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 [...]

Don’t let the ticks and snakes keep you from finding new spots to hunt this fall. It’s time to get out there and start scouting. Lather on the DEET, put on snake boots and get a leg up on those other guys who are playing golf or kicked back on a beach or in the A/C somewhere. Let’s say you hunt a 250-acre woodland. You’ve probably hunted only 50 to 75 of those acres over the years, if that. You figure other guys roam the ridges and hollows beyond your stand. Or maybe you’ve just gotten in a rut and hunted the same spots. You bust some does every year and a buck every once in a while, so why [...]