I harvested a white tail deer for the first time 10 years ago on 11/3/11. I lived in my home state of NY and was hunting with a bow that my father had given me earlier that year. I had practiced daily and my hunt was successful in large part due to the years of knowledge my father had accumulated and was willing to share with me. I continued to hunt with a bow for years with varying degrees of success in NY, but was always capable of harvesting a legal buck.
In 2018 I moved to the Olympic Peninsula and purchased my first WA state hunting license with similar expectations. What has followed has been years of hard work, heart break, missed opportunities, all day sits in the rain, miles of hiking, cameras placed, repeated mistakes and often times complaints to my friends and family that I was going to give up trying to hunt black tail all together as it just wasn't coming together.
Despite these failures, on Saturday 10/23/21, I woke to my alarm. I dressed and got set up in my chosen tree well before 6 am. I had been seeing deer sign. I had small bucks on my cameras just after dark and I had been seeing does daily working their way along the ridge into different bedding areas surrounding me. After 3 hours in the tree a doe stepped out at 70 yards. I enjoyed watching her work her way through the sword fern and low lying brush for 20 minutes. As I watched her my heart began to beat out of my chest when I saw a chocolate colored rack come over the hill in pursuit of her. He kept his distance from me for 10 minutes or so, but eventually stepped into my shooting lane broadside at 44 yards. The shot was relaxed and the arrow was true.
I now see that all those mistakes, all those unfilled tags, and hours that at the time may have felt wasted lead me to this success. Without those days of coming up empty I would not have known where to place the stand, where the bedding areas were located or where to expect the deer to enter from. I wouldn't have known that 10/23/21 was a day I needed to be in the stand and I wouldn't have known that I needed to be in that tree an hour and a half before sunrise. They were not failures they were learning experiences. I now know that my early success in NY was built on the shoulders of that same experience. It just wasn't mine. It was my dad's.
Thank you to everyone on this forum for your posts it has helped to keep me motivated these past 4 years. I hope this inspires someone else struggling in the woods in the same way that you have all inspired me!
