00:00:02 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, your home for deer hunting news, stories and strategies, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Kenyan, and this is episode number two and ninety. In today, myself, Spencer new Heart, and Tony Peterson divulge some of our greatest deer hunting failures and then explore what we learned from them. All right, welcome to another episode of the Wired to Hunt Podcast, brought to you by Onyx. I am in Montana at the Meat Eater headquarters to my right, Spencer new Heart to my left, and a roundabout way, it's Tony Peterson. We just did a whole half day of recording some videos which will be coming out on the Meat either YouTube channel at some point here soon. UM. I'm not sure when that will be in comparison when this podcast comes out, so I'll keep it vague, but a pretty cool breakdown of some different hunting ideas throughout the year that three of us put together that I'm excited for y'all to check out. When that does come out, I will definitely be letting you know exactly where to find it when it's out there. But it got us thinking about a number of things because we were sitting around this morning talking about hunting certain properties. How would you hunt this one, how do you hunt this one? What did you hear? And it got me thinking about a specific hunt that I was on not too long ago that it just seemed like a sure thing, Like I felt like I had hunted some areas similar to the state. I had some experience. I had time in the spring to go to this place out at shed hunting some stuff. I had some good intel. I thought it was slam dunk, and I was so confident that I paired two different states together. I was like, on a killbuck in this state and then go over the border killbuck in the other state, and it will be easy. I know what I'm doing. And then we completely got our asses handed to us and we didn't see a single shooter until we did make a move far to a totally different area. But um, big time failure. And this brought to mind for all three of us the fact that we've all had a whole lot of failures. Well, big time failure. It seems a little aggressive because you kill the book like three days before this big time failure true. So so yeah, I succeeded in Montana, I failed in North Dakota, so that is true. And and and we couldn't you could even argue this is a good interesting question that was going to sidetrack me a little bit. But I had someone, a friend of mine, posted on Instagram the other day and in one of people's opinions, if you fail to fill a tag on hunt, and you go on a hunt and you don't feel at tag, is that a failure? And he argued strongly that it is, and that if you say, yeah, and he said, if you and I'm paraphrasing, and I'm you know, I'm not gonna get quite a sentiment, right, but the basics sentiment it was that, you know, if if you're not actively trying, if you're not gonna do everything you possibly can, if you're not already doing putting it all out there to fill that tag, then you're just making excuses for yourself. And if you don't call that a failure, then it's like giving participation trophies to kids these days. What's his point? So you should be be real with yourself. What are you going out there to do? You're going out there to kill an animal, to kill a deer. If you don't do it, if you pretend that's not a failure, you're kidding yourself. So what is your thought, Tony? If you don't feel a tag, is that failure? I think he's bananas. Um if you you know, you could go out there and make every possible good decision and work your butt off and do everything right and not kill. Yeah, so you know it's it's hunting. So I don't follow that line of reasoning. I think I think sort of parallel to what he's saying is try hard. You know, if this is your thing and you really like it, don't don't don't allow yourself to make a bunch of excuses to not try and and get after it. But you know, I mean the measure of success for failure being the punch tag is. But you know, there's there's so much to it, and you know I feel this. You know, I'm sitting here with Spencer over here, and he's just a young pup. You know, we've talked about this before. I still got a little eggshell on his back. He's just a young guy. But you've got you've got a youngster. You're watching out for and trying to teach how to touch fish and stuff. And you know, I'm sitting here with two seven year olds and I look at it and I'm like, the experience matters, you know. I mean, it's it's awesome to go kill big Bucks, towsome, go kill little Bucks, does whatever. But you know, a year down the road, that just it's it's not as important. It's fun to remember about it, but it's like you remember the experiences overall, and like to hunt you're talking about out there in North Dakota. I mean, that's that's one of the coolest places you could go to hunt. Like you you can go out there and not kill a deer and have an awesome experience, and I don't know how you'd label that a failure. Yeah, I know what you're saying, and I feel the same way. Um, But I also feel like it took me time to get to that point. Like for a lot of years, I felt like I was going through like a proving it to myself or proving to other people phase, like somehow had to establish credibility, even like in my own head, like yeah, I can do this, And I really took it hard when hunts didn't go well, really stressed. Really, you know, I think it's only the last couple of years that I lost a pretty good degree of that stress. Like the year, not last year, but the year before. I didn't kill a single buck that year because I was after Holy Field like crazy and spent so much time, and I felt pretty dunn okay about it. For the first time. I was like, I don't care. I didn't kill any other bucks, but that doesn't matter. But if that had happened the year before or the year before that, I would have been stressing. What are people can say I'm not able to walk the walk that I talked. I was like, I think it was a confidence issues and stuff. But at some point in everyone's journey you have to a you build confidence and then also I think we all, for many of us, learn not to care about what other people think too, and just start doing things for yourself and not for others um because nobody really cares what you shoe. They don't well, and if we're being honest about this stuff, you know, if you if you're a litmus test for you know, a success or failure on this hunt is whether you kill something. We fail as bow hunters, especially, we fail almost every single time we hunt. I mean it's like, you know, we probably should figure it out at some point, but it's like, what one percent of the time, you kill something two percent of the time, So when you're failing nine percent, they can't look at it that way. That's crazy. Yeah. I was telling Toni before this recording. We're talking about haunting h Montana this year and stuff, and I was tell him about elk hunning. I'd give myself a five percent chance to kill an elk with my bow this year because it's still foreign and I have no idea what I'm doing. Um, but I will certainly not consider the season of failure if I don't kill one, because I think in the context of what it is and my experience, UM, there's no way there's that's a failure if I don't get one. But if I'm like thinking about a rifle hunt in South Dakota on the property that I've hunted for all my life, if I had that tag and I didn't kill it, dear, I would consider that a failure because I feel like I've such an advantage. I know the ground so well, I have a weapon in my hand that can shoot three yards. I absolutely did something wrong or messed up. I failed to kill a buck. So in that context, I would then say I failed because I feel like I have a huge advantage. So basically what you're saying is, if you put the training wheels back on your bike, you shouldn't tip over. Yes, exactly. And the reason I bring this whole topic up is because I know for a long time, um, you know, before well, even once I started Wired hunt right, growing up consumed a lot of hunting media. I remember getting up Saturday morning watched the hunting shows on T and T back in the day, Jackie Bushman and whatever else it was back then. Um. And then moving into the adulthood, watching the stuff that's been running over the last ten years. The time you see a whole lot of big deer hitting the ground, it just seems so easy. These guys seem so flawless, they seem so good. And then even talking to people on the podcast, there's a lot of people that come on the podcast we talked to it that are just at least seem like absolute killers, I mean, ice cold studs. This stuff is just easy for him. Every single year they get it done. And then I was finding myself like, holy crap, how come I can't do that? How can I keep screwing up like this? And I know I'm not the only one who ever feels that way. I know over the years, I've heard from many, many, many other people. There's a whole lot of folks out there that struggle that too, makes so many different mistakes. And I guess one thing. If there's anything that maybe has made wired Hunt a little bit successful, and I've said this before, but I've gotten this feedback, it's that I've always shared all my failures. And my friend Matt once said that I'm talking about me. He said, you've cornered the market on failure, like you've done. You've done the best job talking about failures and screw ups and stuff like that. And he and he found that refreshing. It was nice to see that. Um So, the point being, I thought, today we all I don't don't know whose idea it was, but it was a good idea. Whoever's idea it was that we could just talk all day at least all episode about some of our failures kind of layout or dirty launder on the table, talk about some of the biggest mistakes and screw ups we've made, and maybe you get some help from the other two guys here, maybe you talk through some ideas what could have been differently. Has it happened to you guys too. This will be like a little bit of group therapy session, all right, or to talk through our problems see if we can figure something out coming out of it. And and I'm betting there's gonna be some other people listening that say, oh yeah, there would be not in along, like, yes, that was me. Um, I'm betting that is going to be the case. So Tony, Um, start right off with that property we're talking about, sure, because there's this really cool area that I wouldn't hunt this year after my Montana hunt, and Um, I've been out there just like recreationally with my family in the past and liked it and had started hunting more western states and thought it was really cool. And you also had hunt in this general air in the past. We talked about that. So last year I finally had the time to be able to go out there and try hunting him. This is North Dakota, some river bottom stuff, and like I mentioned, showed up thinking it was going to be a little of a cake walk did not end up being that way, and so Dispenser's point, maybe it's not a failure, because you know, I still failed the tag earlier. I still had a great time. Like you mentioned, Tony, it is such a beautiful location that even though we totally struck out last year, I still want to go back this year and I want to try it again because it's even if the deer population isn't that great and if there aren't dear like you know you might want, which I think there are based on some of your experiences and other people as I talked to Um, even if that wasn't the case, it's still just like such a cool experience being there. I want to give it a shot. But what I want to do is is it kind of layout what we did on that hunt very like cliff note style, And then as much as you're willing to kind of break down what you think our mistakes might have been, sure, Um, so the way this area laid out, we'll keep it kind of high level. But there's this river in the bottom, and there's some high stuff on either side, and right there's a kind of a river valley, and then there's hills on the sides, and we came in thinking that these deer would be feeding in some kind of green grassy food source or something down the bottoms, and that we could sit on the hills and glass and see where these deer came out of the thick shrubby or cedar kind of would cover whatever you thought would be. Watch him come out and maybe cross the river. Maybe it's head out to some these fields and field and and and feed. We would observe that at a a time or two, and then we be able to move right in with our hanging hunt setups, get positioned between the bed and feed and ambush them pretty easily. Thought that would be the case, um from the get go. My buddy Further was out there for a few days before I was there, and he was telling me along the way, not seeing many deer at all, just a couple of dolls here and there. I saw one young buck this, and that there was some pressure from some other hunters hunting other species in the area. He was a little worried about um. And then you know, when he was going on hunting, it was like you see one dear night, like just was not the numbers we thought. I showed up five days later or whatever it was, spent one night up on a hill and one morning up on a hill, glassing a huge swath of country, and again I saw very little, saw handful of dos. One night at last, let I saw two decent ish bucks down in the river. Um. But decided to pull the plug after that because we drove around that whole day looking to try and find different assets, access points, looking at maps, and I'm thinking, we've got like day and a half of hunting left, so we've got two options. We either just go and sit somewhere and see what we can do, but have not seen anything that's very encouraging at all, or we totally you know, call an audible drive to a completely different part of the state where I had some intel that I thought we could find some deer in a different kind of way. So I end up pulling the plug on this went to the total other part of the state. Did find some deer, had some close calls. But looking back on it, you have experienced that same general area. You went back to that same general area later in the year and ended up seeing some good deer, had some quality opportunities and stuff. Um, what what did we do wrong? Because it seemed like so bleak our situation was compared to what you've seen. So I think what you did wrong is you went out there looking for the destination food source and expecting to key in on the travel to and from it. And you know, if you can find an alf alfa field or something out there, it's going to be covered in dear. It's gonna be private, but you know you could have public land deer moving to it if you don't find that. And I know some of the we were looking at those maps like you were. You're right on top of some of the stuff. I've hunted for ten years now, and I know from experienced glass and out there that a lot of times you're watching that river or you're watching what you think is like the destination for him, and you just need to spend a one e D and start looking back towards where you think the meal there might live and you'll find those white tails. And what you see when you find them is there on a just a browsing pattern. They're not really just trucking off to some spot. That's why you don't see the major movement across the rivers. If you hunt a place out there where you have a field. Those river crossings are money because that's where they're going, but there's places they don't have that, and so you end up just watching, you know, you end up getting getting some elevation and getting on the spotting scope and seeing those white tails in places they shouldn't be there in sage flats. And so if you and I can say that, it sounds like easy, but I've spent probably at least twenty five or thirty days in my life out there in that spot glassing. You know, I used to go out there for four days at a time before the season to glass, and so I know this just from getting in the same situation. But the deer were there, you just they just weren't. Probably you guys just probably looking a little bit in the wrong way. And you know, it's it's hard to remember unless you walk through that stuff a lot out there. But it's a hell of a lot taller than it looks, you know. So it's it's like any kind of long range glassing. When you look at the cover, you're like, oh, you know, and then you walk into it you go, whoa, this is freaking head high and totally different. Same deal out there and so a lot of times those deer they're they're way more visible later in the season when there's a lot less cover, and so in early season you might not even see them come out from the cedars wherever they're betting, and they might make it into that that brush along the river. They disappear, they're gone, and until they come out to drink or they come out to cross, you don't see them. And so when I went back out there, um, I mean, they're they're deer all over. I mean, it took me a while to kill one. I killed one, but it was it was the river crossing thing was done. I didn't have anything going on there. Everything I had was just browsing. Why do you think that was that they weren't crossing the river? I don't know. The river wasn't high. They were. I saw I saw some deer cross it, but it was not the consistent. I mean that that's been my go to things out there. You get on and watch those crossings, you find where the bucks are going to go down their hanging standard you you know, sit on the ground and kill one. I mean, it has been easy for me out there. It's not hasn't been lately, and it's just been a matter of, you know, keen into what those deer browsing on, and it's if there's something going on anybody. You know, one thing I've seen the versus you know, the opening week in labor day, weekend type of thing when you were out there versus middle October. You see the browse change. You see the like the rabbit brush and stuff out there's different colors and you watch them feed on different things. And so you know, for you, I don't know what was happening there other than they were just they had enough brows they weren't they weren't crossing the rivers. So analyze my process us. So so my process for this account, I want to zoom out and make it a little more generic. So for someone who isn't hunting this specific place, maybe they can still learn something about how to not make the same mistakes I made hunting a place for an out of state place for the first time. So my process was talked to a handful people who have been there. I looked at the maps a whole lot, tried to find what I thought would be good pockets to cover where I thought they would be dear betted, and then we made a spring trip there and shut hunted and scouted it and and and hit a couple of core places. There's a lot of other stuff. We didn't get to walk, but I got to scout a couple of patches at least while we're there, And then when we showed up. I just told you what I I did when we showed up, So analyze that process. Was there any process mistakes or tweaks would have made that aren't necessarily specific, just as a little piece, but um, the only thing I would say is just you know, you always have to be careful about falling in love with the idea of you know, like you have this idea this is what they're gonna do, and you you push that dead program. And I'm to the point now with hunting and glassing. If if I give it an evening in the morning and it's not happening, I'm done. I'm moving on to something else. And that that's you know, that like I almost have to stick to that, otherwise I'll do the same thing. I'll be like, oh, this is gonna happen. And when you're sitting there and if you can see a mile up river and down river and it's not happening there. You gotta figure something else. So sometimes out there, you know, you pick your glassing point of going on X or whatever, and you'll watch you don't see them. Sometimes it's just a matter of hiking up that ridge, getting on a different knob and just looking a little bit different. And I really it's it's really easy to forget about doing that in the morning, and it's so important out there. You know you'll see them. You'll see when it starts getting light out there already a lot closer to where they're gonna batt a lot of times, and you know it's different than the evening how that progresses, and it it might not put you on a morning pattern, but it'll it'll it'll give you a better idea what they're going to do in the evening. And so much, at least for me on these odd state hunts, especially states where you can see a little bit, getting those visuals. If nothing else, just the confidence boost that you're in the right general area. I mean, that is huge, just to know we're in the in the ballpark, then all right, and then we can wheel around and figure things out. But I want to know him in the ballpark. It's really hard to get serious if you're still clueless. If you're even in the game, that helps it ton well, and that at such a good point. And like when I went back out there, I got on some deer. It took me, I don't know, probably three days. Had a perfect setup. They were coming in three bucks, it was it was gonna happen. Somebody drove down the other side of the river blew everything out. So I had to reset, and I didn't have a lot to go on, so I just went back to my spotting scope and started over. And that's when you're in a hunt and you're on the road. It's really hard to go out like for an evening knowing you're not really gonna hunt. You know, you carry a boat in case you see when to crawl after or something. But it's just an exercise and futility mostly, but to reset and go, okay, that blew up. What's next? How do I figure this out? And it it takes a little time, you know sometimes, but if you're you know, if you're open to that, like if you're open to like, okay, either I had it wrong. It got blown up on me something like that. This thing has changed, and now I need a reset. You gotta reset, you gotta do it. Uh yeah, that's that definitely in my mind. It was looking back, it was I had these assumptions going in and we didn't adjust accordingly. Now I sort of made a good decision, and that the mistake, one of the mistakes was not trying to plan B in the same area and like getting in there and seeing stuff up close for changing our vantage point. We didn't do a good job of that. So that was one of the state mistakes. What I think was good though, was I realized this isn't working. What we're doing isn't working. Let's hit reset. I just made a really hard reset by driving an hour. Now, by doing that, it put us in a brand new area where we found dear really quick and came really close to shooting some Um So it worked out kind of, but it's in a very different fashion. Um But I do know now that maybe I could have made it happen still there and sure as heck, are going to try again. Well did that happens? I mean I did the same thing in Oklahoma last year where I put in a pile of research into this spot, drove down there, got my ask kick for three days. Me and my buddy were like, let's just let's just call it outible go somewhere completely different, Like and you know, maybe, like you said, like maybe you could have stayed figured something out. But I just sometimes if you get to the point where you lose that much confidence in a spot, it's good idea to see fresh ground. Yeah, I was just gonna say the confidence things. Sometimes it becomes like a self fulfilling prophecy to agree if you get so down on your head or if you're getting beaten up so much, you could change nothing else but just make me feel like there's gonna be a better chance because I'm in a new place and all of a sudden things start working out, and it's still it's not a complete failure because now you've seen this in person and going into you have a better idea of what to look for when you get there. This video series that we did earlier today, within that we took a property that one of the three of our was familiar with, and then we had the other two digitally scouted and it was really eye opening. You already know this, but like digitally scouting can only get yourself far and then the person who had been there on the ground and hunted these places had much more awareness of what it actually looks like in person and why maybe your assumption on this was wrong. So it wasn't a failure that you didn't kill one, because now you go into and uh, you know so much more than you did before. Tell you what, though, if I don't kill on in twenty nineteen, that's a failure. I'll be really pissed. And I'm planning on sinking a bunch of time into it this time, like how much time? Uh? Well, last year I tried to do attended trip between Montana and North Dakota. I think it was something like that, and I think I gave it like three and a half days. So this year, I'm gonna budget seven to ten days just for North Dakota. So I think I can do it. I like it. Yeah, I think so seven at ten days and h depending what your standards are, I think you can certainly do it. Yeah, I'm gonna I'll probably. I mean it'll be like a three year old is like my floor, Like I'd like to kill three year old. Um, But if I get out there and night number one and I'm like saying nice box, like nice older box. Then I'll jump my standards up because I know I could shoot like a nice four year old or something like that. I'd have a hard time jumping back down to like a spin lee three year old. If I knew there was a big daddy out there there are Yeah, he's out there. Well, I have these freaking sheds, and tell me there's a small we'll not swamp monster, but a big boy. So I don't know, I'm excited to get back that. One of the things I love about hunting so much and about like taking to the degree that we take is these challenges like this where you get thrown into a place Like why I love hunting new properties so much because I loved the figuring out process. I like that figuring out process more than the actual pull it trigger. So this is actually the really fun part of it is struggling and you learn a little bit here or they're they're going to learn a little bit there. And this year, if I get on some deer like that, it's gonna be cool even if I don't kill one. So so that, uh, that is something that I know we can all relate to a little bit. Do any of you guys have any other specific hunts like that you would say is like a failure or that you can point to some big mistake you made as far as like tactics or decisions on that front, anything on that line. Uh. The decision wise, I think it was like five years ago. It must have been six years ago. Um. I had an okay year hunting up to that point. But it was like November four in a buck perfectly read the script and came in and A shot him a ten yards and um, I was so sure A double lung him, and I saw the arrow he uh ran off. The blood looked great. It was you know, the bubbly pink blood. I was ignorant and sent out text messages like bb D got on and man never again until I'm like holding those antlers in my hand. Um. But I was super confident that I just crushed this buck. And I waited, you know, probably forty five minutes an hour, and I picked up the blood trail and followed it forever and was down to the point where it's just drops, and I ended up one longing that deer. I'm sure he died a mile later, miles later. But I just never found him, and it bugged me endlessly for the rest of the year. He got me really down. Um, and I don't know that like, um, waiting longer for the recovery would have been the answer, Like that would have resulted in me having, you know, this deer now on my wall or something. It was just the poor shot selection of a slightly quartering two deer that I don't think I'll ever take that shot again, or um, I'll just bring that shot more forward, because is it sucked? What happened that really really sucked? Walk us through the actual encounter, Like how did it work out this deer coming in? What were you doing? What led you being forced into that shot? Like we forced in that shot? Or was it the first shot available and you were like I gotta get it, Or what happened leading up to that point? Uh? For most of the encounter he was coming in described the buck to head one envisioned this probably like by five It would have been my best arm tree white tail at the time. Stoked to have him and he was coming in pretty much head on, and I had this encounter lasted probably three or four minutes of just watching him come in because it was on a field edge and then uh, he ended up weaving through some trees and all of a sudden he was at ten yards and that was the first shot I had, and I took the shot, and that ten yard shot was like in front of me, whereas had I let him come a little bit further too, he would have then been, you know, parallel with me. I could have had a more broadside shot ideally, So that that was another mistake I made. Um, But just that quartering two shots and the huge like off and down, I double along this thing. It's going to be dead a hundred yards away, and then that not happening really sucked. Uh. The shot placement, m hm, it was quartering to you dramatically just a little bit. You said, what was it? Just a little bit. It was such a rush too, and and I was, I don't know about cocky about it, but I was confident that I killed this year and it was only ten yards. Ten yards should be a dead deer or anybody. And so I think there was like a lapse in my uh attention to detail as well as far as where I might have hit this thing. But I felt like the the blood and the arrow confirmed that I double lung this year? Do you remember at the shot. I know that I've had a tendency um on like gimme shots that and this is a bigger issue that I will speak to and address. But on the gimme shots, especially like as soon as the pin hits the bowl, bamn, I'm firing, Like I like, I don't take the time on those gimme shots because it just seems so easy. And I know, like you should be taking the spot sink in your eye, like right in and then you know, pulling back on it. But did you feel like it was? It was so easy you couldn't mess up, so you just did it. And maybe it was an issue like that. Yeah, Um, there was. Also I didn't bother stopping the year because he was ten yards, and so I think there was there's a lesson to be learned there as well. Uh, it just seemed like too easy of a shot. I was coming off the year before my shot a buck at thirty five yards. He died within fifty yards. I double longed him. Um, So I was confident that a ten yard shot should be a dead deer and it should have been, and I just messed up. Where do you guys stand on the stop, don't stop, debate? What do you do? You typically stop dear spencer, typically stop him? And is there any situation where wouldn't other than that one? Maybe just how aware of me it is, or how on edge it is if it thinks there's something up or um. One time I stopped it to hear that I grunted at twice, and when he came in and I ended up stopping him before I shot, he knew then that something was up because he came into an area where, like, son of a bitch, I should be able to see this buck that just grunted at me. I made the mistake of like nat, doing that at him and stopping him, and then it was like he knew it was up. I shot him and killed him. He didn't go very far. But in that case he was on edge um. There was too much information available to him to know that there was not that buck there. And so that was a case where I stopped him I shouldn't have. But in most cases I prefer to stop it because because the argument against it, it's kind of you you're um sort of speaking to, which is if you stop them verbally with a sound, you put them on edge and you give it a better chance of a buck like jumping the string, so dropping down the arrow goes over his back, that kind of thing, Tony Man. I'm it's all situational, you know. If they're if they're cruising through and it's it's going real fast, you know, I'm gonna try to stop them, you know. Um, if I think they're gonna stop naturally, or if they're just walking in there close. A lot of times I don't, I just dump them, you know. And it's just it's like one of those things you just read in the moment, you know. And once in a while you get one of those deers that you murp at to try to get him a stop, and he turns around and runs out of your life, and I really wish that wouldn't happen. So it just it just depends. And I do think it does come with experience a little bit too, like knowing when you can get away with it when you can't. Um, Like you said, I'm you know, I definitely I feel like there's a chance that they'll stop themselves, and off time I would rather than do it naturally, for sure. But sometimes you don't have that snare but I've I've heard of some people, especially new hunters, were like, if you watch hunting TV at all, it seems like every single time someone shoots a deer, they got they first thought, got Maratt And so you got new hunters who have like a deer standing stock still in front of them or like really still. They were like they could stop at any point and then people and then shoot him. Um, you don't need to do that. It's like a taunt or something. I don't know what it is, or you know, I think some people on TV do it because like they want to pretty shot, like the picture they want. Sometimes when you know, you hear it on the TV show, it's not the hunter, it's the cameraman doing it, you know, so they have it in frame. Yeah. So I think that you, as a hunter need to remember that you don't need the pretty video shot. You don't do They don't have to murp him, don't murp him. I'm sure you guys have one recovered deer, but have you ever single lunged a deer before? I So, the only unrecovered deer I had was not a single lung the buck I killed him Montana, I nicked one lung and ever. But I don't have a single long buck that that I can think of, or any deer of any kind that I didn't recover Tony I have. Yeah, I mean, you know the thing about saying that is if you don't recover from, how do you really know? You know? But I I shot one one time in the in the Twin Cities. I got on this vegetable farm by my house, and these deer were just like on this little carrot field. It was like incredible. And as soon as I got permission and I saw what was going on, and this was like a guy's garden by the house. No, no, no, it's an organic vegetable farm. So it's a farm. But they have liked a whole field of carrots and never hunted carrots before. And I went out. I got permission, My buddy got his permission, and I went out and glassed it. It was the season was already in and I'm sitting there just glassing, and I just watched all of the like twelve bucks come running in and it's like they're plucking these carrots out of this looser, you know, and they're they're hold them up like bugs, Bunny. They chop a field, let it go. And I'm like, this is like a dream. It's it's like two minutes from my front door. And so I went in there. There was no good place to hang a stands. I just went and built a little groundbine under the cedar tree and had all these deer pour in. I had I'll never forget. I had three turkeys right behind me, all these deer in the field in a in a ambulance went by, and all the turkeys were goblin at the siren the all time, and they were like right over my shoulder. And these bucks started coming in. And the first good one, which was a really nice deer, got in there and a dough busted me as I drew and kind of put the whole thing on edge, and I shot him, just squaring the shoulder from the ground. But I was like, well, you know, it hit hard, and he went running off. I had a lighted knock and not my arrow went spiraling up in the air. I'll never forget it, and I looked for that dear. That was one of those ones. It's one of the reasons I don't hunt those places anymore, because you're like a hundred yards from people's backyards and it's you know that that farm in the neighboring farm where we got permission to look for him are pretty big. But it was just weird. I don't like being in that situation, but that's one deer where I'm like, I'm pretty positive I took out one long just the way watching it hit and watching how it transpired, and I never never got I've never saw him again. I don't know if he I don't. I'd like to think he survived, but who knows. You know, he probably didn't. The mistake or wheah, I shot him in the shoulder. That was dumb. I should have shot him behind the shoulder. Well, I mean my mistake was, in all honesty, was I rushed it because what happened is I had all these deer and all this stuff going on, and that dough busted me, and I just instead of just concentrating on the shot, I concentrated on Now, this whole situation is going to evaporate. She's gonna blow this up. And in my career, my hunting career, so many of the screw ups I've made shooting, you know, missing or hitting him poorly have been just because I didn't let it breathe. I just didn't let I didn't take my time, and you think about it, you know, it's like literally the difference between taking your time and not take in your time. It's three seconds for five seconds, but it's like just that freaking rush it. Man, you gotta get this, you gotta make it happen. And I try so hard in my life now to not fall into that, and sometimes I do just from you know, you get in the moment. It's crazy. But it's like young hunters, you see that so much. And that's like when I'm listening to Spencer talking about this book that he lost and saying, you know it's ten yards, how did I screw it up? And you know it might have been slightly quartering whatever. I always think about that because we always think we know exactly what happened, right, But if we don't find him, we don't know. And you just you know, if you if you take newbies out a lot, and it still happens to us. But if you take people out, you know, ask any guide out there, like what happens? So double lungo, I double lungo, I double they go out, it's gut shot it's hitting the brisket, it's hit all you know, like we we just fill in the blanks mentally, man, And it's a lot of times I don't I don't think we get it right. I mean, it's it's so easy to to to rush things. But then like you said, to also put pressure to make it happen right now, because we you know, especially if you're you're getting into a pretty serious but you're still early in that process. So you went out all spring and scouted, You went shed hunting, you hunted, You hiked miles and miles and miles and miles, picked up sheds and scouted and found betting hears. You went out there in the summer and you hung tree stands, and you hung trail cameras, and you sat out there in the evening and scout of bean fields. And you're random a couple of miles every day to make sure you were good enough, fit enough to be a hike in a couple of miles in the public land. You did all this stuff, you put in days and days and days and days and days and days and days and days and days and days of work, and it all comes down to the next ten seconds of my life. I will either cashing on that investment of time and energy in my life or I will not talk about a lot of pressure on a couple of seconds. It's really easy to say I gotta get now. I mean, I've fallen into that for sure. Early on it was like there's a little window I can maybe slip the shot in there. If I don't take this shot, never get get the shot again. And I was at that point, I gotta take the shot. I think a lot of time you learn a hard lesson if you do that, whether it be with a miss, whether it be with wounding a deer, and you realize how much worse the scenario is. I would much much much rather not get a shot at all than rush one and wound a deer and deal with what that means. But that's sometimes something that has to be experienced before you actually start to be able put into play. Dude, I think it. I think you have to go through it, and I think it's I think it's just there's a lot going on. But part of it's just pure ego, like we all go through. We want to possess that big buck, like you believe me, you want to show that picture off, and I think you go through the stage where like you're gonna screw up a lot, you're gonna fail a ton, and then you kind of just you get to the point where you learn, like that deer, it's awesome, it doesn't mean that much to your life, like and really, like you said earlier, it really doesn't mean that much to anybody else, and you kind of go, it's still it's still an amazing thing, and it's a driver, but you understand that this isn't the end all like this is, you know, And and if you don't get this one, like you know, it might take you another year. But if you stick at this long enough and you work I don't enough, you're going to get another chance, you know. And the opposite is the other side of the coin is the opposite, and that if you force a shot for your ego and you wound an animal or you hit it and it dies two weeks later, we're talking about the very serious nature of life, Like you are screwing with the life of an animal that could suffer, that could have a really horrible, horrible end to its existence. And that's something I don't think that you want to be. You don't want to be trifling with just to stroke your ego. It's bad ju ju man, It's bad, bad, all the way around. And it's not even like always ego related, just not having that much experience with a live animal in front of you, just not knowing how that encounter is going to unfold. And I think about my like first years of archery, turkey hunting a lot, and all the times I messed up not knowing when to draw on a turkey and just screwing up a perfect encounter that had I let it go, you know, ten more seconds, I would have had a turkey with his fan up, with his back to me and a perfect shot. But it just takes some actual encounters. It's it's so the thing that's such so much more easier said than done. You just need to experience it and uh potentially have those screw ups to to figure out what you need to do this this exact scenario. And I don't know I should have thought about this when we first started talking about this. One of my biggest groups of all time, the biggest failures, and I've talked about it extensively in past years, but now where this podcast have been around so long, there might be a lot of people that hadn't heard that way back until the thirteen I think it was. But um, I did this very exact same thing with the biggest Buck, I would have had a shot in my life at that point. It's a great big buck. I called him job breaker, talked about him a lot, and you're one. Had some cool encounters, didn't get him. Year two, it was all about trying to kill this dear. Lots of excitement build up around it. I thought I found his bad I thought I knew where he was coming going from This whole thing worked out really cool, where like one morning I'm sitting in Mischian into my office and typing away, and then I had this feeling like I got just like I think I need to be in Ohio today, and I looked at the weather and I saw a front was coming in. I'm like, there's a front coming. It's October fift or something. I know where he's betted. I've been waiting for this one wind direction. I was like, if I had a south southwest wind and a cold front hit, even if it's in mid October, I bet you can kill him. And like it was like one of those weird gut things where like usually you don't really know, you know, usually don't really have such a clear calling to like this is something stupid. It was. It was a weird thing that I don't know if I can speak to another example like this, but I was like, I gotta go. I ran upstairs to my wife's office and say, hey, honey, I gotta go. I'm driving five hours down to Ohio. I think I killed job record at night, and so barreled down all the way. It was raining, cold, set up in this perfect one set up where I was gonna kill job breaker, and he didn't show up. I didn't see him. Woke up the next morning, start driving back to Michigan. I get stuck in traffic on the highway. On the way back to Michigan. I'm sitting in the car beating myself up about it. Think and think and thinking. You drove all the way down here for one night's hunt five hours five hours. Have I said that many times that you're teasing me about it. I genuinely miss that. Uh so there's a five hour drive literally just um, I'm stuck in traffic on the highway, and I convinced myself again to turn around. You gotta do it. You gotta try it one more time. Turn around, drive back down, get set up. This time he shows up. He comes walking off from this ditch, crosses right underneath me, like twenty some yards away or something. Kind of a situation where was a gimme shot, except for the rushing part. Came that I had seen him step out of the ditch and there was about a ten remember than that twenty some yard wide little opening that he was walking across, and I did two things. I number one, to get into the position to get a shot that I thought I needed, I grabbed my bone. I had to do a full three spin to be able to get away, you know, around this and shoot around the backside of the tree. And then number two, I believed I needed to film it, so I took the extra three seconds to turn on the camera, spin the camera, and get it on this deer. All the while I'm doing those two things, the deer is walking across the clearing. By the time I get those things, we have dogs in the office, so there's a little bunking going on. By the time I got those things done, he was at the very end of the clearing and there was some bushy trees that he was just starting to walk behind. And I don't I definitely didn't have like the thought like what, didn't have a conversation with myself at the moment, but for no doubt about it, in my head, I was like this now or never, you gotta shoot. Shoot, like this is your last possible chance. All this, all the two years of time, and then this whole like two days saga back and forth, back and forth, thinking this is gonna happen, then didn't happen, things gonna happen, Like there was so much put in this moment that I absolutely rushed that shot. I fiddled with too much stuff up in the first place, and then I rushed it when I finally did get the shot and I got shot him, and that buck I didn't recover until the next February. I don't know what happened. He might have died. I searched him for two days. Maybe he died and I didn't find him within that time period. Maybe he didn't die for a week, maybe he didn't die for two I don't know, but whatever it was, it was not good. Um and so that has just stuck with me forever. To the point now that I so after that happened, I was like, Okay, I rushed that shot, screw up. I gotta practice more or whatever. So I thought I practiced more, practice warn't get better. And then I had another time where I found rushing the shot again, and then I would tell myself, but you're fine on the target behind the house. You're fine, it's not that bad. You still kill these deer. You're doing fine. It's not a big deal. And then a couple more years one of that where I'm like trying to convince myself it's not an issue. Finally I realized, you know what, it's just not worth screwing wrong with something like this. Like so as as many people know now, I've been like tearing down my whole archery process and rebuilding to try to find a new way to better control those final moments, to be in control of the shot, to have an unanticipated release, so I'm not punching the trigger or rushing it. Trying to trying to find all these different things so that there's nothing I'm working at harder now than figuring out those last moments, because it's not it's so easy to grow up and it's not worth it anyway. There's there's nothing I don't think that probably demands more of our attention than being able to execute in those final moments. But so many people it's the last thing they think about. There's a lot of people who grab their bow two weeks before the season, shoot it a couple of times. I hit the balls, I'm good to go, and then off they go. I just do not think that is responsible with job Breaker. Do you think there was also, um like a failure when it came to the post recovery, as far as you may have pushed him too soon or anything like that, so kind of like you, I don't think so, I don't know, but I don't think we waited overnight. So I shot him in the evening right towards last light, came back the next day, like I don't know, eight am or something like that. So gave him a lot of time. And then I had two different dogs too, So first we went followed blood to the blood ran out after the blood rand. Now we started doing circles nothing. A buddy of mine came who had a who had a dog who was gonna come help. Anyways, he also happened to have a pretty well trained dog. He helped search for a day nothing and then actual listener, I've been sharing everything on Facebook at the time. Someone who was following along and said, hey, I'm not too far away. I do this professionally. Whatever, I could bring my dog the next day. So I spent two full days looking with dogs um and and I didn't rush it. So I think we we did everything we possibly could to try to find that deer. Now. The weird thing, though, is come back two months later or three month whatever it was when I was back there to go shed hunting, like the first day of February, first week of February, I don't know. We show up and that buck is right in a spot that we walked by like I can't say we walked within sight of it, but we walked like it couldn't have been more than twenty yards away. He was down like a ditch and there's a little tiny it was like the head of a ditch at the bottom's that's the oppos of the whatever, that's the bottom of the ditch sort of. And there was a spot telling a natural betting spot probably that a buck there. He was right there, so we couldn't he might have been in the whole time and somehow we just missed it. But with those dogs smelled it, I mean, the odds of that, the odds of two dogs missing it so slim. So I wonder, you know, this is just speculation on my part, but like I think about something like that, and I go, that was probably not just a direct gut punch situation. It was probably one of those deals where it maybe looked like that, but it was maybe real low or real high or on the lower side it was, so it was more like contestined. Well, I was gonna say, because I hit one. I had a big one on public land two years ago in South Dakota that hit low. I shot at him from a ground blind and my limb hit the ground blind. The whole world exploded, and I thought I missed him, went out there, found blood and ended a long story short, ended up finding eight hours later shooting him again. And I had hit him like that where it was like he caught some guts, but not just a center punch thing. And so I always wonder about that buck. If we hadn't caught up to him and got really lucky to find him and get another arrow in him. I don't think a twenty four hour a weight would have been enough for that dear, Like when we what he was capable of doing, what he was thinking about stuff, he had his faculties about him, you know, eight hours later. And so that buck that you shot like that, you know if you just if you naked enough to kill him over time, but it could be, you know, because with with two good ducks, that DearS, if he's gut shot in dead, you find him, I think you would, so he's you know that it almost makes it way worse because how long was he out there? Who knows suffering? You know? Yeah, I mean that will go down. Hopefully that will go to the worst, like the lowest point of my journeys Hunter. Hopefully it never gets worse than that, because I have for a long time felt pretty darn bad about that and have tried to learn from it and still working to address issues of that and try and get better every year. But that one sticks with you. Yeah, You've had some challenges with buck fever and stuff like that, the two right now, old brother, I don't know, I don't know if there's anybody in the world who's ever had it worse. I mean, you guys are sitting here talking about were you know before this, like talking about, oh, I've missed three deer. I'm like, I missed three deer in a day. Like I'm like, I I spent it quite a bit of my life. I wanted it so bad, you know, I just growing up, I just wanted to be a successful bow hunter so bad. And the first couple of years I hunted, I couldn't hardly buy a deer sighting. So when I started finally getting like a few deer around me, it was like such a big deal that had no chance of holding it together. And I'd go through these periods where like for a while, I might make a couple of good shots in a row, and then it flame out for like six shots, you know, and I just I had to look at it. And it finally came to a head with me in in Minnesota, probably in I don't know, two thousand and I don't know five or something. I guess maybe maybe a little earlier than that. But sitting on a tree stand on like Halloween, you know, just just the night, and sitting in a place where they cruise, and I had this is this is gonna make me sound dumb, and I'm not that I am. So we had gone to uh, we had gone to a concert at Fine Line Music Cafe in Minneapolis. I had the whole week off to hunt, and like the Sunday night we went to a concert or Saturday night or whatever. And I was freaking deaf concert Blue October. We're getting all these other details. So yeah, so it was a Blue October concert and there was like twenty five people there and it was so freaking loud. It was. It was a blast. But I remember my wife and I had we had at the time, she was not my wife yet, but we had a hotel room and I remember laying in the room at night like thinking, Okay, now I'm driving to southern Minnesota tomorrow. I can't hear anything, like nothing, And so I go down there to hunt, hunt for a couple of days and I'm sitting on stand and it was like the it was I've gone to one concert. I love music. I've gone to one concert since that entire time. Because that scared me so bad because I would sit there. I'll never forget I was sitting there in that stand and I'd hear I'd see the trees like the wind blown to the trees, and I couldn't hear it. It was so like from me. And I looked down and this fork he came walking by, couldn't hear him in the leaves and he betted down and I'm like, I can't hear that, dear, like eight yards away. So anyway, this is not what where I'm going with. That is not the failure. That was a failure, and that was dumb different kind of dumb um. And so you know, and if you want to talk about dumb um, I've like tried to preserve my hearing so much since then because it really wigged me out. And I had a buddy shoot at a gross like three years ago right by my ear and like doubled the ringing in my left ear. Maybe I lay at night. I'm still pissed at him about this. So anyway, total total sidebar. But that night, I'm sitting there and it's just the night, it's beautiful, and I but I can't hear. And I look up and here's this buck walking by and he's got you know, he's got just a wall of times, like just that typical twelve point type deer and he's like one fifties, you know, and to me at that time, that was like an unreal dear, like to seat to see it let alone. And I remember just watching my arrow sail over his back like never aimed, not just drew and you know, like road spray and prey, and I'm like, holy sh it, I screwed it up so bad. And so he just kind of trotted a little ways and then I'm in panic mode, like because he's like fifty yards away now, like, oh, I know something's going on. He stopped at scrape and I got another air on and I'm like, I'm like every deer sound you can make, snore, whees, athletes, fawns, rattles, whatever party sounds, I don't care I'm doing. I'm like, please come back into like range, please. And as I'm calling to this buck, I just like look over my shoulder and here comes this like a pointer right by me. So I called in this dear, and I just spun around and I shot, and that buck was so close. When I missed him, that arrow stuck in the ground and he dropped a turn and he snapped my arrow and ran off, and I was like, it's you want to talk about? Like a formative moment in your life. Like I was sitting there and I was like, how do I just destroy everything? Like I immediately just turned in the joke er. I'm like, I just want to watch the world burn. I freaking hate everything. And it was like it hit me so hard because it was two opportunities that, you know, they just don't come around. And it was like a ten minute. It was like, in ten minutes, I did that and I'm not And that wasn't like the first dear I had missed, you know, like, and I was like, I'm not going to be able to continue to bow hunt if I don't have confidence like that I can do this. And I had to. I had to take apart the whole thing and start over. To man, it was I felt like, I don't know, have you guys ever hunted with traditional gear, hunted with recurve bla blah blah. So I did a little experiment, you know, when I was in college. I'm like, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna try to kill one with a recurve. You know, a ton of practice. I ended up. I missed a few deer, I killed a decent buck, which was freaking awesome, killed a dough and I was like, you know, I think maybe this is maybe I can do this. You know. The next year, I just never I shot a lot. I just never got to the point where I was like, I totally feel okay carrying this in the woods. I started the season with it, but I knew, like I had this guilt like you're not you're not there, man, Like you shouldn't be out here with this, and so I stopped. I went, you know, I went back to a compound. But I realized I was like feeling that way even though I knew, like you said, I could sit there at the target hit it no problem, but when I went out of the woods, I'm like, I don't. I'm like, I'm scared to see that deer coming in because I'm gonna screw this up. And that's like, if you're there, if you're at that place, you're in a bad spot. Man. Yeah, that's that's the truth. And I I'm trying to think here. I mean the same thing you could if we want to stick to this topic. I have had somewhat similar issue, different but similar with gun hunting and that I shoot my bow at ton, I shoot my guns almost never, like if I'll shoot a couple of times, you know, just for fun with friends. But then I basically in my past with fire arms, I don't do very much fire running. So it's usually like you go out there the day before, the week before and shoot it once, shoot twice, whatever, make sure yeah I hit the bulls eyre hit close and all right, it's it's still on from last year. And then you go at it um and then all of a sudden you wonder why you missed something or things don't go well. So I mean, for example, I it was two thousand, it was the year before that job breaker shot, and now I was I was hunting a job breaker this year. But there was also this other buck I was hunting that was a year younger, a couple of years younger, um. And fast forward through. We saw a few times during both season. It's December now and another one of the situation was a big snowstorm, cold front coming through. I drove down for the front, hit it. It It was a blizzard like conditions. I had shot a muzzlotter, had shot my muzzlotter once, you know, the week before, just to make sure it's good. I get out there and now I found myself in a situation where I'm trying to climb up into the tree stand. It was so much ice on the steps. I couldn't get into the tree stand. So I go to another stand, same thing. Can't get any of my tree stand. So I just walked and find a tree stand next to a tree on the edge of the field blizzard like conditions. A doe in this book ends up walking out. I have not spent much time at all trying to range deer at long ranges with the without a range finder. I was trying to range this deer. It was so much snow and wet and crap. I couldn't get a range on him. He's out there. Obviously I believed he was within range. It looked like he was close enough, but I'm not. You know, I don't have a good rest. I don't know exactly as range. It's snowing, it's blizzarding. I shot the muzzler a couple of times that year, leaning up against the tree paw. The buck looks up, looks around, gets back down to feeding. It'm like, oh my god, I missed him. Freaking out. This has been the same kind of thing like the whole year been going by. I had all these different clothes, calls, nothing was coming together. This was early, this was in that still I haven't really stressed out about stuff phase. So I felt this pressure. I had to kill a good buck. I reload, takes all the time, jam all the powder and the sabbath, everything down there, get back up. He's still staying there, leaning the gun against the against the tree. The buck looks up, takes a couple of runs to bounce off, stops looking at me again. Oh my god, you gotta be kidding me. Start reloading, and then he finally goes off. But as he's going off, he's kind of slowly walking away. I'm halfway through loading my third shell. I feel something like dripping into my eyes. Wipe my hands. I scoped myself, blood coming down my face. I just missed the best buck. I had a chance that all your toys, and it's because I never practiced with my gun ever. I never practiced in shots lead against the tree. I never prepared for adverse conditions with the gun. I've never practiced shooting without ranging it, so I didn't know how far. I didn't even know what the max range was for the muzzler. I you know, I was like, it's over a hundred yards, but probably under two hundred, I'll hit him. But you know, I shouldn't have been going out there like that. It shouldn't have known that. All right, if it's going to be a hundred twenty five yards, you make that shot on the bowl. But if he's a hundred fifty, you better aim and inch high. And if he's a hundred seventy, you're at the extent of your range or whatever it might be. Like now I'm getting the point where I realized you can't skimp on things on the fire ELFs side too. And I I had grown up in a world where we hunted with firearms for a few days a year up north, and the longest shot you would ever have as fifty yards. And it was in that situation, at least in our family culture, you shot the night before. If it was still on, you go. And we we saw one deer every ten years, so you weren't really gonna get shot aways. So now it's a different scenario. And I feel like it just comes down to so many failures in the hunting woods come down to those final moments. But how much of our time throughout the years spent preparing for that. For a lot of us, there's a lot of time scouting, a lot of time hanging stands, a lot time checking trail cameras, showing your buddy pictures, a lot of time doing all that stuff. It's easy to sometimes skimp on the other pieces it is. I mean, I think, uh, you know, Spencer, is probably better to talk about this. You're probably probably the most accomplished gun hunter in this room, I would say, because I'm terrible at it and I'm you know, listening to you talk about your experiences. Mark, Like, I'm in the same boat, Like I can't. If I have deer within bow range when I'm gun hunting their toast, it's awesome. But if I'm hunting like normal rifle ranges or even like an easy rifle shot, it's like not a foregone conclusion. And for me, I found like I can miss a year with a rifle pretty easy if it's just standing there. But I'm pretty good at him when they're running. Like like, I don't I have a theory about this. I don't. And this is like only a few in my entire life. But and it actually the first the only time I've ever big game hunted out west where a rifle was with for antelope one time and I was like, I missed the antelope standing there broadside and smoked him running and you know, antalope pretty quick. I'm like that that had to be a fluke, right, But I've had that happened to me like three times with deer, and I've only killed a few with a rifle. And it's the same thing, Like I think I just go on autopilot. I mean, I hunt with shotguns a lot on flying birds, and I think I just like take over a little bit there and go, okay, this is this is like it's like totally unintentional. I don't think I'm honestly don't think I'm good at it. I think it just lets me like takes my head out of that little part of it, and I'm better at it than when I actually get to sit there and think about it. But it's all like a familiarity comfort thing, you know, like if you're not and like you said about the both thing, if you only take your bow out for two weeks before the season starts, you're gonna feel like I feel a little rifle like probably shouldn't even be there. You know, it's it's it's a rough thing. I mean, like you just said yourself up for failure, you are the best thing for me has been hanging out with these mediator guys more often. They have gun hunts so much that I've been invited on rifle hunts now and there's a lot of peer pressure to make sure I'm not the worst shot there. So I'm very proud that on our last hunt we did a Couzier hunt this last year, everybody missed except for me. Nice. Nice, Yeah, And you know that's that's stout company I was with and I was the only one with one shot kill. So I'm learning. I'm getting better at it um, but it takes work, it takes experience. Like I had to shoot a lot this year or this was last year, Like the last two years, I've shot more than I ever have and uh, and that's not going to be a blip on the radar and to try and make that the norm. Yeah, I feel really compy with my rifle. I've done a lot of rifle hunting. That was I started doing that before I was bow hunting, and I had like a stretcher. It was like seven straight deer that were one shot, one kill with my rifle, and I like felt unstoppable. Basically like, if there's something within two you on our fifty yards, it's dead. What does Spencer do when he feels unstoppable, I'll tell you what he does. So, like I felt really really competent as a marksman with my rifle, but I like quickly realized that I was much too dependent on my bipod. Like almost all the shots I was taking was sitting with off of bipod or prone off of a bipod, which in that scenario it is so easy to hit your target. But one year I was hunting from the ground and I had a big white tail like a hunt buck coming through some crp that was ground level with me, and I tried to get a shot off of my bipod, but I was just too low. I couldn't get my scope high enough to even like get this thing in my scope. So then I had to shoot standing up, free handing it. And I stand up and get ready to shoot, and I was so lobbly. There wasn't there wasn't buck fever or anything like that. Like I just had to execute, you know, hunter and fifty yards shot standing up and I could not do it. And do you feel like that should be an easy shot? I think so standing up free hand hundred yards, I I don't know, I just I just don't maybe not that. But I wasn't even close, Like I didn't even feel competent enough to consider pulling the trigger because I wasn't close, and I realized I was way way too dependent on my bipod. So you didn't shoot. I didn't shoot. Not Yeah, but if you could have seen my scope out in the field at this you had to realize, like for me to shoot, I feel like I would have had to have it in my scope. That's how wodly I think I was. But it was something that, uh, you know, I feel like I feel like Spencer might have like an aim issue, Like he's really worried about when he aims things because earlier today, earlier today might be right. We're filming stuff today. So Spencer was wearing a microphone, like one of the wireless mics, and he's gonna go to the bathrooms and talks start. Production teams say how do I take this thing off? You know, I gotta go to the bathroom. And they're like, well, you can just do this or whatever, but he's like, you know, it's just fine, We're not gonna listen or anything. So Spencer goes in the bathroom, comes back out, and the microphones like obliterated. It's in three different pieces. Were like, what what did you do in there? And he goes, well, you know, I have to get completely naked before pee, shoes off and everything. It looks like a Todd that went to the bathroom. There's just a trailer closed, lady. The last thing you see his Spencer's underwear hanging up the door knob. So yeah, I feel like that must be because you're worried about your aim. You don't want to get anything on your pants, right, must feed must be. I'm gonna let that linger. We're not gonna tell you whether that's true or not, but that that was eye opening for me. That like, yeah, just just like somebody with their bow. People preach this all the time, like practice from uncomfortable positions, like practice sitting down, practice sitting or standing up, practice drawing. You're like bent over and then you have to you know, straighten your back or whatever. And like I think archers who are serious are really good about doing that, but a lot of gun haunters aren't. Like after that, I mean out and I started practicing shooting off a fence post and practice you know, shooting off of leaning off of a tree and freehand and everything else, because, like I said, it was just too dependent on that bipod. It made it, uh like I just got lazy with doing everything else because I thought every shot would come easy off those two sticks where you have a really hard time messing up. Yeah, you know what that reminds me of kind of like what you're talking about. It's like if you're in a turkey plant, or if you're in just a hub stop lind and you have your decoys or your shot set up in front, and you know that turkey comes in behind you and you have to open the window and scoot around and shoot. You screw that up every time, every time because it's not like the simple easy thing that you but you should probably be sitting in yard practicing for that. You know. Well that's this gets a little woo woo. But I think it has helped me a lot. And we talked about this with somebody recently. It was John Dudley or I don't know who it was, but visualization like what I get into a tree every time I visualized actually imagine watching a deer come walking in front of me into each of the different places I think a shot might happen, and I imagination station watch this buck come walking across in that lane. I will practice drawing back, imagine imagining stopping him um and making sure I can actually draw back, making sure I can move into position, and think through everything I'll do. And I try to do that each time in like three or four different locations in the tree. You got a lot of time, usually sitting up in the tree. That's a great way to use it in a productive fashion. And I do think like your brain operates a lot more smoothly when it's gone through a scenario, and even if it's faked, even if you were just visualizing it. Like there's so many examples of this outside just hunting, but in like the sports world and all these different yields. This stuff really does help your mind perform under pressure in the real scenario if you've already walked it through in your head. So I can't recommend doing that enough. I do that all the time, all the time. When I'm gonna true stand aim at leaves that are you know, I think so too. I'm gonna vote not, I'm gonna vote. That's real world, good, solid advice. Good alright. I got the Tony Peterson stampoo approval, but not than that woose stamp um uh so not woo woo. But we're still talking about state of mind issues, Spencer. You're really aggressive with certain things like related to clothing and using the bathroom onnot. I just imagine I couldn't stop thinking about, like what this would be like. Does he like really like petitely drop everything. He's like an animal that was never supposed to have clothes on in the first place. And it's weird. Is this the same guy that thinks that Bobcats and Turkey's mate. He's got a lot of quirks, Tony. There are there are people who have told me that Bobcat Turkey think was the single best thing they've ever heard on a podcast ever. Spencer, he's a he's a he's a genius content. He brings some really special things to the table. But what I'm trying to get to here is that you told us that you have had issues as being not aggressive enough that's a failure of the past. Is that something worth speaking to? Yeah, I think if you are somebody who kind of like learns white tail hunting from magazines and watching TV and stuff like that, you see this pattern of these hunters have this property that has an area that you don't hunt until the rout and basically, you know, if you can haunt in September, you're hunting field edges, if you can haunt October, you're only haunting evenings and maybe little bit into Timber. But then like once it comes November, then you can haunt your better spots and uh like without having kind of a real world mentor for white tail hunting, I thought, Okay, that's what you do. That that's what you do. And so my first couple of years bow hunting, I had some success. I killed a few deer um doing just that, and I'm like, well, that's that's the answer, that's what it is. But then I struck out for like three years after that, and I learned that I was not being near aggressive enough. And it wasn't until like, um kind of removed myself from those sources of information that like it's this you know, very practiced, uh like amount of pressure that you should apply or whatever like that. That's still relevant. You had to be smart. But when you pick and choose a hunt. Um. But I've had a lot of like eye opening conversation with Tony, for example, about he is very aggressive when it comes to thing and I need to certainly do more of that. And like seven or eight years ago, I had to do way more of that because I wasn't even close to being aggressive, you know, I was doing just like the things that you should, like I said, field edgies and just the evenings and then maybe a morning and stuff like that. And like if you have a certain set of circumstances that works really well, right, I mean, it's all about like reading your situation right and finding that balancing act right, like what is necessitated here and what what can you get away with? What can't you get with? There are scenarios like you know, I mean we're talking about like the juries of locastokies or something that you get these huge farms control everything. You can keep the pressure below that methodology that they use from you can't argue it doesn't work for them, right, And and like it's just not relevant to everybody else. Ten or fifteen years ago, that was kind of the only information available, not not literally the only stuff, but that was so much of what you saw. But now there's a lot more guys that speak to you kind of that aggress same style of haunting. You hear about it with you know, the Haunting Beast and people like Tony and huying public guys. Um, Like, I'm not saying that is completely the answer either, but there's a balancing act. And I wasn't there for my first few years ago. That was certainly a problem. Was sorry, that's ah. I mean, that's just a symptom of getting your information from the wrong place. I mean, like you said, you didn't really have a choice, but you always have to like vet where this is the advice is coming from, you know. And I was like, I would use the example like if if Mrs Peterson got hit by a bus tomorrow and I got dating advice from Brad Pitt, it probably wouldn't be relevant to me, right, Like he probably had an easier life going after the ladies than I would, and so it wouldn't be It would be like, you know, when when somebody who lives on a thousand acres or four thousand acres in southern Iowa says, you know, hunter food plots leave these sanctuaries alone and move it like that plan is awesome for them. It's a good idea. And like Mark said, if you have that go ahead, you know, we know that that's the best way to do it. Most people don't have that. You know, if you're hunt in public land in Pennsylvania, that's like that is absolutely worthless advice to you, basically, And so it's like a matter of just and that's why these guys, like the Hunting public and stuff have got so popular. They're showing you like, here's here's your world, guys, here's what we're doing in your world, and you go, holy cow, you know it's it's amazing. And you know they're still doing stuff differently and you know, taking different tactics and stuff, but it just opens up the world to like more relevant advice to each of our situations, I think, And I think the key thing at least that I have taken is like my favorite thing about doing this podcast over all these years is getting to talk to so many different people who have all had a whole lot of success, and many of them do it in wildly different ways, Like there's so many different ways to do it. And I still believe that it's not worthless to get advice from the Lakowskis, even if you don't. He's pointing at me, by the way, the just just because he said that, and because at the same period, like I don't hunt um the same stuff that Dan Infall hunts. Maybe, but I'm still going to take something. I think you can take something from everybody as long as you pass it through a filter. I would say, take, consume it all, take it all, break it apart, like pick it apart. Hear what Marjorie has to say here, what Dan Infall has to say here, what Tony Peterson has to say here, what Spencer Newhart has to say and think critically about her? Why does this work for them? What is the situation that allows those things to lead to success? What does that mean for my situation? What could I take from Tony? What can I take from Spencer? What can I take from Joe Blow in Florida? I mean I think that I think that you can learn a little bit from everything, even if they come from different circumstances. Because if I only ever pay attention to guys did exactly the same way that exactly the same place as me. Your situation. I do think you're missing out as some interesting things. Um So it's just like you gotta have that filter. Yeah, And I think if the if the script was flipped and a decade go, my uh, like I wasn't only watching the Lakowskis and the Drewies and stuff like that, and it had been the super aggressive hunters like the hunting public or something that probably wouldn't have been that beneficial either, like only knowing that kind of guerrilla style hunting. So it's like, yeah, I was way way too passive to start off with, and once I realized that it needed to be more aggressive, that was certainly a turning point. And it was a failure to not be more aggressive for those first few years. And I'm right there with you too. I did the same thing. And I'm still like, definitely, I definitely air towards be careful. I don't I have a tendency to want to go careful first and ease my way into things. I've been trying to test more and more of the aggressive things, but I definitely have that same predisposition. But where for for either one of you, Like, what's your litmus test internally for knowing what's how far do you push it? Like, I don't know if you have if there's it's hard to say that without any specific example, But is there any example either one of you guys can speak to to help us understand, like how you judge how aggressive is aggressive enough versus not? Is their story or experience that would speak to that? I could say For me personally, it's almost always a matter my My aggressive strategy is almost always a matter of getting in on some fresh sign and setting up at the edge of where I think it's good. And so mine's like I do like a lot of one two things. So I want to observe, and so I forced myself to get in, but like cautiously get in to watch. And so I'm not you know, I'm not relying on trail cameras anything I want to see with my own eyes, and I'll be hunting. And once in a while you do kill when doing that, but usually that's like the half step, you know, like then you got to see what's going on and then move in and get aggressive. And if I see something I like, then I get really aggressive. But it's always kind of like a measured observation thing. Not always, but a lot of times, and then it's like, Okay, you're right or wrong, or you found it or you didn't. And then if you find it, you go yeah. Another big thing I'm always thinking about is like what do I have to lose? And that changes at different parts of the year, that that changes on different types of hunts. So if I'm like on a short seven day hunt and I'm three days in, what do I have to lose at this point, Well, you I got three more days. Worst case in there, I blow it off for the next three days, but I don't have that much time left. While if I'm hunting a small property in Michigan that I have the next three months I'm supposed to be hunting and I'm depending on this is maybe it's my best spot. Then if I have two and of months left, I get a lot to lose if I get super aggressive right now. So I'm constantly trying to think what do I have to lose and how high are the odds of success. It's this constant like scale, and I gotta sit there and have to try to analyze what's on the left side of scale, it's on the right side of scale, and sometimes of year or in some situations you're okay with it being off balance, sometimes not. But I think that does take a little bit of personal experien is to start to understand. Well, yeah, that's a good point. I mean, it's it's entirely tied to how much land you have to rome. You know, if you if you only have twenty acres and you're in the suburbs somewhere, and aggressive, you know, Tory gilly suit on approach is probably a bad idea. You know, if you live somewhere where you got a couple of thousand acres of public land or fifty thousand acres and go nuts man started rolling. And I would guess that, like your aggressive hunting style is really a product of kind of being a traveling d I Y guy. You have five days in this state, so you can't really afford to be passive. Um, it's it's partially that. I mean, that's where I learned it, you know. But I do that at home too, and I do it in Minnesota. I do in Wisconsin to to to some extent, maybe not quite as aggressively, but it's more it's more a matter of having two little girls at home and not you know, like I don't ever have a month, you know to sit on and wait for the right conditions. You know. It's it's almost always like a short duration thing for me. And so it's it's a matter you know, if I played too cautious. I don't have anything going on a lot of times. Yeah, and like when I lived in South Dakota, I would be fairly cautious and stuff. But if it got down to the wire and it was you know, the last three or four days of gun season, I had a gun tag that I was really excited about, I would get as aggressive as doing soft deer drives that we talked about on this video series. Um, you know, just like blowing deer out of sanctuaries that a lot of people would consider taboo. But in that situation, I felt like that's what it calls for. Yeah. I blew a lot of deer out of sanctuaries too, But there's nobody posted at the end of him Tony. When you end a hunt, like you when the when the traveling hunts. When you end a hunt and you didn't kill a buck eight times out of ten. If you could put your finger in something, why why didn't you kill a buck? Is there some typical thing you could speak to, like this is you to the issue? Or this is usually why? Uh, most of the time, it's riding a dead program too long. You know, if you only have four or five days and you know, you get locked into the research you did and you show up, and especially if there's like you know, some ground truth to it, where there's some sign there, it's that's the danger of It's like, you know, it's sometimes it's hard enough to get a plan A and to have a quality plan being can be really hard. So you talk yourself into that. But you know, like I should probably talk about like if we're talking a failure episode and a mistake episode. I think my biggest mistake I've made as a bow hunter so far, and that has led to probably my most consistent failures, is ever deciding I was going to hunt the big Woods in Wisconsin. I'm and I like, that sounds like a joke, but really I'm sitting here like just about in tears because I get my butt kicked over there all the time, and it's like it's it's like got in me like you're talking about this North Dakota stuff and I'm listening to you, and I'm like, man, that's so easy compared like, but it's different. It's just different. You know, it's like the antithesis of each other. It is in it, but it's just solid timber versus a state that you know, the state tree is the telephone pole. So it's so different. And you know, it's a matter of experience. But when I go, I've like, I've made up my mind to hunt these big wood bucks on public land. I'm mostly on public land. Once in a while I hunt in private. But it's like I will I will scout in the spring, I'll scout in the summer. All I'll put in more work there than any other state I've got, Minnesota, whatever, and I will think, Okay, this is the year. Like I've I've seen him in the hay fields next to the private you know, I found the rubs, I found the staging areas. Maybe I saw a big one, because I've seen a few big ones up there on public land. But I go hunt and it's like, you know, this guy comes by in four wheel or to go refresh his bait site, or you know, the wolves come through or something, and it's just or I just you know, I get busted by those crafty doughs up there. Like it's just it's the hardest thing that I do year to year for deer, and I just don't. I like, I almost can't get it right. Once in a while, I do, but I've never killed a big one up there, and it's just like it's like the place I go just to fail, Like I I just know and im and I'm talking, you know, I'll spend more time during the there than anywhere, and that my odds of killing anything are so much lower than everywhere else I could be. And I keep driving across that goddamn river and I keep going over there, hut, and I just it's just one of those things, like it's just a stubborn thing, and you know, my mistakes over there. Maybe that's what bothers me the most is I feel like I feel like I'm not I feel like I'm putting in the work and it's not happening. Like it's it's like when you're fifteen, you know, and you've been be hunting for three years and you're like, I'm sitting in the tree stands like I'm doing the same things everybody else is doing. Why is this not happening for You're like the dog chasing the car. Oh my god, I'm like a lot of efforts. I'm like a blind three legged dog chasing a car. Yeah, one of these days you're gonna cross the intersection. Gees, I mean my wife, My wife will Joe. Every year, I'll say, like usually by like about November fifteenth time, like, do not ever let me go back to Wisconsin. I'll go over there to duck hunt, grouse hunt, whatever. If I tell you I'm going to your hunt there to divorce me, leave me, I don't care, like, make make the stakes real. And every year I go back, Are you going back this year? I'm going back and I got a new theory and I'm I'm I've got this. There's this this area of managed force land and it's um, it's gotten pretty big now. I don't know if it's the same Timber company or not, but it's it's private land enrolled into the tax program, so it's public, you know, and they log it and so it's various. You know. You and I were talking Mark and I were talking about fire burns up in the boundary waters. And you know where we're at in Wisconsin, a lot of a lot of stuff is centered around the clear cuts, and this this timber company keeps cutting the clear cuts, and there's you know, there's old growth and new growth and five year old growth, and there's a lot of deer in there, and every once in a while, halilay eyes on just a pig in there, like just I mean, I saw one a couple of years ago. That was when when I first laid eyes on him. I'm like, that's at least one sixty and I'm talking legit, big box and I'm just I think, I'm just I'm gonna go way later this year. I'm gonna go right before the gun season. I'm gonna hunt the middle of November. I'm gonna not going over there in Halloween. I'm not doing any of that bs. I'm gonna go for that time like where that big mature buck might be cruising right before. You know, the wild card there is you can bait, and so I want to just go catch them cruising. So I'm not running a corn pile, but there's five million corn piles out there from gun hunters, and so it's like a it's like a wild card thing. But what I see is those bucks get real wise to those spots. Anybody can drive an a TV two and they seem to stay in those those you know, five years seven year old clear cuts. And so my plan, my new plan, after getting my butt kicked, is I'm focusing on that stuff at that specific time all day. Sits for like five or six days, and I'm just gonna roll the dice on a big one screwing up done. Interesting, I'm already I already can feel like it's gonna suck, Like I'm I'm already like I know that might sound like sort of convincing, but I have so little confidence it's gonna work. I could totally relate those just like the big woods in northern Michigan. I mean that's exactly I've grown up there, pounding my head against the wall, wondering why isn't this working? Wi isn't this working? So yeah, I've I've wondered the same same things and struggled the same things. I haven't put in, you know, not as much time as it sounds like you're putting in. Like I'm not devoting my best days of the rut to it. I'm there the handful of first days a gun season. Um, but but yeah, I've started. I did some last year, spent a little bit more time in our big woods stuff, and I did kind of like a scouting hunt into this public stuff that I've never gone this far back before. I tried to get way back into this swampy stuff that's like smacked down in the middle of two roads, like the farthest point from both of those roads have a big creek that runs through and I got damned by beavers a long time ago, and it's still kind of a big marshy area because of that. And so I headed in there and kind of scouting my way in, and it came across like there's not many deer in the are in general, so when you see sign, like any sign that's like a positive thing, you don't see stuff littered everywhere. So I see a rub, see another rub, and I realized that there's like a little bit of an island with some evergreens that I'm on here, and there's another rub run here in a scrape and a rub, And I found more concentrate buck sign this little patch than I've ever seen in my twenty five years that I can remember hunting and hiking around and there like like it looked to me like right away, all right, this is literally a bedroom. There's a buck bedroom way deep in here. And it was an island in the swamp not I wouldn't call a swamp, was a little piece of high ground what I wouldn't call it swampy enough to be swamp, but just off the edge of the swamp, so imagine like standing water. And then I'm back like forty yards from that it's slowly getting a little higher, little higher than like a little knoll almost of evergreens um and then make some just thick junk red in there, and it was just ripped to shreds, and I could see bucks, you can see rubs. Found that edge like a soft edge to the swamp edge to like where the hard timber began. And that's a spot a little I want to get in there this year and uh try to hunt that actually during the rut and see what's going on around there, back in that gnarly stuff. Because I've started trying to find like these soft edges, find either like what looks like a concentrate. I've never found concentrations like this, but I was hoping to find something like that and or just like these internal soft edges and try to hope that someone's gonna cruise along with something that they move in through there. And that's the best idea I can hop at this point. I'll be curious to hear how that plays out, because I've found a few. I've got one island in a in a swamp over and you know, you know, a real lowland over in Wisconsin that if I go out there, you know, grouse hunting or something late season when it's frozen and you can just walk out to it. It's like that you just walk into it and you're like, holy cow. But I've tried to like figure out how to bow hunt it, and it's just such an advantageous spot for that deer to bed. I think it's just one of those places that you know, a big, big guy lives there for a while, he dies off, wolves get him, whatever, and then another one moves in. I think it's just like that spot and I have yet to figure out how to capitalize on it. But it's like it's just they're like taunting me. So I'm curious to hear how that goes for you. My thought process, I'm going to try to go in there, like the first day, I can walk in like three hours before daylight or whatever it is, way before daylight get in there. So I'm not going to push him out and just be set up and said all day and just hope that maybe there happens to be a buck still there that comes either maybe he doesn't actually live right there, maybe that was just happened stance last year, but maybe I'm in a spot that I haven't been in the past that for some reason the buck really likes spend a bunch of time and then cruise through or it come. Maybe he is maybe comes back in beds there and you know, fribus bike. But knowing knowing this, it will be a big body, good eating exactly, so we'll see. But yeah, a lot of failure in those big wood situations is tough. I was going to try to do um and looks like it's gonna be pushed next year, but I'm gonna try to do a big woods Northeast hunt tracking them in the snow. That's an idea that I think it's really cool. So yeah, I was gonna do that this year pushed a year, but still on my schedule. I'm gonna try that and maybe that will be the way to do it all the time in Michigan. Maybe I'll start talking with a rifle, right, Yeah, so that could be a pretty cool way to do it. Um, We've really, I feel like, embarrassed ourselves, laid ourselves out there. Is is horrible failure ridden hunters. Maybe no one's gonna listen to this podcast any ever. Again, this might have been our greatest our greatest mistake of all was telling these things. Credibility going yeah, credibly vanished. Um. But before we wrap it, is there any other final thing that popped up in your guys minds that you want to um get out there or speak to UM. I think if I had a concluding thought, I would say to all the listeners, just understand that everybody you see out there doing this sucks at it most of the time. Like understand that that that's just reality. We everybody gets it wrong way more than they get it right. Yeah, you said one percent before, and that seemed generous for like how often a person is successful because a lot of overshot it. It seems maybe a little bit generous. I think if you're talking to general hobby, general hunting population, for you know, every day they hunt versus killing, it's probably way high. Well maybe I don't know. It tends on what they're trying to kill too, though. Yeah, if it's true, if you're trying to kill a mature buck, then yeah, buch a one percent A lot. I don't mean, I don't know if you looked at how many times, like how many five day hunts do you go on Tony that you kill buck? Mature buck on average or a week long hunt whatever. Mature buck maybe one to two a year, some good a really good year maybe three or four, and that's like a you're you're thumping your chest for a while because you're hitting at least like most years. Then for mature box, no, I probably hunt. It's not actually sorry, not days hunted, but trips tags filled. Oh I I feel a lot tags. But I have pretty low standards in a lot of places. Right, Yeah, there's a when you're talking to me, there's a big difference between talking mature bucks and talking just killing stuff. Um so yeah, I mean I kind of I figured it out one time with my hunting buddies, on our out of state trips a few years ago, and just overall for meal deer, antelope, and primarily white tails. Just my little group with guys, we were we were at and that was that was ranging from unbelievable awesome animals to little spiker scraps or does or something. So it was just like wide range. You know, if you're if you're talking three and a half and four and a half or better, you're talking real small percentage and then you you knock it down from very experienced guys like you guys too, most folks don't haunt that much much much, much lower percentage. I'm sure. So your point's well taken. Good, good Spencer, uh Tony. Earlier you brought up like buck fever, but I don't know if you addressed like where you were at now? And I know you've written an article for Meat Eater about this, like how to suppress buck fever? So what did you learn from that process? And like where are you at now with your buck fever status? I am? I am so much better, No, But like it's just it's once in a while, Like I was telling you when I was in Oklahoma last year, I had unbelievable, non typical come in on public land, came running in and chase the dough and I just flat out missed him, didn't just rushed it dumb, you know, And so I'm not immune to it. But if I'm sitting on my tree stand and you know, I see a buck walking in and it's just a normal, decent scenario, even if they come cruising in a lot of times, I mean what I do. Like Mark was talking about visualization, I started to think about deer's targets, like when I see him like and not like in a like a demeaning way or anything, like, I look at him and I go, I wouldn't miss you. You throw a Rhyan harder at Glendell out there, I'm not missing that sucker, you know, like you could do that if you look at them that way. And actually a lot of times the deer bigger than the targets, and you're like, you wouldn't miss that with a thousand arrows, but you can miss that when it's got a heartbeat. And so I started looking at him and I think, like, you know, you're sitting on that bean field in that buck walks like you wouldn't you would never miss a target there. So there's like some self talk to you actively in your head, like Tony, you got this, you never missed do that? Oh my god, I'm yeah, I sure do. I mean that's why I'm glad we're having therapy because I've had a lot, like I've had a lot of therapy in my life. So I'm like this is this is nice? Yeah? I literally in my head, I'm like good, I'm not like screw this up. I'm like, you know you can do this. Come on, buddy, Like, look at that that. If that wasn't target, I can see that. I'm too obvious. Um. Yeah, that's a that's a really good point though. So But to answer Spence's question here, like we're talking years and years and years and lots of hunting to get there, like to get over that, and I'm not. I'm not over it. I'm just so much better than I was. But like I was bad, you know. So I mean it's it took me. And you know the other thing about that, you know, solving that issue. You know, I interviewed Randy Olmer for that, and Randy's so freaking accomplished, you know, and his his thing was target practice somehow with something at steak. So shoot a competition, shoot against your buddies, you know, get get yourself in the headspace where like you want to win, you want to concentrate on that shot. And there was a lot more to it, but for me that was part of it. But also just watching more and more dear, doing more photography and scouting as much as I could in the summer, and just sitting back and glass in these bucks because I think that's the thing, like we don't we don't spend any time around them, you know, like that we think about them all time, and we do not like you don't spend like you don't walk out into the parking lot here and you know pedal hundred, they're not there, Like you don't see those list is Montana, Tony, I'm not. I'm not a sould on Montana as I used to be. After this trip, I've been running into some some rough people. Man. Um that's a different that's that's spotter for a different podcast. But I think just like seeing them kind of demystifying that and going, man, they're they're just they're out there doing their thing. They're not these crazy six cents, super smart things that we give them credit for. I don't believe that for a second. Like I think they're just surviving machine survivors. Yeah, so watch them, Spencer, any other thoughts or no. I like that way of thinking about it. But like some buck fever is fun too, Like those are the funniest moments I think of the entire year, that ten seconds or that minute leading up to the shot. Uh. And it can be like kind of healthy too. Sometimes it's like really focuses you in Now it's not healthy or fun if it's debilitating, you know. Um, but I don't feel like I'm there, But I enjoy that rush, you know, right before that happens. I just want the mega rush after the shot. I want to make sure, like the shaking and freaking out that part of it, the debilitating part you want to have after the release. People out there who claim that I'm not one of them, I get it at all points. So I knock on wood. Now. I have my issues and they're well documented. Like my issue has been rushing shots, Like like the pin gets on target and I'm shooting it and it's almost like a lout of my controls. It's my issues have been the past but knock on wood. The last five or so years, like haven't had that, like shaken, freaking out, like leaning up too, I have not had that. I had one well that was even different at one time where my legs went out of control, like it was the weirdest thing. I got stuffed as that mean, like I got stuck at full draw on a buck. So I drew back. The buck was one step in my shooting lane, and then he stopped and was staring at me up in the tree like it was on a spindles tree. And it was like the only thing I could do was like a hanging hunt, like two and more two hours before daylight hung this dam um, so the bucks right there drawback and they staring at me. And then I was doing like the whole self talk thing like all right, you got this, just hold on, hold on, he'll he'll put his head down and moved just wait, just wait, just wait, And then like it lasted too long. I'm like, I don't know if I can hold on hold And all of a sudden, like my legs just turned into like spaghetti in the way, just like and I swear to God so much so that I thought to myself he sees your legs, You're the box is gonna run away because he sees your legs moving so much. I literally was like, you need to get your legs under control. You need to You're gonna lose this buck because he sees you. And fortunately enough he took one more step and I was able to get a good shot. Your legs really disagreed though the legally you don't have this market. No, this isn't easy. It was internal conflict like anything I've ever experienced. Uh So, I think my final thought would just kind of echo a little bit what Tony said, which is just like the whole reason why I want to have this conversation, why I'm glad he got brought up this morning and kind of just our chats was the fact that it's just it's just a reality of it. Like hunting is full of these failures, these mistakes, these shortcomings. Every single one of us has these. Every whether you're a new hunter or the most experienced hunt in the world, you're gonna screw up more often than not. And that's okay. You should look at those opportunities opportunities, not as failures. But hey, okay, I just learned something that doesn't work very well. I just identified something I can improve on. That's an opportunity. So even though it sucks in the moment and it's it's common and easy and I do it. I'm really hard on myself when these things happen, but it's address it, Identify it, and then quickly figure out how can you address it? And I think that's the way to remove as much of the suck as possible is by making progress. Because nothing, at least in my opinion, not many other things feel as good as fixing a failure, as growing from that and then being to look back and say, I totally screwed this thing up last year, and look how much better I did this year. That, like personal growth, is one of the very most powerful things in life. I think North Dakota, it's all right and on that. Yeah. So with that, with that in mind, I've noticed that Spencer starting unbuttoned his shirt. He's gonna go to the bad thing. Okay, So that will do it. Thank you for listening. Hope you enjoyed this one as we regaled you with all sorts of screw ups we made over the years. Um My hope with it as I already said was that this maybe can help everyone out there realize that you are not alone when those mistakes and those roadblocks and those obstacles come along, we are all right there with you. You can get through it, you can learn from it, and you can grow. That is our goal. That's we're hoping comes from this podcast for each one of us, even personally, So keep that all in mind. Hopefully you're making some progress out there in the woods getting ready for the season, which is gonna be here in just a matter of weeks. I can't believe it. I'm excited. And until next time, stay Wired to Hunt.

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