The Countere Guide to Deer Hunting
I had less than six hours to find another buck. I had spent the past three days on land in western Illinois that I had leased from a unique character that I had befriended on a Facebook hunting forum. I had seen tons of huge bucks…all out of range or trotting too fast for me to put an arrow through their heart like the savage I am. The day smelled mostly good; this is an important part of any fall hunt. A bit earlier, I had passed up a younger 6-point buck (6 prongs on its antlers) that was in range, close, and seemingly had a death-wish. It seemed wrong to kill it at the time—for to take something out of the forest before its time feels wrong—but I regretted this act of mercy a few hours later.
It was right after I messaged a pic of me scowling at the world to someone, that all of the sudden a stunning buck, with a small frame no doubt, but 9 points total, stepped out into the open. It came to 30 yards and stopped right as I got my sight on its lungs and heart. I released the arrow. After staggering while bleeding like a stuck pig, the buck dropped not 10 yards from where I shot it.
The next hour of tagging, reporting, and dragging the deer back to gut it was a combination of sadness, adrenaline, and pure happiness. I had sacrificed life, blood to the land. I felt a great connection to myself, the animal, and nature, beyond anything I ever could get shopping for steaks in a grocery. In short, it was a transcendent experience.
You either now think I’m a cruel maniac or are yourself thinking: How do I do that? Most of us that want to hunt are born unlucky, because our uncle stopped hunting a while back and has some bitter story about why that is, or he didn’t hunt at all and you have nobody to teach you, or the info you currently have is confusing.
Good news: I am here to help you get your first deer kill.
Hunting License
The first thing you need is a hunting license. A hunting license in the United States is basically always a state affair (I say basically because if you want to hunt migratory birds, there is a federal stamp needed). So long as you are hunting within your state, it likely will not run you much over $50 for a license, additional permits that vary by state, and a deer tag, which gives you the so-called “right” to kill one deer and is a physical document that you’ll attach to its body.. If you are hunting as an out-of-state resident, prices will vary but usually stay within a few hundred dollars. The good news is there is not a single state in the US without a huntable population of deer. The catch is that you will have to take a hunter safety course.
I know what you are thinking: Oh no, I have to do a class? What is this going to cost me? I get it, but it really isn’t that big of a pain. My class was pretty chill, in the basement of a security company in a neighborhood in Chicago, taught by some veteran who spent most of the time telling everyone about Vietnam and serial killers; he pretty much made sure everyone passed their final test. Most of the people in the class were hipsters or immigrants, with a chipper suburban family thrown in the mix too. The class met three times over the course of a week, for a couple of hours, and was free (most classes are either free or done for a nominal fee). There are also online versions of the class available.
Unless you are an idiot, you probably won’t learn much from the class, since it mostly consists of being told that shooting every single deer in a forest is bad for deer populations, and that you shouldn’t shoot people, and that’s if your teacher stays on topic. If you intend on hunting with archery equipment—more on that in one second—you might have to take “bowhunter education,” either in lieu of, or in addition to, the general hunting education class. This requires you to show you can shoot a bow accurately although details vary by state.
Weaponry
Everyone wants to be the badass bow hunter walking through the jungle with a bow tipped with frog venom, and everyone also wants to be the sick sniper who knocks off deer from a mile away with his $10,500 dollar rifle. Unless you are willing to undergo lots of training or spend quite a bit of money, both are fantasies. This is deer hunting, not masturbating. You need to think practically.
A few things to consider about weapons: price and availability; whether or not you can learn to shoot them well; what will permit the most humane kill; and the season length and licenses for each weapon type. It requires real skill to be proficient with a bow, but bow season is longer than gun season or muzzleloader season, and the tags are almost always sold over-the-counter. As with everything in this guide, check your state regulations, consult online hunting forums, ask around at hunting stores, and read the regulations booklet in your state to figure out what is best for you.
This will be controversial, but if you are in a state where crossbows are considered archery equipment, and the archery season is long, I highly recommend starting out with a crossbow for three reasons: one, it is easier to learn how to shoot a crossbow than a regular bow, and you can consistently hit targets within 50 yards or less; two, crossbows hit harder than compound bows, usually flying over 350 feet per second, making a quick and humane kill more likely; three, having a long season to use a crossbow means you will be less stressed for time in plucking a few days out to go hunting. With a crossbow, you’ll get the experience of archery hunting—the rush of waiting for deer to get close —without having to commit to practicing every day for months as you would with a regular bow (although you will need to practice with your crossbow as well). Crossbows also look and feel badass.
Of course, standard compound bows are an old standard, and becoming marvelously advanced. Mine is adjustable from 30 to 70 pound draw (how much power you need to draw back the bow) and shoots over 300 feet per second. Compound bows require practice, but are great to add to one’s repertoire, so if you have the time, do take them up; you will have loads of opportunity in all 50 states, unlike crossbows, which can still be restricted to rifle seasons or even outright prohibited in a handful of western and northeastern states.
As for guns, a rifle generally should be over .243 caliber—as always, there are exceptions, and there are plenty of hunters who use specialty .223 loads that can kill deer. Depending on your state, you might be forced to use a slug gun due to a ban on using rifles for deer hunting. A slug gun, a shotgun that shoots a single devastating slug, can either be a run-of-the-mill smoothbore or a specialty shotgun with rifling, which are grooves in the barrel to improve accuracy and distance. They generally aren’t used past a hundred yards, unlike a rifle, which can shoot further. The upside is slugs leave a big hole in deer.
A note about buckshot: despite the name, it is not usually legal for gun deer hunting! There are also, as I mentioned before, muzzleloaders, which are old-timey guns that are loaded from the front with powder, although some of them have in recent years become quite high-tech. If you are interested in muzzleloader rifles, they require a set of unique skills and a whole lot of patience, and you will have to get used to loading them safely, but I will leave that for someone else.
Other Equipment
So, you have your weapon and license. There’s a few other things you need to pick up: camouflage clothing, a rangefinder (especially if bow or crossbow hunting), binoculars, and if you are hunting whitetails, a treestand or ground blind (explained later).
A rangefinder will let you know the distance you are shooting at a deer. Binoculars are good for seeing deer off in the distance, as well as killing time and trying to see if that annoying bird a hundred yards off is indeed the recently extinct ivory-billed woodpecker (hint, it isn’t, but when you’ve been sitting in 20-degree weather all day, delusions like these will keep you going). Camouflaged clothing is self-explanatory and do make a difference. Deer, after all, have eyes.
Don’t bother with “scent blocking” clothing, and instead just learn how wind works so deer won’t smell you. Make sure the wind is blowing in your face, and not blowing towards where you think deer will be coming from. Deer smell really well, but in my experience, they are less sensitive to human scent than they are made out to be. Regarding treestands and ground blinds, which will help conceal you, it is best to hold off until you know where you will be hunting, which brings us to our next problem…
Access: 99% of the battle
If you are lucky enough to have inherited a game-rich property in, say, Pike County , Illinois, or Buffalo County, Wisconsin, or anywhere else with deer, or you are a country boy or girl still living with your parents on your 50-acre farm, ignore this section. You are lucky, although I will hold off my insults for having wasted your life not hunting when you have such access. The rest of us have a real struggle before us: finding a place to hunt.
There was once a time, long ago, when you could dress in some nice clothing, drive out of your city, stop at farmhouses, and ask permission to hunt for free, offering maybe a bit of meat from your harvest. Then came an era when liability lawsuits scared the bejeezus out of landowners, and deer leasing became lucrative cash flow for farmers and landowners. A deer lease on 100 acres can go for several thousand dollars, especially if the land produces trophy bucks consistently. The era of door knocking for permission is a memory in most of the country. There are exceptions, and the boys over at the SeekOne YouTube have shot some incredible urban hunting videos on small exurban and suburban lots. However, generally speaking, if you want to hunt on private land, you should get used to paying up.
Luckily, in basically every state in America, from dense states like New Jersey to the wilds of Alaska, there is public hunting land. If you live out west, public lands are the biggest game in town. They are generally pretty accessible, with far lower hunter densities (the number of people hunting the same piece of land) than eastern public lands.
Some states are better than others. Wisconsin, despite recent attempts to sell off a lot of public land, is still rich with public hunting grounds accessible near every city, whereas my home state of Illinois has a lot of crowded, crummy public lands that you have to apply for in advance to hunt—and even then, the deer are often reduced by disease-culling state sharpshooters before and after hunting season. Public land hunting, in other words, is a question of where you live.
Yet it is also a question of time. If you want to hunt public land, there won’t be a landowner to tell you that “way back there they really like to feed, see them all the time.” You are going to have to scout these lands yourself to find deer and good hunting spots.
The possibility of a guided and fully outfitted hunt is also an option, and a cozy one at that. It’s expensive, but your guide will show you what to do, have stands set up or areas scouted, and provide furnishings and game cleaning. To find such hunts, a quick Google search for “fully outfitted hunts in [wherever you are hunting]” will suffice.
Be sure to look at reviews, and compare prices at different outfitters. Like all aspects of American capitalism, these experiences come in good and bad forms, and more importantly, scams do exist, so be careful. Booking with an outfitter with a good reputation can be a solid way to get your feet wet in hunting.
Urban Hunting: The Bad Boys of Deer Hunting
Urban hunting has recently become something of a trend. Since suburban landowners are not farmers and aren’t thinking of treating their deer on their quarter-acre woodlot as an additional source of money, it is possible to get access to small suburban woodlots behind homes to hunt. You will need to bring agreements to sign that you won’t hold them liable if you hurt yourself, and in many places, in order to hunt in suburban areas, you will need to demonstrate archery proficiency in front of the local police department.
You need to be damn sure you can hit a deer with the utmost accuracy. A deer that runs 100 yards after being shot might end up on a hostile neighbor’s property, who you will have to beg to be able to retrieve it. It may be the last refuge of the door-knocker, but there are distinct challenges to hunting in the suburbs, and one should be careful if they want to go down this route; it is not ideal for beginners.
How to Hunt
You’ve got your hunting license, bought your equipment, and found access to land. Now what?
Hunting deer is not terribly difficult. They are not a hard animal to find signs of and track, they tend to use the same trails over and over again, and they go to bed and eat and drink in fairly easy-to-predict areas. A piece of land with deer only has around 1-10% of the land actively being used by the critters. Your objective is to find that 1-10% as well as the trails deer use to move around
Set up a tree stand or ground blind, or just sit on a log out of the way. Establish your position on either the trail routes or the feeding areas; setting up on bedding is inadvisable, except at the very end of the season, since it can spook deer. Make sure the wind is hitting your face and not carrying your scent downwind.
Tree stands are essentially platforms put up in trees. Once, when explaining why I hunt to the guy next to me on a train ride, I explained it as being the only socially acceptable way a sperg like myself can continue to sit in trees in adulthood. Tree stands are based and cool. Blinds hide you from deer; they are less based, but people shoot a lot of deer with them. They range from some branches propped up in front of you to expensive boxes and pop-up tent-like tools.
Fancy game cameras are nice but totally unnecessary. Learn how to identify a deer track, how to identify a deer bed, how to identify potential food sources, and what a “buck rub” (where bucks scrape their horns on small trees) looks like, and you’ll be fine. A great resource for this stuff is the MeatEater website’s section on scouting, so use it! Our ancestors nearly killed off deer in the Americas with crappy muzzleloaders and no camo, so while tech like the aforementioned fancy cameras are great, don’t get too preoccupied with them.
Once you set up in an area that deer frequent, it is a waiting game. Make sure you get to your stand early—remember, deer are most active at dawn and dusk. If you live out west, the game will be a bit different. You will be climbing rocks, hills, and mountains, and then using a spotting scope to comb over large chunks of territory looking for deer, and when you see one worth shooting, stalking it within range.
During the breeding season, often called “the rut,” you will see far more deer than during the rest of the season. Generally, I like to hunt the early season (October) for a meat doe, and then hunt a buck in the rut (usually in November). I like to carve out three to five days worth of time to go hunt. While I can never promise that you will see deer, you will almost certainly see a few over the course of multiple days—probably quite a few, especially if hunting during the rut, which, outside of the Gulf Coast, usually occurs during the whole month of November.
As a beginner, it’s easy to get pessimistic after a few hours and get up and give up. A word to the wise: sit down. There are people that hunt whitetail deer by stalking (nicknamed, strangely, “still hunting”), but unless you know someone who is a master of that, you are not one of those people. If you get up, your chances of being “that guy” that spooks deer and then complains they get nothing goes exponentially higher. Be quiet, relax, meditate. There’s plenty to take in when deer aren’t around, and you can always switch spots the next day, or even midday when activity usually hits a lull.
Shooting a Deer
When you see a deer: relax, get your aim right, and know your distance. Breathe in or exhale a little. Fire.
You want to make a good shot. A gut-shot deer is a pain to find, and you’ll feel awful afterwards and may not even recover the deer. After making the shot, examine the arrow on the ground. If it looks like a lot of clear or almost-clear fluid and smells gross, you made a gut shot. Back out of the forest, and wait 12 hours to start looking for more blood so you can find the deer. Deer are tough, but a serious wound will kill them within that time frame—provided that you back out quietly and don’t give them a shot of adrenaline by scaring them.
You want to kill deer, you don’t want to wound them. If you do, look at your local hunting Facebook groups and see if you can legally hire a houndsman to assist in recovery. Oftentimes houndsmen won’t even ask for money, since they live to run their dogs on deer trails. They use specially trained dogs that can find wounded deer.
On the other hand, there appears to be air bubbles in light-red blood on your arrow, congratulations: you made a lung shot or possibly even a heart shot. Your deer should be close, but wait at least half an hour to recover it. If it appears to be dark blood, you might have made a bad-but-not-gut-bad shot and may have hit the liver. A few hours should do the trick; let’s say 6 hours. Look for blood droplets and follow them until you’ve found your deer. They’ll be there, trust me. If you have walked for over 200 yards without finding your deer, consider calling a houndsman.
Final Words
The author posing with one of his hunted bucks.
The aristocrats of old trained for war by hunting, because hunting is a war with one’s self, with nature, and with prey. It is a war conducted for the sake of war itself, with brutal honesty as one aches in the cold, waiting to test their resolve against a noble stag. The philosopher José Ortega y Gasset once wrote, “One does not to hunt to kill, one kills to have hunted.” Most will never experience the act of killing a wild animal. But as Hemingway wrote in Old Man and the Sea :
“You did not kill the fish only to keep alive and to sell for food, he thought. You killed him for pride and because you are a fisherman. You loved him when he was alive and you loved him after. If you love him, it is not a sin to kill him. Or is it more?”
Only a hunter or fisherman can understand the complexity of such sentiments, but you will feel them too, as you grip your deer’s antlers for the first time or run your fingers through its fur. With the privilege of the hunt—the taking part in nature’s great sacrament—comes great responsibility. Act with honor and reverence towards the animals and the forest. When I shot my first deer, a doe, a great sadness washed over me. But then I remembered a quote from de Maistre: “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.”
The reality of nature is that it is a plane of constant bloodletting and sacrifice. Hunting is the lifting of the veil off our natural world and the transcendent experience that follows.
May you have great luck hunting!
