just you are not making any ground up. So appreciate y'all sticking with us to is hopefully you can learn from our mistakes and you're gonna make your own, but maybe they'll at least be different than this and you'll get a lot better. Right. We will make sure and include all of these hunts in the description through some MA links. You can go look at this stuff on YouTube, see how dumb we are, and then maybe be able to do better than us. But we appreciate you all. We appreciate your support through the years, through all of our dumb mistakes. And remember this is your element, live in it.