The Layup Buck: What to Make of Lucky Hunts

Last year, by the second to last weekend of Montana’s month-long rifle season, I’d gone deer hunting a grand total of zero times. My focus had admittedly been elsewhere: it was my bird dog Gunney’s first season, I was deep in the grips of the fall semester of my final year of graduate school, and my girlfriend and I were unexpectedly living in an Airbnb as the contractors our landlord hired for emergency repairs found more and more damage in the flooring.

But I wanted to get out deer hunting if only to say I did. Still, new to big game hunting as an adult-onset hunter, I’d only ever killed a whitetail buck on private land with help from mentors in Nebraska. Now, I’d drawn a muley buck tag for a nearby unit in Western Montana—not a hard tag to draw but not a general unit, either. The morning before, I’d seen two town bucks brawling in the dark as I drove to duck hunt. I knew the rut was on. And by Saturday afternoon, a recent storm had finally passed. I figured deer would be moving. And that it would be one of the last nice days of the season.

Having not scouted the unit in person, I chose an obvious spot. The area I was hunting had one main road with a check station at the start of it. The drive-in reminded me of a parade, with numerous trucks crawling along, the drivers and passengers attempting to spot deer. I wanted to get out and go for a walk, but there was a vehicle parked at every pull-off, so I kept driving until eventually, I found an empty spot in what looked like the most desolate draw in the area.

The hike in was brutal. The bottom of the drop was choked with deadfall from an old burn, and the sides were steep scree fields. There was fresh sign, but the wind seemed to be swirling, and I wasn’t sure if my scent would bust any deer up the draw from me. Not that I could see far ahead. I decided to scramble up a ridge to get a better view, but gave up halfway up because it was too steep. I decided to sit for a while before heading back to my truck. I checked the ranges of potential shots, sat back, and within seconds heard rocks pattering across the draw. A decent 3x4 muley buck was walking perfectly broadside. I leaned my rifle against my pack and fired.

While I told several close friends about my buck—the first I’d ever killed hunting solo on public land—I didn’t post about it on social media or write about it for a long time. Truth is, I felt like a fraud. As an adult-onset hunter, I’ve often felt like an imposter when I’m in the field. I’d thought that shooting a respectable buck on hotly contested public land would’ve put those worries to rest, but it didn’t. The hunt felt…too easy. I harbored a certain amount of internal shame because of this. So much so that for a time, I failed to even acknowledge the things I had done right: timing my hunt after the storm, taking advantage of the rut, and slogging into country rough enough to keep other hunters out.

To my mind, there are, essentially, two ways to “earn” a big game kill. The first is to use money to pay for an outfitter. The other—and often more rewarding way, in my experience—is to put in effort scouting and hunting. Both methods require time, either in the office or in the field. But neither route accounts for the third variable of luck. You can pay for a $10,000 hunt and get skunked. And you can stumble into a nice muley buck on one afternoon of hunting public ground.

One of the reasons that such an easy hunt felt so off-putting is that what attracted me to hunting in the first place was the difficulty of the pursuit. I took it up in the years following my time as a hyper-competitive ice hockey player. Lacking this elsewhere, and in a technological society that seems built for instant gratification, I was able to challenge myself mentally, physically, and emotionally in the field. I liked it when hard work paid off. I craved the delayed gratification. But I didn’t know what to make of luck.

This spring, I went on a short educational walk with a forester from the University of Montana. I have no formal training in science, but like many outdoorsmen, I’m fascinated by ecology. The forester introduced me to a concept called “stochasticity” while talking about natural variations in wildfire seasons, and the behavior of individual fires, too. A system with stochasticity is one that involves an element of randomness, which is the opposite of a deterministic system, or one that can be fully predicted.

Hunting, like most elements of nature, and life, involves stochasticity, or some unpredictable variation. This doesn’t mean it’s fully random, of course, as in the long run, your effort, knowledge, and other factors within your control do make a difference—and limit the variable of luck. But it does mean that you never know the outcome of individual events, or hunts, before they happen. The time and effort you spend may not directly determine your success, either.

As I prepare for my next big game hunt, thinking about stochasticity has helped my mindset. In the past, I’ve often blamed myself for failures in the field, even when I may have put myself in the right position, but it just didn’t work out. Same for my successes—I took them as individual accomplishments. Ironically, having a hunt go just right has helped emphasize the fact that there are so many variables we don’t control that can make or break a hunt.

And ultimately, I’ve realized that this is another reason I head to the deer woods: to engage with a world larger and perhaps more dynamic than the one at home—the natural world. One that’s rife with stochasticity. One that demands I acknowledge there’s so much beyond my control. Here, there’s always the possibility of failure despite putting in the effort and making the right decisions. And there’s always the chance at redemption despite mistakes or a lack of time or experience.

I’ve gotten lucky before. My friend and I both doubled on our first turkeys a couple of years ago: nice toms on private land in California. We were in the right place at the right time and made our shots. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Afterward, one of my mentors said something that has stuck with me. “Take those easy shots with grace when they come,” he said. “And celebrate them, because it’s not often that way.”

Which is true. I’ve eaten tag soup before, despite hunting long and hard. I’ve put in far more days and effort to kill a single rooster pheasant than that muley. And as a new hunter, striking out in the field is often the norm.

So, here’s to the layups, the lucky instances when everything goes just right. Here’s to the moments when you make the shot. Here’s to the public-land muley buck that happened to walk across the draw from me last November.