I wrote this in a magazine article many years ago:
…anybody who kills a deer and then has the gall to complain about the work when the animal is down will never hunt with me again. If you are doing it right, gutting a buck and then wrestling it around and over logs, up and down hills, through creeks and mud, all the while sweating a river and stumbling and bumbling and cussing back to your truck is strangely fun and invigorating, whether it takes you 20 minutes or 2 hours or all day.
The work was a lot harder back in the day. I didn’t have an ATV, and so I had to drag my deer, sometimes a mile or more through the Virginia woods. One of my favorite stands was way down an oak ridge in a beaver slough. The “Buck Hole.” Man, I shot a lot of deer there. They would inevitably go on a death run off the ridge and straight to the bottom of the hole.
The pull up out of there was not that far, but rough and took hours. Steep as hell, slick and thick. Sometimes I lashed a rope over the antlers, but most of the time I just grabbed a beam and took off. I slipped, sweated, fell, cussed, bled…and when I got back to the truck and wrestled one of those big suckers up into the bed by myself, I felt great, and complete. The drag was a big and important part of it.
We have it too fat and easy these days. Much of the time we can drive a truck or ATV right up our deer, and with the help of a buddy, grab the legs, count 1,2,3, swing the animal back, toss it up and take off.
And now we have gadgets. One day last year, I shot a buck, and a guy came in with one of those rolling carts with big wheels. We loaded my buck onto it like a sack of feed and rolled him back to the truck. Slick and easy for sure. But thinking back on it now, I feel like I was a lesser hunter for it.
I’ve decided that this fall I’m going to work harder for my bucks, both before and especially after the shot, and I have started preparing and working out harder for it. I don’t kid myself, it will not be easy, I am not getting any younger.
I know I have got it ass-backwards, after all these years, I should hunt smarter and not harder. But deer hunting is supposed to be good, hard, dirty fun, right? Does that make sense to you?
good stuff guys, hunt hard and have fun anyway you do it!
One of my top 5 deer stories was not about the deer but rather dragging my brother’s beautiful 8 point brute through 18 inches of fresh Illinois snow. It was too treacherous to drive in with the truck – so we pulled that beast by the antlers while gauging our progress by taking 15 steps and resting several minutes. It probably took us 15 good pushes till we hoisted that sucker into the truck bed.
Yet I’m honest enough to say that if our 4-wheeler had been purchased and at the cabin that night – we would have saved an hour of time and avoided our windburned cheeks by driving that puppy up to the truck. Maybe its good to leave the 4 wheeler at home and take a few chances to make some memories.
Last November I had the good fortune to take a nice, heavy 10 from the WV mountains. After a very difficult drag to the top of a ridge, my brother had to take a photo. The caption read, ” who looks more dead, the deer or my brother?” What a memory, we will be laughing about it for the rest of our lives.
Really good way to have a heart attack. Course I’m71.
Man I’ve been there and done that! Now I call my grandsons when I can an their dad and I just stand back and remember when we were the youngsters in camp.
It does seems like deer hunting is becoming more about surveillance with our cameras, creating a “hit list”, trying to shoot “that” deer from as far away as we can, then picking up the deer with our atv/utvs.
Of course, then we tell everyone how hard we worked getting our buck…
I think that having to drag a buck out of a hell hole by nothing more than sweat and hard work builds character. I shot a buck in a GIANT bowl here in the AZ mountains last year and it was a 4 hour drag to get him from the bottom of this huge bowl to the top where we had a RZR. It was so steep and covered in big boulders that dragging it was the only way and I can promise you I about died lol I also gained a new perspective on whether or not it’s worth it to shoot a deer in certain situations. I’ve had tough drag out situations before, but starting a drag at the bottom of a rock covered mountain at 6000 ft elevation in the dark will effect me for life unless I have some help with me because it was a tough go at it. I appreciated that meat soo much more than I ever have after that drag out and it was solely due to the strenuous work that it took to get that meat back to camp. I will certainly take an easy drag out/drive up to the deer if the situation presents itself, but out here in AZ to shoot a big coues more often than not you will be doing a LOT of hiking to get into their bedroom and that means you’ll be doing a lot of dragging to get them back out to the nearest access road. Hope all you Big Deer fellas are having a great summer and are getting excited for fall..only 2 months and 4 days for us here in AZ till our August archery hunt. Mike if you’d ever be interested in doing an AZ Coues hunt I’d love to assist you in taking a good one out here.
Mav, might take you up on that love Coues and have not hunted Arizona in years!
Mike I’m serious about the offer I’ve got some great areas to hunt with some BIG coues like 105″+. We have an Over The Counter Archery Tag in August and then the OTC tag opens back up for archery in mid December through the end of January. However they did close one of my best areas for this December hunt so it will be only August and Jan. I’ve also got a great friend who is an outfitter named Matt Woodward with http://www.borderlandadventures.com/. You may have seen Dave Watson hunt with him on his past shows out here multiple years. I could always set you up with him as well either here in AZ or down in MX.
I totally agree with you Mike.
I can’t remember ever using anything but myself or if I was lucky a buddy to help drag my deer. Hunting a lot of Public/Open and private land in CT,ME,NY, there’s been a lot of 5-6 hour drags, but like you I don’t think I would want it any other way, It has to be part of the whole experience.
I do own a 4wheeler but really only use it in the summer to hang a stand and to plow my driveway in the winter. I don’t mind the mile walk in or out of the timber, it should be that way. That deer gave its life, I could show a little respect by working hard to get the animal out of the woods by hand. Guess I am and always will be “OLD SCHOOL” in that regard…