00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired2Hunt Foundations Podcast, your guide to the fundamentals of better deer hunting. Presented by First Light, creating proven, versatile hunting apparel for the stand, saddle, or blind. First Light, go farther, stay longer. And now, your host, Tony Peterson. 00:00:19 Speaker 2: Hey everyone, welcome to the Wired2Hunt Foundations Podcast, which is brought to you by First Light. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today is all about loss in life and in the deer woods. I know that last week I said I was going to write about early season buck sign this week and how you could use that to kill a big one. 00:00:40 Speaker 3: I'm going to push that back. Something came up. 00:00:43 Speaker 2: And, you know, that's just how it goes in life. And I kind of want to point you in a different direction this week. Next week I'll cover that, deer scouting and the sign. But today I want to talk about loss and about life. Well, in a way about deer, I guess. I know that makes almost no sense, but it will soon enough. Earlier this morning, I sat down to join a Wired to Hunt episode with Mark and Dan Johnson from the Nine Finger Chronicles podcast. What I got was a desktop that wouldn't boot up and just gave me the spinning wheel of computer death. Half an hour later, I threw my hat across my office, texted Mark that I was out for the recording, and contemplated chucking my Mac into the pond in the backyard. As much as I wanted to take this computer for a swim, I didn't. I sat there thinking about my life. and listening to my old dog limp her way across the floor to look at me with eyes that just don't see very well anymore. The lumps on her 13-year-old body are impossible to ignore these days, and while I know what's in store for me with her, it doesn't make it any easier. It's one of those mornings where I'm looking for a reason to be pissed off, after some reasons found me when I wasn't looking for them. Once that balance shifts in your brain, though, it's pretty easy to find more reasons to rage against the world at large. I can hop on Instagram or Reddit and watch videos from the recent flash flood in Nepal, where a glacier calved a huge chunk of ice from an extremely high elevation. Now that 2,000 foot wide piece of ice plunged 7,000 feet down, allowing it to heat up and grab a whole bunch of earth along the way, meaning that a landslide happened concurrently with that glacier falling down. This massive amount of moving earth hit a river, which fed into another river, which runs along the China-Nepal border. 00:02:36 Speaker 3: This caused a flood. 00:02:37 Speaker 2: Wave of pulverized ice and rock and, of course, water that covered the first 14 miles at speeds of about 120 miles per hour. Think about that for a second, because that huge mass of earth and water moved nearly 14 miles in less than seven minutes. If you've seen the videos, and I'm sure most of you have at this point, It looks like end-of-days stuff, and it's pretty surreal to watch people to try to outrun that water, only to be engulfed by it. It's a terrifying reminder that Mother Nature doesn't much care for our well-being. My buddy and I talked about this and quite a bit of other stuff as we put up some blinds for our kids to hunt, picked up a few acorns off the ground to peer up to the trees and gauge how long they'll be dropping and if that would impact our plans, and, well, we just got some work done recently. In the back of his mind, and in my mind, was a good friend of ours who we both used to live with, who we've hunted and fished with, and who has gone through a lot. Earlier this year, we attended his father's funeral. And as it goes with fathers and sons, their relationship was complex. It was built on a foundation of a lot of things, but alcohol was a huge part of it. I think that every person at that service was surprised that his father made it as long as he did. 00:03:54 Speaker 3: I know I was. But that wasn't why this friend was on our minds, though. 00:03:59 Speaker 2: His wife, who fought cancer twice before she was 40, caught an infection through one of her surgical scars at the beginning of July, bacterial meningitis, which is no joke. It took her out and led to a series of cascading failures that kept her in the hospital for nearly two months. Now, our buddy managed that situation and their two children, one who is a junior in college and the other one who is just starting her first year as a freshman. Through those two months, she would come to, she'd be lucid, she'd communicate, and then she'd crash. It was a series of hope and then despair that to us on the outside felt like, you know, one big step forward and two steps back. And in a situation like that, you can only go in reverse for so long. So when he texted us that she had passed peacefully, it just kind of broke my heart, as you can imagine. We look for equality in this world, and for some reason we expect it. But it isn't owed to us or promised to us or even possible for it to be delivered. It doesn't work that way. It never will. We just have the unfortunate processing power in our brains to expect it. Although I guess my dogs kind of do too, so maybe all animals hope for the best. 00:05:08 Speaker 3: I don't know. 00:05:09 Speaker 2: Maybe it's a consequence of consciousness to want things to work out and to rage against the reality that it often just doesn't. And there's no accounting for that. I'm reminded of two quotes from my favorite author, Cormac McCarthy here. The first is from No Country for Old Men, and it goes like this. You never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from. A clever way to explain why we should be optimists, or at least not dwell on what we perceive as bad luck, because as parents are prone to saying to children, could be worse. The second quote, which has a little less hope in it and comes from his novel The Road, goes like this. 00:05:47 Speaker 3: Nobody wants to be here, and nobody wants to leave. 00:05:51 Speaker 2: If there is a better, more concise way to address the human condition than that, I have yet to hear it. It's nearly perfect in its simplicity, which was one of the many hallmarks of his writing. Another hallmark of his writing is that his stories mostly don't work out for the protagonists. They are good versus evil, dark versus light, and well, they don't work out like hallmark movies do. When you think about it, most of life doesn't work out that well with big wins. That's why we celebrate them. That's why when I meet a bunch of deer hunters somewhere, they tell me about the biggest deer they killed first and not about the amount of times a big one came in and then got away or the amount of times no deer came in, let alone a couple of booners. That's also why when I talk to a lot of hunters, especially hunters with 10 or 20 deer seasons under their belt, their optimism is always heavily tempered by reality. They have learned to mostly expect failure because in simple terms, That's what we mostly get out of deer hunting. On any given sit, we don't fill a tag. And in any given season, most of us won't kill a, you know, no doubt mature buck. The people who learn to be good at deer hunting aren't just the ones who figure out how to kill deer more often than most weekend warriors, but they are the ones who understand that most of those no-kill sits and those no-kill seasons are just part of a lifelong process that is stingy with rewards, but not completely bent on never delivering the good stuff. They learn that you have to wade through a lot of shit to get them. And that makes those sits where the big ones don't show up and those seasons where it just won't quite come together something different, something more tolerable, something better. That's a hard lesson to learn in deer hunting. And it's a hard lesson to learn in life. Partially because there's so much extra unnecessary noise all the time. We are all tired of it. The performance review at work, wherever you are, we have to justify our paychecks to the people who have been watching us to make sure that we do our jobs to begin with. No, the nonstop slide into year-round sports for eight-year-olds because for some reason we feel that literal children need the equivalent of a part-time job and the pressure to perform in front of a bunch of adults shouting instructions at them because we decided that was more important than just going out to net some frogs or catch some fish after a full day of school. The guy who comments on a picture of a 150-inch buck by saying he's a solid deer, but could definitely use one more year. Like, maybe you could use some challenging hunting if you think that's the case. 00:08:25 Speaker 3: Go out there and pass up a. 00:08:26 Speaker 2: Bunch of giant bucks on public land and get back to us, Chief. Everyone is running their own deer race, and the course is vastly different for each of us. It's those things and a million others that chip away at us and make enjoying what we should love just a little more difficult. But we can't silence the trophy-hunting keyboard warriors any more than we can quit our jobs so we don't have to sit through another performance review, which, if you think about it, is perfectly named. Our performance is to convince the higher-ups we deserve more money. while their performance is designed to convince us that we are very lucky to get paid what we do. It's all theater, but also our real lives. I think we need to guard our hobbies and our passions from that as much as possible. I have a friend who's relatively new to deer hunting game, at least when compared to guys like me, but she's working her ass off to find public land bucks in Wisconsin. And I'm not joking there. When I say she's putting in more work than most deer hunters I know. 00:09:33 Speaker 3: I mean it. 00:09:35 Speaker 2: She's terrified she won't find a buck that's at least two and a half years old to shoot because she wants to level up on deer. 00:09:41 Speaker 3: And she's doing everything right. 00:09:42 Speaker 2: I mean that. Yet the voice in her head comes from outside of herself. And it consists of a collection of general deer hunting sentiment on what constitutes a big buck and what is worth shooting. And I hate to see that because if she could dial down that volume and just tune out those nagging thoughts of having to shoot something someone else deems respectable, she'd be having so much more fun. But that's really easy advice to give, but difficult advice to follow, like a lot of advice. Maybe this is just because of my mood this week, but I can't help but think how quickly we'd change our thinking if deer hunting was taken away from all of us. If we lost this thing that we love for whatever reason, I wonder what we would miss most about it. I doubt it would be picking up a big one from the taxidermist as much as it would be the anticipation of a new season coming on. You know, maybe we would miss the trail camera notifications or that feeling of settling into a stand or blind well before first light and waiting on the day to unfold. The mystery of who's going to come walking down the trail. The glimpse of something big and brown and antlered walking through the woods in your general direction. Maybe the feeling of watching your kids try to keep their shit together when a 23-inch forky shows up at last light. Would we miss the feeling of posting a grip and grin on Instagram more than we'd miss leaving work and driving right out to the woods to sit for an evening in mid-October when the leaves are changing and the sound of acorns hitting the ground keeps us on red alert until we hear that very, very welcome sound of hooves shuffling through the leaf litter? It's not an easy thought exercise to engage in. Because it feels like deer hunting isn't going anywhere. 00:11:20 Speaker 3: It is, though. 00:11:21 Speaker 2: And whether we get another 25 or 50 years out of it is anyone's guess. Maybe every season is a gift, and we should treat it as such. Maybe we should also try to recognize that in others as well. It wasn't that long ago that I didn't have much hope of that happening. But after shaking hands with several hundred people at our store opening here in the cities a few weeks ago, I'm actually more hopeful than I've been in a long time. the people I met, most of them anyway, seemed to all have their priorities largely in a spot I consider to be a good one. You know, sure, there was plenty of big buck talk, but there was also plenty of small buck talk and doe talk and public land talk and talk about how the next generation of deer hunters is coming up. We are dang lucky to give them the opportunity to sit in those woods with those animals we love and allow that small part of life to give them what so much of life seems hell-bent on taking away from them. Maybe I'm being overdramatic here. I honestly don't know. I know that it's very easy for me to focus on what has been lost in hunting and what could be lost any day now. It doesn't make me feel good to look at the new developments around me on farms I hunted not that long ago and think about the greed involved or the callousness of it all because the nature I loved is no longer there. But I live in a house with a yard and I know without question deer used to live here too. I've never had a developer offer me life-changing money for my land, either. It's easy for me to say I'd turn it down, but that's because the offer isn't on the table. My natural default setting is to find the negative outcome first, and then go through with whatever it is I'm sure will fail. And sometimes just be pleasantly surprised it didn't. That's a dumb way to live, if I'm being honest. 00:13:04 Speaker 3: And I am. 00:13:04 Speaker 2: I'm going to try to be better for myself and my daughters. We have a couple of big weekends coming up with deer openers in Wisconsin and Minnesota, although I just found out that Wisconsin's out because I'll be at a funeral. It's how life goes. Now, I'm pretty sure either way in those first couple weeks, we'll piece together a blood trailer too. That should be enough to keep the bad thoughts at bay because that's pretty incredible, especially considering it took me four full seasons of bow hunting to kill a buttonbuck, and it'll probably take the girls about four full hours of hunting to kill something bigger than that this year. And maybe that easy success is the wrong measure. But looking at volleyball schedules and basketball schedules and homecoming weekend and my work schedule means that the days when we do get out there don't deserve to be bogged down by focusing on the what-ifs of life. I know that I won't get a mulligan on those moments with my daughters any more than I'll get to replay a season in the woods for myself. 00:13:59 Speaker 3: They're here, and then they're gone. 00:14:02 Speaker 2: Like a woman I've known for 25 years who gave one of my best friends a son and a daughter, and a path toward a life that wouldn't consist of throwing back long necks at the local watering hole every night. In fact, other than his father's funeral, the last time I saw them together and got to spend real time with them was last year's bow opener in Minnesota, when I brought one of my daughters down and we all got to hang out. We laughed until we cried then, and it had nothing to do with deer. 00:14:29 Speaker 3: It was just the reason to be there. 00:14:31 Speaker 2: And because we were there, it allowed us to get together and have a great night like we used to when we were in college in those pre-kid days when whatever we could see through the windshield was so much bigger than anything in the rearview mirror. And that's not the case anymore after a couple of decades. But there's still plenty to look forward to. And it doesn't do any of us any good to dwell on the things that we can't change, as much fun as it is to do just that. So I guess I'll wrap up this meandering rant here that took the space of some good old deer hunting advice I was fully prepared to dish out by saying that maybe you've started hunting this year. Maybe you're shooting every night and just dying of anticipation on the upcoming deer opener. Maybe it's your first season on a new property or your last season on a property you hate to lose. Maybe your kids are going to hunt for the first time. Or maybe they're going to just sit next to you in a blind and help you look for deer and eat some candy. Whatever it is that is waiting for you this fall in the woods, and when you're not in the woods, I hope it's just good. 00:15:27 Speaker 3: I hope it gives you what you need. 00:15:29 Speaker 2: And if it doesn't, I hope you figure out why and you have the opportunity to find it somewhere else down the road. We don't know how many seasons any of us have left. And that might seem like a totally abstract concept until it's suddenly not. And when it's not, I bet we will give a hell of a lot to go back, you know, one more time. And meet up with some friends the night before the deer opener or to climb up into a stand while our fathers stand on the ground and watch to make sure we make it up there okay. I think we should all try to remember that as long as we can. And I know that I'm going to try starting right now. That's it for this week, folks. I'm Tony Peterson. This has been the Wired Hunt Foundations podcast. As always, I want to thank you so much for all your support. I know you see us here at Meteor going in a million different directions. And just the fact that you guys show up and you read the articles, you watch the films, you listen to these podcasts, it means the world to us. You know, you show up at our store openings. It's truly incredible. So I want to thank you for that. If you need some more content, you know where to go. 00:16:31 Speaker 3: TheMeatEater.com. We drop tons of new content all the time. 00:16:35 Speaker 2: Go check it out there. Good luck this season. Wear your safety harnesses and have some fun.