00:00:01 Speaker 1: Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, home of the modern white tail hunter, and now your host, Mark Kenyon. Welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast. I'm your host, Mark Kenyan, and today I'm joined by my pal Spencer new Hearth and Tony Peterson to break down there one Week in November hunts getting the best of the best of the decisions made, the mistakes along the way, and what led to their success. All right, welcome to the Wired to Hunt podcast, brought to you by First Light. And today in the show, we are talking about rut hunting success. Last week you got to hear about rut hunting failure. Today you get to hear about the successful side of things. You get to hear about the smiles and the cheers, and the high fives and the hugs and and all the good stuff that you hope to get at this time of year. And uh with me, I've got the rest of the cast from our new show coming out on the Meat Eater YouTube channel this week called One Week in November. So in addition to me, that is Clay Newcomb, Tony Peterson, and Spencer new Hearth. Clay is is standing us up at the moment for reasons undisclosed, So it's it's just Spencer, Tony and me, but maybe Clay will join us later. We're gonna cross our fingers. Uh, real quick, uh, Tony and or Spencer. How do we feel about Clay standing us up right now? He's such a diva man. Do you think it's because they're out enough? Yeah? Yeah, he better have a good reason. He better like have his Vortex minos right now on some big giant Nebraska buck. I hope that's the case. Although he already killed one, so I think he's taged out. Someone else in camp has not killable one, so I hope he's helping that person. Look, there you go, there you go. That's that's a good point. Uh. So, guys, here's what I want to do, and you tell me what you think about it. Um. I want to walk through basically. You know, anyone's listening now, maybe heard last week's episode in which I walked through my week in Iowa. But while I was out there having a struggle fest in Iowa, you guys in Clay were killing it across Minnesota, Wisconsin, Montana, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. So I want to walk through, day by day what you guys did what you were thinking about, the different kind of strategies that worked for you during the rut um. Anything like that I think would be helpful. And then we can kind of bounce around between each other and you know, see what kind of curiosities we have and dive into whatever wormholes present themselves. Um, but that's my high level you guys though, are you know? You guys host podcasts here and wired Hunt too, So if you have a better idea part way through, at any point, you're welcome to jump in and say this is stupid, let's do something else, and I'll entertain it. So, Spencer, do you want to kick us off with your game plan leading into this week? We haven't gotten to a lot of detail. You've kind of alluded to things throughout, and you talked a little bit about this letter deal. But do you want to set us up how your week was planned out, how you were feeling about things heading into it, what your game plan was. Yeah, my my plan was to try to fill a Montana General deer tag and a special draw white tail tag in Wyoming. And this this wasn't necessarily related to the series. I would have done this either way. But in the summer I sent out a hundred and twelve letters seeking deer hunting permission in Montana. UM. And I'll reveal those results more and talk about sort of what my strategy was and what worked and what didn't work and things like that in an article at some point, UM. But to give you a quick synopsis of it, I got like six yes is UM. I would identify like four of those as B minus properties that were either small or they had a lot of other shared permission UM, or they were like in the opposite corner of the state from me, so so not really ideal. So like four B minus properties and then one that I would say it was like a B plus but the landowner actually ended up selling it between the time me getting permission and the fall actually getting here and then the six property being a total A plus. It was over a thousand acres UM great habitat hadn't been hunted in a long time UM, and it was going to have a mix of white tails and mule deer, so that that I was thrilled about. And I had scouted a leading up to what was our opening day, which was November one, for the show UM, and there was a buck like a mature buck that I had identified on the property that was being pretty consistent, um who in in twice scouting. I had within two yards and could have killed with my rifle, but but chosen not to you for the sake of the show. And and that was my strategy for Montana. For Wyoming, it was sort of similar. I hunted there last year, UM and I end up getting a lot of door knocking permission. So as soon as I filled in Montana, I was going to drop down to Wyoming. In Montana on day one, it was pretty slow for me. I set up um with haunts that I thought were going to help me kill that buck, but I never saw him in the morning or the evening. I didn't see him at all the first two days, And so the first day had a lot of action for me in both the morning hunt and the evening hunt, but no mature bucks and not the buck that I was looking for. Can you can you elaborate a little bit on like what that setup looked like and why you were there on that first morning. You know it's river bottom stuff, right, yeah, yeah, it's it's a lot of hardwood trees and river bottom and CRP and slewy area yeah, and and the reason that I was there, and this is something that, UM, when the show comes out, my setups are gonna look very different than your guys. And I think one of the the biggest spots where where mine is different. Besides I'm on the ground and you guys are in a tree. Is that any wise bow hunter like you two know that you don't set up to see deer necessarily, you set up to kill a deer. And so I'm guessing, um, having not seen like the places you were in that a lot of times you guys were hunting areas that maybe had visibility of like thirty yards, maybe fifty yards in a good spot, but probably some spots that only had like twenty yard visibility areas. I was set up so I could see hundreds and hundreds of yards um at a time, and I I did want to see deer so then I can then close the distance and make something happen. So the reason that I would set up on day one and day two where I did was to just get like maximum visibility of an area, and if there was a buck that I would identify that I wanted to go after, I would try to close the distance from there so that's I think couldna be one of the biggest like differences between my setup and the three setups that you guys have throughout the whole week. Yeah. You know, another thing that stood up to me when I was kind of hearing about what you're doing was how you kind of looked at your morning hunts is almost throwaways, like you didn't have much confidence at all. You kind of fell out, gonna be out there for an hour and then I'll be done, and you were really resting your hopes on evenings. Why why was that, I mean so much of so many other places when we talked about the rut, we always think the mornings are the best. Why was your situation unique? Part part of that reason is the property, UM didn't set up great to uh, like catch a lot of morning movement. You would you'd get a lot of movements sort of on the fringe of the property where they would spend a lot of like the their shooting light on the neighbor's ground or something like that. And then to have a good morning movement, you would ideally want to be in the tim or somewhere UM, which with a rifle isn't always ideal. UM, And and there wasn't a lot on like either any of the places that haunted in Montana or Wyoming that would really funnel movement, which is like something that you're sort of hoping for in the morning to to catch a cruising bucket like ten am, You're not gonna be on a field edge. Really, you're gonna be on some ridgeline or something like that. And these properties just didn't have a lot of stuff that would funnel movement that would make me confident that I'm gonna catch some buck going back to his bed. Okay, so morning one was slow. I mean, you saw a bunch of deer, but not a shooter. What about the evening? Did you go back to the same spot the evening I went back to a very similar spot, and uh, same thing again. I probably saw every single deer that I had seen that same morning and every single buck that I had seen in like my three or four days of scouting, except for the buck um, which sort of brought with it a little bit of that rutt anxiety, where like, did did some hot dough show up? Did this thing wander into the next county already? Like is is it already too late? Um? So so day one. I had seen many of the same year that I was familiar with for my short time scouting, except for that dear. Okay, so day one, you're feeling kind of a little apprehension they might have disappeared, but you weren't down in the dumps, right, No, not not down in the dumps. Mostly I was considered about I was concerned about my lack of like quality morning haunts that we're gonna be with me. I thought throughout the whole week, like, uh, if if my evening setups were like a nine out of ten, my mornings were like a six out of ten, And so I was mostly concerned about not ruining things in the morning for my evening haunts. So just like a tiny bit of pessimism. Um, but I wasn't. I wasn't concerned quite yet. After day one. Yeah, now, what about this whole lodging situation. Uh, this needs to be brought up because you were him this ship about staying in a hotel and Tony was an Airbnb and Clay was like a resort or something. Um, and You're like, I'm staying in a tent, but you were in a tent in the yard of an Airbnb that you got to use. So what what was this? So the airbnb was some rancher who had a sodhouse that he refinished. Um, and it only had one room, which the cameraman stayed in. So then I I pitched my tent in the yard. Now here's what what won't show up on the show. Um, we were sort of the first guests to stay there when it was ever cold out. And so what we learned and what we were the first to learn, was at the place was just littered with mice like that very first night when it got chili. Uh. The caraman said that he thought like he was in the movie Ratitui like it was. It was just wild. H He said he could hear mice in the ceiling, he could hear him on the floor. Um, he could see him through the cracks in the wall where like moonlight was coming through and they were scurry by real fast. Um. So even even the cameraman staying in some ranchers airbnb, soadthouse was not living in luxury. So I stayed to my tent. I was probably more comfortable than him even So So with that said, then let's let's pivot to Tony's day one. Uh, Tony, this will be a quick story and let's we really get a lot of backstory. So, um, give me, give me the lead up to the Minnesota hunt and why you were going to start in Minnesota and and how you were feeling about stuff leading into that first down. Oh man, so minute. I've talked on this podcast a lot about Minnesota's early, early gun season, and so I knew when when we were talking about filming for a week, like if I'm gonna kill in Minnesota for this project, it's going to be like, uh, maybe two days of my time and then I'm gonna go down to Wisconsin because I wasn't to push it any later because of the gun season opening up in Minnesota, and so I ended up. I've got a permission on a farm in southeastern Minnesota. I've hunted since I was like fifteen years old. And then a buddy of mine, a really good buddy of mine. Uh, he's got permission on the land next to it, and so I've got him permission to hunt my side of things, and he this year gave me permission to hunt his side, or got me permission to hunt it. So like, let's just team up and hang some stands in the summer that we think are going to be like banging rut spots, and that's what we did. I I drove down there and I think it was maybe the end of July, and we picked a few areas where you know, from past observation and some winter scouting, and you know, we we knew that we'd probably be on top of bucks. But I really I had two stands, one on his place, one of my place that I was like, okay, these are kind of it, and the one on my place was it had me real excited for how it's set up, But the problem was none of the corn was picked on either property and the wind was dead wrong for that stand, and so I ended up having to go to a backup spot, which was the other spot that we set up together. And it was a good I knew it would be good. I didn't think it'd be as I didn't think it treat me as well as it did. But I was kind of bummed the first morning because I was I was desperate to make that other spot work, but I just knew, you know, bringing a cameraman along and having to hang a stand and having two people in a tree and a wind that's just there's no way around it. It was not going to work very well that you know, we're going to the backup spot. And I was thinking, you know, walking in there, we jumped some deer in the cornfield in the dark, and everybody's everybody's listening has probably had that experience at one point or another. And then to get on that stand set up super early, we kind of pulled a Mark Kenyon got out there way early. You know, by the time the sun was rising, I was watching coyotes chase a buck away from us, and it was cold. I'm sitting there going, I don't know how long we're gonna make this, Like I'm cold, and my cameraman was shivering, and it just ended up that we were in a we were on a woodline, uh kind of a little drainage through through this corn field that sort of forms like a almost a turkey foot pattern. There's there was just these little veins of cover through this unpicked corn field and it just feeds bucks from one spot to the next. And so even though I knew it was like you know, Spencer mentioned, you know these tight spots that we sit in when we bow hunt, this was as tight as it comes. Like, I knew they were going to show up fast and it was not going to be great TV, but it could be a spot to kill a good buck. And honestly, going into that part of my hunt, I was like, if in comes by, he's toast, Like I'm not. I'm not gonna be picky with two days to work with. And just so happens that the first buck that came in was out of his mind and he was a big one. So before you tell us what happened with the big one, I gotta know what the spot is that you really felt good about. Because this spot worked out pretty good. What was the setup that you were dying to be in instead of this one? Um? You know, it was only a couple hundred yards away from where I killed this buck, but it was It's got a creek bottom in it, so there's there's deer that feed in from the main part of the farm that I've been hunting forever. And then it's not very far away from this a d acres that's kind of a sanctuary. These guys own it and they they don't really hunt it much. They hunt it during gun season and they're they're big buck guys, and so the deer on the neighboring properties they tend to get pushed into that property. And this stand where that I hung is is not that far away, and the deer that naturally come and go from that property they go through this area and so it's just hard to access spot that you're kind of playing off the pressure from the neighboring properties for you know, at that point in the season, like six weeks of of bow pressure, and then because of the the gun season opening up on you know it was the six or seventh this year, you tend to get this sort of influx of guys who are going in to check their stands and you know, checking their trails in and out. So you just have this added pressure of people coming in and so that a d becomes just kind of this hub of activity because nobody's going in there to hunt, and so those deer come in and they go out, and you know, it played off a water, It played off a lot of that stuff, and so I was really excited. I sat there one day during the rut last year and I saw I can't remember fourteen or seventeen deer or something, and it was on and I wanted to get there in the worst way. It just you know, I couldn't justify it with that wind direction. Yeah. So back to the spot that you did sit, it's this turkey foot of timber in the middle of a standing cornfield. Uh. Other than it being just like that perfect tight kind of pinch, was there any other reason why it ended up working? Was there anything else to it that made it made it worthwhile for that buck to come cruising through? And how how tight was it? Tony? You said that this was like as tight as agains. How tight was it tight? I mean you asked the post production team happy they were with the footage, because I got asked about three times like okay, is this it? Like, is there there's no more footage? I'm like, no, No, what you see in this show? When this drops, it's like ah. The encounter with that buck was maybe five or six seconds to Matt Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt. This dude, Yeah, And this dude came in hot and he had he had some cornstocks and his antlers and he I think he had lost a dough. I think he'd been running hard and I think she gave him the slip and he was out of his mind, because we you know where he came in and where I shot him. A dear, that age in that area should be looking up going no way boys, and he should have been gone. But he couldn't get him to pick his head up. I couldn't get him to stop. And he was fifteen yards away. And so it was just one of those dreamy situations where you've got a buck that's just he's got one thing on his mind and he's not clued into anything else. And so that spot, it just it was that kind of thing like you weren't going to see him coming, you know, but they were going to cruise those wooded at those little woodlines. I think he was, you know, he was on the upwind side of a of kind of a nasty little thicket, so I think he was looking for does in there too. But I really think that that buck had just been covering ground, had been chasing lost the dough, and he's like, maybe she came down here, because he looked like a deer that was frantic. You know. It's kind of like if you have like a high drive bird dog and they can't find you know, you toss a bumper into the into the you know, waste high grass and they can't find it, but they're they're super excited like that kind of just like jittery body language, like where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Like he he was kind of projecting that it was wild man. That's awesome. So for people who haven't seen the pictures yet or haven't watched the episode, which by the time this is out, you should be able to watch it on the Mediator YouTube channel. But for those ofn't seen it, can you give us a visual picture of him? Uh, he's a bigger eight pointer than I ever thought i'd kill in my life. H he. I didn't know when he came running in. It was kind of one of those deals where you just the first glimpse you get, you're like, oh God, I gotta get my bull in my hand now. And he came in and I tried to murp him to stop him a bunch of times, and he just I think he just stopped naturally. I shot him and he ran off, and I knew that. I knew the shot was really good, but it was one of those encounters where I didn't, you know, I didn't have an adrenaline dump until after as soon as he ran away, it was like it was incredible. And you know, of course when you're filming, you gotta film some stuff after the shot, and so I'm like, I want to go see him so bad because I knew he was good when I was thinking like one forty when he ran off, and then walking up to him. You know, I killed a buck in Minnesota, I think two years ago, and a clean eight pointer that went one forty three. I didn't think I'd ever topped that. And this buck I started looking at him, I'm like, man, he seems like he's a lot bigger than that last buck. And you know, we got home and a sidebar to this is my buddy Eric, who was hunting with He had killed buck there the night before. There was an eight pointer that went one nineteen. It was a beautiful deer, and we we had both of those bucks in the back of his truck. And his look like a baby deer compared to this one. I mean, it was just incredible. The body size and the mass. It was just it was it was I was so lucky. I got so freaking lucky with that buck. After you killed that buck, you sent a text saying that you just killed a toad. Um. And had it been like me or Clay or Mark that said they killed the toad, I'd be like, okay, awesome, like at five by five. But when when you sat a toad, for some reason, I put greater stock into that. I was like, oh man, this this must like genuinely be a giant buck. And I was not disappointed when the photos came through. Yeah, he's he's a good one. I'm not sure to take that comment. Spencer. By the way, Hey, I'm I'm putting me in Clay in the same boat there. I'd be like, awesome, they kill like a five by five. But it it when when Tony said it, it felt like it carried a little more weight. I was like, all right, this this is a toad that he killed. And especially because Tony was talking about originally shooting like a little hundred in shape point or something, you know, that's right. I had a range on that part of the hunt for sure. Man, oh man, he pulled it. Officer, well done, well done, thank you. Um. So then for you, from there, Tony, you were just recovering the buck, processing the buck, putting things away, getting all set up, and then you're going to move to this other Wisconsin place for day two. Right, Yeah, so we you know, I killed him pretty early, but getting him out was a little bit of a process. And then because my buddy had killed, we had too deer to butcher, and so we started. I can't remember when we started on those dear it was like one o'clock and we didn't wrap up to like eight o'clock at night. I mean, it was, you know, just he and I too on those two big bucks. It took a long long time, but that was you know, I had to do that, you know, CWD regulations and all that stuff, and so, you know, it was a process. But then it was like, okay, well now we get a good night's sleep and tomorrow we're heading to southwestern Wisconsin. It was it was a great The way it worked out was amazing. I couldn't be happier with it, so real quick before we move on to the next day entirely, I gotta ask you guys what you thought about what I did on day one. I passed like a hundred and twenty something inch nine pointer that looked like a three and a half year old, and then another buck that probably was again I believe he was three and a half, but he was tall and tighted. I mean he was like one thirty something probably. Um when I did that within the first hour and a half of the first day, were you guys like on board, were like okay, Mark, good call. Or were you sitting there thinking I'm an idiot, Go ahead, Spencer. I told you guys this before, like there's there's not a hundred and thirty inch year around me. That's safe. But I've also never hunted a place like Iowa to sort of be put in, uh, that situation, to to know that like, oh, yeah, the there's much better bucks behind these trees. So I I don't blame you one bit. You were in Iowa, it was day one. I think you would have regretted it the rest of the day, the rest of the week, the rest of the fall. If you would have done it, you would have been wondering, um, and ultimately, you know, you get the opportunities later. So I think you, uh, you made a fine decision. And and Tony happened to kill one on day one, so I feel like, uh, like when one kill, we all kill. And uh that that's at least how I felt about it. So I was. I was stoked. Like when when Tony killed that buck, it felt like, for some stupid reason, I was part of it, despite being thousands of miles away. It hadn't having nothing to do with that, dear, um. So it wasn't like we were in like a real dry spell either where it was like, man, we need some action, and we we like, uh, she gets something on the ground. So I don't. I don't think you made the wrong decision at all. Um, But if if I were in that situation I had at twenty yards, I don't know that it would have survived. Yeah, I thought you should have let him up. Mark. Of course you did well for a couple of reasons. That's a great dear. First off, Iowa know Iowa whatever. That's like, that's no slouts, right, I get. I totally get why you passed him up. It was early. But when I when I look at that and I think about, you know, let me put it this way, the average person in the audience looks at that and they think, Okay, you got like a week in Iowa. You know, you're obviously onto something. If you have a first morning like that, that's that's a great start. I would look at that a little differently and be like, you know, you're gonna be towing a cameraman around for a week. You're gonna have a lot of different different types of encounters than if you were doing it just on your own, and man, that's that's a great dear to have that close and when you're doing a project like this. I was when you sent me that, I was like, I don't know, man, I think probably should have been flying, but you know, you make those decisions in the moment, and I get why you didn't, but that deer would have one percent got shot at if if I was there. Yeah. I definitely was waffling on it. I was. I mean in the video, like they didn't even show the second one. They only show one of them. But it's like I don't know, no, yeah, maybe I don't know, no, yeah, no. I go back and forth like fifteen times, and I just I just couldn't bring myself to It. Was more like I wasn't even thinking about the production. I was just thinking about I've waited six years to hunt Iowa. I want to enjoy the damn thing. You know. I would totally be bummed not knowing what might have been possible or what I might have seen, or like what the show might have been. You know, you go to Iowa and you see bucks fighting, and you see bucks chasing, and you see big deer and like I, you know, I just I wanted to see the thing. Um. So from that perspective, I feel good about the decision at the at the moment. What I have loved to have killed that deer on day six or seven. Yeah, um, but you know it is what it is, so that one, you know, I can't take that one back. So Spencer, what about day to move us today to what was your what was your setup going into that morning and your thought process? Day two, I decided to dive into the timber in the morning and just going in blind. From what I thought on on X looked like a good like funnel for deer movement. Um. I I went into in the dark and didn't see a single deer that morning, um, which which was a bummer. That was sort of that was sort of the beginning of my pessimism, Like damnit, um if if my morning hunts are going to be like this, and uh, you know I only have like seven of these evenings. In reality, I don't know that I talked about this on the show, But they're gonna be moving cattle on the property on November four. So I felt like I only had like three days I could have hunted beyond that. Um, but it was going to kind of shuffle the deck beyond that third day of hunting for me. And so in the morning was just like totally slow and saw zero deer. Um that that was a bummer for me that evening. Though I had the right wind to hunt what I considered like position A on the property. Um, I knew I would see deer. I knew I would see box. I knew it was a place where I would see a mix of white tails and Muley's. And despite me telling you otherwise, Mark, I was fully prepared to shoot a new deer if one shut up there. There was some dialogue before the show about like what what should I do if a mule deer shows up? And I think how I had left it was telling you Mark, like, yeah, I don't I don't think I will. I won't shoot one if one shows up. But I was fully ready to shoot one. It wouldn't even been like despite me being very clear that you shouldn't it wouldn't even been in like a decision to make. It had been like, yeah, I'm gonna shoot this thing there, there would have been no offering that would have happened if if a big mule deer showed up. So anyway, on on the the second night of the haunt, I was in position a UM and I had some good action. I think I probably saw twentysome deer that night, a mixed bag of mules and white tails um, a good like buck too doo ratio um. But I didn't see anything that like was beyond a basket rack, which was which was disappointing, and that was my day too. But something that sort of like turned the whole thing around was on the morning of day two, on my way out of the woods, I wanted to learn more about the place since I had sort of like accepted that, yeah, I'm gonna have to just like kind of blindly hunt this timber. In the mornings going forward, I found a scrape taking the scenic route from um where I was hunting that morning to the pickup, and I actually found a little cluster of scrapes there. And for me hunting in the West, I feel like I'm I'm rarely coming across like really good obvious sign um just because I feel like the deer like you sign making a little bit differently out here. I'm also hunting a lot of landscapes that are like very scarred by cattle, and so trails aren't always obvious. And even if you have like what you think is buck rob it could be a porcupine that's chew and on the tree, or it could be where cattle like to rub their backs. And uh, you don't just like find a lot of scrapes, even though for you guys, you probably could have started marking like uh, Sioux City, Iowa, and and taking a rock and throwing it from scrape to scrape and made it all the way to like Illinois. That's just like how common scrapes are in your area from either not And so when I saw that scrape, I dropped a pin on on X. It was also only about fifty yards from a water crossing, which you've written about before and mark in articles mark how like water crossings are sort of a terrain feature you can hunt from Maine to Montana. It's just something that works, and any idiot can go somewhere and identify like a spot where deer crossing a creek or a ditch or or some water feature like that. So what I had found that morning was a water crossing as well as a clusterer scrapes and then like fifty yards of each other, and that was sort of what informed my hunt four day three, which ended up being successful. Alright, So then what about you, Tony for day two? Did you end up getting to Wisconsin ready to hunt? I can't remember if you did hunt that day or if you were still kind of in transit. No, No No, we got We got down there and I had a couple of stands. You know. This was this this property them hunting. My buddy bought it, uh last winter, actually last spring, and so I had spent a little bit of time turkey hunting, a little bit time scouting at this summer, and then we did one big stand hanging mission in preparation for this, and one of the places that we hung a stand was this. Uh. It looked like just an amazing crossing at the point of this valley where um, you know, the deer kind of had to go around some of these really deep washouts and there was a series of them. There's actually three of them in a row. And so when you're talking like a rut spot, I just I've been thinking about this spot since we found it in Turkey season, since we set up a stand there this summer. And so on the second day after driving down there, UH went into that spot, got set up, and literally like two minutes after I got in stand, two doors ran up and a buck chased him right through the crossing, a little guy, and I was like, oh my god, this is this is it, this is gonna be on And that place just proved to be a scrapper fest. And for some reason I couldn't buy a sighting of a deer bigger than a year and a half old. But that's that's where I ended up the first, i should say, the second night of this hunt, the first night of my Wisconsin part of the hunt. And and this was the farm where you actually thought you'd have a chance that the big one right Minnesota was where you thought you shoot the scrapper in Wisconsin was where you thought the big boys would be. Right. Yeah, I had pretty high hopes for this property. You know, it's it's bluffy stuff real close to the Mississippi River. It's the kind of stuff that I grew up hunting, and I just I love it so much. And because of those you know that that serious up and down along the river, I just don't think. I think you get a really good age class there because it's impossible to just drive out There's there's there's too many places, too many big valleys and stuff that the deer can hide on. And from my summer scouting and then some of my my trail camera work, you know, I knew they were really good deer down there. So what's like the name of the game for you when it comes to rut hunting that bluffy terrain? Uh? Is it? Is it just really using those terrain features to funnel movement and just counting on that to eventually bring one by you? Or if you had to oversimplify your general thought process going into that portion of the hunt, what was it so and and that stuff? It's always terrain. I mean, I think you know, because I I hunt, If you were to look at where I hunt in northern Wisconsin, a lot of times it's really flat and it's so much more difficult to find a good pinch point or a funnel. And then you start getting into those hills, those bluffs along the river, and they're just tailor made for, you know, pushing deer travel a certain way. And so I probably went into that too cocky because I found those spots this this summer with my buddy and I was like, oh man, this is it's over. And what I didn't factor in was, you know, it's the first year on this this ground. You're gonna learn a bunch of stuff. And so that spot and another spot which we'll get into later, where I spent a bunch of time on this pond, I kind of thought, looking at him and reading the sign, I'm like, okay, I know how the deer use this well, you guys know how it is. Then you get in there and you actually observe deer and they cross a bunch of different ways, and they travel and they don't come from the same spots you think they will, and it's just a crash course on how the deer used the land. And so my my setup was those you know, those specific terrain features. But I got a really good education in the six days I spent on that farm because they didn't use it the way I thought I had it figured out. I didn't so walk me through them. What you found out on day three? You sat there that first day, next day you get in there to go back to the same place, or do you scout to final the location or what? I went right back to the same stand I had a I had that pond standing. You know, the forecast for that week where I was started out pretty cold and was just progressively supposed to get warmer throughout the week, and the winds were gonna shift, and so I knew I was going to be dealing with some different winds and some some temperatures getting up into the sixties by the end of the week. And so even though I really wanted to go to the bottom of this valley where I had to stand along this pond, I just I knew every day that I put it off would be better. And so I went right back to the crossing stuff for the second day. And it was kind of a repeat of the first afternoon. It was a lot of not a lot. It was. It was some young bucks cruising through in some doze, but just nothing nothing where I was like, man, I feel like I'm on him now. It just it felt just okay, what was the corn situation for you there? Tony, I know you said it wasn't ideal in Minnesota. What about around that spot in Wisconsin? Um, I didn't have any corn anywhere near me. I had corn about three quarters of a mile away, and I do think, I actually do think that soaked up some of the deer. Um. But it was really a non factor for my my Wisconsin hunt. And what about you, Mark, I know you had said at one point that there was some corn being cut. Um, But was that like at the end of harvest? Was at the beginning of harvest there? What was going on in Iowa? Yeah? It was actually standing corn almost everywhere I hunted. Um and Um, I would bet you like four out of the seven days, maybe five out of the seven days, there was corn being picked somewhere around me. Um. So I hunted to properties one that I had got knock on door permission on another one I got permission through a buddy, and um golly, the first one they picked like a small subsidiary field next to where I hunted on the first day. But then there was like five acres of corn and they covered all the rest of the property all the way until I was done there. That never got taken out by the time I was out and then the other farm I was hunting, they had picked like kind of an outside row and then left everything else until day three, and then on day three they picked a bunch of the rest. And that was that one day tony where I texted you guys and like, I meditated, and I'm moving to the cut corn. There's gotta be does out there, and they end up not being shipped. Um so there was there was just there was a lot of corn. And then the fact their last day I had a excuse me, a little standing corn field behind me and that was standing all day and then the last like two hours of daylight, the farmer came in and picked that and ended up picking you know, all the way combine all the way till the very end of the day, like and wrapped up like the last five minutes of daylight. Um So, yeah, I guess that's a long wind of way. And say, there was a lot of standing corn. There was a lot of combining. Uh didn't end up helping me in the ways I thought. I thought I'd be like get on some of that fresh combine corn and have a flood of doos come out there and be hot. That never happened for me. Um, it certainly could have when there was corn standing in those locations. It certainly could have, like Tony said, it could have soaked up some of those deer and hidden some of those deer out of mat view. I'm sure it did, um how much. I don't know. Question for you, Tony Um flipping it around here one of the things that I found myself, and like every year during the rut, I have this debate internally. I'm sure most of us do in some way. I'm just curious how you how you think about this after this past week, there's this there's these two options I feel like we often have during the rut. One thing is like this temptation to want to find the hot sign, find the action, like where are they right now? Where's the hot right now? If if you're sitting out there somewhere it's not happening, there's a temptation like you gotta go find it, you gotta get out there. So part of me was saying, I gotta scout more, I need to search more. I've got to go get on these deer where they are now, Because as you guys know, I had a long spell there in the middle of my tripport is really really definitely slow. Um. But then I had this other temptation or other thought, which was, man, if you have confidence in a feature in a spot, because it has certain things that just do work like they they're timeless when it comes to the rut. If you have a spot like that, sometimes you have to give it time. You have to silk in that spot to let the good thing finally happen. Right if I hunt the best funnel in the world and doesn't happen the first morning, you know, big Buck might come through the next morning just fine, never know, you know, it would have never known. I was there the whole day prior. But the next day, here he comes. And if I had moved on to the next spot because I was impatient and ever wanna you know, enjoyed that opportunity. So the whole week I was balancing between those two things, like sit in the spot, give it time because I believe in it, or search out the new place. And I was constantly going back and forth and back and forth. And so there's a couple of places where I did give time, and then there was a couple of times when I was like, I gotta pull out, I gotta find something new and scouting all that. But that was like the theme of my week was that tension um Tony with the spots you described, How are you thinking through that? Oh man, I think that I think you just touched on something that we don't really acknowledge during the rut very much. But how much downtime you can have and how much like the second guessing can creep in. And I I kind of think I feel a little different when I'm on public land somewhere. But if I'm on private land and I have confidence in my spots and I'm not I'm not getting busted by does or blowing a lot of deer out. I tend to go to volume hunt route and just try to believe in it just until I've really sort of exhausted a spot. And so I did that, you know where I was hunting the first spot specifically in Wisconsin. I rolled that out I think an afternoon and all day and then and then a morning and it was just like, it's just not this is just not happening here. I've got to go somewhere else. But I think there's a really fine line between just jumping around because you're like, oh, I haven't seen a big buck on this sit yet, and it's like, well, I don't know, man. You have days where you only see a couple of scrappers. You have days where it's just slow, and you have days where it just pops off. And if you're on a really, really good funnel, you want to be there that day it pops off, even if the day before it was just a couple of four keys and some doze or something. And so I kind of think more and more now that just discipline kills deer during the rut. And and unless you've just been given a clear reason to go find that new sign, like I, I know that you were, you were in that position where you're like I I feel like I have to go find them now. Sometimes you hit that and you just have to listen to it because it's the right call. But other times it's like that patience is is what's going to kill that? Dear? Yeah, it's it's like you said, though, it's hard when you've got, you know, twelve hours of nothing happening in and all the little voices whispering in your head. You think through every different possible option. At least I do I think through everything. Like the entire time out there, I'm just thinking through should I do this, should I do this? What's this situation, what's the circumstance, what's this factor? And I just sit there like doing an algebra problem for twelve hours, trying to think through this and that and whatnot. And it definitely, uh, it can definitely just you know, you can go in a direction, that's for sure, Um Spencer. What about you when you were there in Montana? Were you did you have that kind of tension between like it kind of sounds like you did because you had a spot you liked and then you were going to blind o the next morning because you didn't see stuff that night before and you were a little worried about the morning hunts Um, where you just ride in a couple of spots you believed in, or did you have that temptation to yeah it it? What what made less of that for me in my situation was that I had no history with this property. Um, Like I I had scouted a little bit in October, but I didn't have, like, um, some historical perspective like man like November four, this is the best spot you can be on the property UM or anything like that. So I I was, you know, going a little bit off of what I had thought I had learned in October and what I had thought I had learned through aerial UM. But also when you're hunting with a rifle, it feels like, um, you're not selecting like a specific trail to hunt, like you guys have to sort of make those decisions. I'm selecting like a region of the property. Um. So there's certainly like a lot less of that that comes into play when I'm holding the gun and you guys have bows. Yeah, that's a good point. So then what about you that day? Day three? You said, Day two, this gray setting kind of set you up for success the next day. How that how that pan out? Yes? So so day three, um, and I had sort of like made the decision that morning about exactly where I was gonna sit, And it was just sort of like triangulating a spot on on X where like, okay, two hondred yards from this spot in the timber I've seen this book exit multiple times in October, and fifty yards from this spot there is a cluster of scrapes, which I would say as good a chance as any of that are his, and then fifty yards from that there is a water crossing that probably most of the deer in this little herd are using, and so using sort of those like three things. I had picked a spot on on X that it looked like there was gonna be a little lane of visibility for me in there, um, which again it's something I'm really concerned about when I have a rifle. And and that was where I wound up at. And I even told the cameraman like when the sun like when you're starting to get some light, I was like, dude, I have no idea if this is where I want to be. Like my changed my mind, um, you know, as soon as like five minutes into shooting light, because I think we should be fifty yards over or I can get better visibility if we're looking at it from the other angle instead of over here. But we ended up staying there and it really felt like a turkey hunt. I was sitting on the ground with my back up against a tree. Um. I had my face mask pulled off because I'm like, I don't know where the deer are going to funnel through here. There's like nothing that would really like cause an obstruction for them to move through the timber in a specific way. UM. So I was just guessing. And about twenty minutes into shooting light, I see the first dough and she's just in like a perfect spot. She's like a hundred and twenty yards away. Um, and I was like, oh, I nailed it. This, this is great if all the deer can do this, And there happened to be a shooter with that's exactly where I'd want them. And after that dough comes through, then another dought like a hundred and sixty yards, and another dough at like eighty yards, and then I started to see some of that randomness of like, yeah, there's nothing to funnel the movement in here. And all of a sudden I had does everywhere from like sixty yards out to a hundred and sixty yards. And as that's kind of happening to my left, I catch movement behind the cameraman. Again. We're sitting on the ground and I look over and I'm like I'm whispering the caraman. I'm like, hey, like chill out, um, there's a something right behind you. I can't tell what it is, but it's like looking at us. And uh so this This goes on for a few minutes, and it was close enough that it didn't had its head like alert towards us, but I couldn't bring up my bios. I couldn't tell what it was because the backdrop was just like some really crowded timber um and branches and stuff. And so it ended up being the buck. But I had no idea when it was looking at us from thirty yards that it was the buck um that I was after. And so finally the buck kind of chills out after I don't move, the cameraman doesn't move, and I'm able to pull my bios and uh, I'm like, oh, that's this is a shooter. This is a shooter. And uh the cameraman did his best to like swing the camera around, and I'm like, can I shoot? Can I? Can I shoot? I haven't seen the footage yet, but I bet I asked him like six times, um if if I can shoot? And uh if even if he hadn't said yes, going into the seventh I probably would have shot because it it felt like the seconds were ticking away. This thing had already been like a two or three minute encounter, and it locked onto us and it was aware of us a little bit, and it had just like given us enough of window where I could pull my binos and and move my rifle over and uh, he gave me a green light to shoot, and I shot, And at that point it was just like uh, an explosion of white tails in the timber, Like there were deer there in other spots that I didn't realize at the moment. Plus I had like those seven doughs that I had watched funnel through and in the perfect spot. Um, and he only ran about I don't know, probably eighty yards and died. But it was it was not ideal like thirty yards like oh great, Like I picked the perfect spot, but it was far from the perfect spot. I would love for those deer to be like at a hundred yards, that's just as easy of a shot as thirty yards with a rifle, even if they were like a hundred and fifty yards And I didn't have my like scope dial to the ideal spot. If if I had known that I was going to shoot something at thirty yards, that's not like a shot that you practice either. Like when I go out to the range and I'm prepping for a haunt, I'll started like two d and then I go out to three and then four and then five and then back down to two hundred. No one has ever like gone out and given themselves a scenario like all right, it's a morning hunt and it's a half hour into the CITs, and uh, there's the bucket thirty yards what do you do? And and so the shot was just fine and it was clean kill through his lungs um, But there was some anxiety before the shot and after the shot, like did that work out? I don't know. I've never fired my rifle at something at thirty yards before. Um, But it was just like finding that scrape and that water crossing. Like I said, any idiot can go out and identify or deer crossing a stream or a creek or whatever and then knowing where they were coming out of the timber. That put me in that spot, which I ended up being just thirty yards from where that buck wanted. To be mean, I'll tell you what. You should have grew up deer hunting with a gun in northern Michigan. We're lucky, Like thirty yards is a long shot for us out there. I was like, man, I really got some range on this one. Thick, thick stuff. You know what I'm talking about, Tony A big time many. So that's awesome. So day three you killed that buck. The scouting ended up helping you out. Um, other than those two things you identify, the scrape and the creek crossing, was there anything else about that region that spot that you think you know lad to him being there, Like if you had to sit and try to analyze, Okay, why was this the right spot? Is there anything else that you didn't mention to color that more? Yeah? I mean I knew like where there were some unholy thick timber and brush at the very back of the property where I would I would guess like, okay, they're they're probably betting there. That would be a very if I were a white tail, That's where I'd want to bed. And I had seen where they were exiting to feed, and so it was just like picking some spot between those two areas, um. And And it was like I said, the scrape and the water crossing that put me there, and uh, you gave me hell for it. Like the day before when I was sending pictures like hey look at this cool petrified would I found? And Uh, it ended up being only like fifty yards from where I also found that scrape, So I was I was very pleased that I took the scenic rout through the woods that helped me find some petrified wood and a scrape and then put me there the next morning. Do you look at those fancy rocks as like a sign to make you like when that happens and you're out walking in the woods, do you now tend to gravitate gravitate to that kind of spot for dear, No, not at all. It Actually it makes me a worse hunter. Like I'll pick a glassing spot where there's like some exposed gravel or something, or like, uh, I'll have my eyes on the ground and I'm like walking somewhere and they should be up looking for other stuff. So it, uh, it makes me a worse hunter. I'm aware of it. Yeah, Tony, I guess question number one is how do you feel about Spencer's rock hunting? And question number two is question number two is was there anything else of interest on day three for you? Worth cover Listen. I love my me and my little girls. We do a lot of eggit hunting and a lot of shed hunting. So I get where Spencer's coming from. I just think there's a time and a place for it. And I think I think Spencer gets a little uh, he gets a little distracted once in a while when he's out there, but it's okay, I get why he's doing it. Uh. And as far as my day three, it was just a scrapp per fest. Man, it was it felt, you know. And I my buddy Adam was hunting the place with us too, so he was out in different spots on the same farm, and we kind of just had this had similar experiences. It was if you saw a buck coming or you heard a grunt, you looked up and it was a little fork or a little six or a little you know, eight point or whatever, and it just was like we're both kind of sitting there going it just feels like it hasn't broke loose yet, Like even though I had already killed a great buck earlier in the week, it just we're just, you know, like you're waiting for that time when it's like it shifts from just being scrappers running all over the countryside to deer of all ages. And by the third day it had that had not happened for me down in Wisconsin. So so let me ask you this. I'm pulling this purely from anecdotal sources of like a sample size of like eight guys that were all hunting around Iowa where I was at UM leading into the week I started hunting and hunting during the week I was there, and the consensus was that there was a lot of running activity the week prior to November, like that last week of October. Everyone was like, man, it was on fire. A couple of people I know got shots, and that first day or two was pretty good, and then there was basically the majority of that first week was really least slow at least around us, like multiple people, a bunch of different people. Basically all the people I was talking to down there, we're all saying, man, it's dead slow. The only good bucks they were seeing were locked on does. And and there was one well, one day that I was driving from one proper to another, and then that one drive of like a fifteen minute drive from one spot to the next, at midday I saw three different big mature bucks locked on does in the middle of the day, off the side of the road or back in the field, that kind of thing. And then two of my other friends had already tagged out, just spent a lot of time just driving around, puts around, looking for deer and just having fun. And they were seeing the same thing that first week. A lot of mature bucks locked on does um, which I would think the first few days in November is not out of the question, of course, like that happens, but to see so many of them locked down felt like a weird, earlier than usual kind of phenomena. Um, did you see her hear anything about that kind of thing happening between the two of you guys, or anyone else you've talked to? I did, for sure to know about you, Spence. But I kind of think that that happens way more than we think you here. I mean a lot of times the last week October is on fire, and then it seems like there's just this little down period then it kicks in again. But I think your experience, Mark, I think that was what we had going on to an extent. And I don't you know, like this is totally speculation, but when you've got a ton of doze around, the odds of one of them going into astris are way higher, right, It's just a numbers game, and I kind of feel like the places I see that happen where you might get bucks that feel like they're really locked down earlier than you traditionally guess a lot of times it feels like that happens in places where you just have a ton of doze to work with. And I don't know if that's what it is or not, but it sure felt that way for us in in Wisconsin as well. Yeah, Spencer, did you get to talk to anyone? I haven't. I haven't heard radio it all last week because I was gone the whole time. Did anybody else share any any experience like that or anyone else talked to you mention something in those lines? Not not that specific typically, Um, Nor did I happen to witness it in Montana or Wyoming either, But that also just feels like a very Midwest scenario that you're describing to Like you're driving around and they're like, happened be a caught cornfield and now there's like a big buck in a big dough betted down out there. Um, I feel like that's a that's less likely to happen in my neck of the woods out here, And I don't feel like I saw that happening either, But I also don't think I'm in a lot of situations to witness that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Okay, So day four, I'm trying to remember now what happened on day four with you guys, Spencer. You were moving to Wyoming, and uh, if I recall didn't start out, well, do you want to give me like the day four cliff notes on what's on what happened here, because it was it was kind of a transitionary period for you, right, Yes, So day Day three I killed in the morning, so I was able to make the drive to Wyoming yet that night and be hunting on the morning on day four. Um, it started off tough. Um. I had hunted this area one other time last year in October, and I had came down to it again in this last September to hang a few trail camps. But other than that, I have I have no like history with this place, and so my assumed knowledge about things like, oh, there's gonna be cattle in this pasture, and there's gonna be horses over here, and this field is going to be corn, and this one's gonna be beans, and this one's gonna be harvested because it's been so dry. I was wrong on so much of it. I had a ton of wrong And I even told the caraman is like, yeah, you know, we're gonna learn a lot when the sun starts to come up here about like what's corn and where are their livestock at and stuff like that. And I happen to pick like a really poor spot that first morning, and it felt like when they show it there should be like Benny Hill music playing, because I ended up in like a horse pasture with like every horse couldn't have been more curious about what I was or what I was doing. All They're all like walking up to me and like trying to figure it out. It looked like they're like solving a math problem standing there looking at me because they weren't quite sure what I was or what I was doing. There. There happened to be some deer onto I wasn't terrible for deer movement, but I just I don't want to be by horses. Is an extra thing to think about, and I'm pulling the trigger. It's also like not ideal for deer movement. It's not like the deer gonna you know, hate horses or something like that. But if they have the choice to to move through like the landscape in the past year next door that doesn't have horses or the one that does have horses, they'll they'll just pick the one that doesn't have horses. Um. And so Day two in the morning wasn't great. Uh. That evening I had found a cut corn field in the area, which I was I was really concerned about. And I only saw a couple of doughs that night. And that was when I had realized, like, man, I really don't know jack about this place, all the stuff that I thought anyway, I don't because I thought I was on like the best food source in the neighborhood with you know, one of the best betting areas nearby, and just happened to see nothing. And I was trying to diagnose, like, what's going on here? Why Why am I not seeing as many deer as I think? Um, which I learned more about on day five. I think on day five I figured out why my haunting was so slow in that spot. But day four was not great. Okay, Tony, what about your situation? Uh? My Day four was the last sit on that crossing that I just couldn't get it going on. And then I moved to the pond for at the bottom of the valley for an afternoon sit and it was still more of the same. Uh So I saw a lot of deer and I started to get to figure out how they were using the valley around that pond finally when I got to go in there, but it was a scrapper fest once again. And you know it was it was slated to get hotter, and so you're sitting there thinking, Okay, is that gonna affect the situation at all? But you're sitting on water and it's going from you know, November four to November five, and you just think, at one of these times it's gotta bust open. And so, you know, the fourth day was kind of a kind of a wash for me. It was fun, but I didn't you know, it wasn't that great. But the fifth day turned on for me, and they're in a in a major way. But I didn't have I didn't have much going on until that fourth day ended, let me put it that way, And and day five was the day for both you guys, right, I didn't kill on Day five. I did I did, but it was a big day for you. It was a big day. It was a big frustrating day. And Spencer, was day five or six, your your next big excitement. Day five is when I killed Okay, So let's let's go with you, Spencer Phillison, on how you were able to figure out what the problem was on day five and how you fixed it, um, and then we'll let Tony ride it out from there. Day five, I thought I identified what would be a good spot for my morning haunted Wyoming, and I get there plenty early, and I'm having a unique gas where I'm crossing two pieces of private ground to get to a piece of public, both of which I had permission for um. And if you didn't have a way to come in via the private, it would be almost impossible to haunt otherwise. And I'm coming into where I want to be in the morning, and there's a headlamp like fifty yards from where I have my on xpain dropped of where I'm headed to, and so I go over and and I talked to the dude, and it turned out we had both gotten permission from the same folks and had the same game plan, and he had beat me there, so I moved out. But in talking to him, I had learned um that he had permission as well as a handful of other guys. He said that the neighboring properties also get a bit of pressure this time of year. And where I was ignorant coming into this is that when I was in Wyoming in haunting in October, I was hunting in the middle of the week, um, and I had talked to you a handful of landowners at one point when like five or five getting permission to haunt, like nobody tell me now, and it was it was amazing, But that generosity didn't end with me. That had turned out that they didn't really tell anybody now. And uh So the difference being there during the middle of the week in October versus on a weekend in November made an enormous difference. So we had that guy where I wanted to be. I started ahead to my Plan B spot. On my way over there, I see a ranger pulling up like like a side by side. Um. So then I go to like a Plan F. And as I'm at Plan F twenty minutes into the haunt, a different ranger comes driving by. Within a hundred yards of me, and uh like twenty minutes after that, long ways away on a different property I can haunt. I see a pickup driving across like a pasture, and he stops and gets out, and he rattles off six shots at something that I couldn't even see what it was he was shooting at, whether it was deer, coyote, or whatever. But I had quickly learned that there were many many folks that were sort of doing the same thing as me, and these places you just do not hunt big enough for that sort of high impact pressure where guys are driving rangers around or getting out of their pickups and rattling off shots like that. Um. And there's also like not that many mature bucks to go around. Even if we all sort of had the same idea to kill something three and a half years old or older, it just like wasn't gonna happen. So day five I didn't see a single deer, but I also encountered a ton of hunting pressure, um, which was sort of like the lowest point of of my whole week so far. And so then coming off the morning on day five, like, all right, I gotta figure something else out. I need to go like knock on other doors or find some other public to haunt or whatever. And uh, I probably put a hundred miles on my pickup that afternoon, driving basically the whole unit. My tag was good for looking at pieces of public and talking to different landowners and stuff like that. And I ended up getting three permissions off of about on a ten or twelve doors I knocked on UM. One person, though, wanted a trespass fee, which I wasn't really interested in. The other person UM had said I was welcome hunt, but they hadn't seen a deer they're like all fall. And then the other person where I ended up deer hunting, said that they would get somewhere between like ten and thirty deer in their field of night UM and that I was I was welcome to go out there. So that was when I settled in for night or for the for the evening of night five UM. And it was sort of the same thing that I had experienced many times over, Like I go in there based on what I thought I knew about the place and on X and I sit down, I'm like, I have no idea if this is right, Like I might change my mind. I may be way way off about where I'm sitting on this property. And the first deer that we see, I watched him come all the way from like six hundred yards to crossing the fence in front of me at like twenty yards. So yet again I was like far too close for a rifle for for where I should be. Um. But that evening there were some other deals that fed out. I don't know. They were probably seven yards away from me at the time, and all I could see where do was at that point, but I thought that's where I should be. Anyway, if there's doughs there, maybe a buck's gonna show up at laft last light. So we cut the distance from probably like seven yards to I don't know, about two hundred yards to where I see all these doughs are at. And at that time a buck comes rolling out into the field and it was just like a perfectly ruddy scene where he is chasing these doughs all over hell and he gets on one dough and he he chases her to what happens to be within like two d yards of me, and he was so hot on her at the time that like I couldn't tell what was really going on in this rat because he had like some sage hanging down and stuff, because he was cutting through the vegetation so hard, and I'm trying to stop him, going matt man man, and I probably do that like four times. Finally I whistle at him and uh, do another like marit, and at that point he stops at like two hundred yards the dough was gone, and uh, I shoot him. And the being a four by four um not very big, probably like a two and a half or maybe a three and a half year old since there's not great nutrition here. But I was stoked on it. I felt like I solved a puzzle. I felt like I saw a puzzle. Um. I had gained access a few hours prior, and you know, within an hour after that, I was hanging the deer and the guy's shed. Um. And then that morning, like it, it felt like I wasn't even back at square one. I was like square zero. Because of all this knowledge I thought I had, I didn't have, and all this access I thought I had, I didn't have to myself. UM. So to like figure that out in the afternoon and find a new place to haunt using on X and then like finding a place that I wanted to haunt on the property and closing the distance. Uh, man, it felt good. It was like so satisfying. It's one of the smaller box that I've killed and in a few years. Um, but damn it, I was. I was real stoked with how it happened. Yeah. I love the resiliency and the way you're able able to pivot. I mean that was that was good stuff right there. Do you do you have any thoughts you can share on just your trick to talking his landowners? I mean how you approach them, how you how you went about asking them for permission, anything you've learned because you've done it's a bunch. Now, Um what what led to your success on that front? Because that was kind of the key to this whole thing. Yeah. Yeah, I try to put myself in like high success scenarios, Um, where if I'm going to knock on someone's door or like writing a letter, Um, I'm not going for like usually the A plus property that probably already has like deer stands on it, and then they've been asked a hundred times and you can see that they've like manicured the property in a certain way for like hunting it or something like that. Those aren't the place I'm going after. I'm going after like B minus property, something that's like worth my time and probably still holds like some good deer. Um. But also these spokes like don't really value it themselves because it's it's not so obvious like what the deer doing or where the deer at. They're not getting bogged all the time from neighbors to hunt it. Um. And then it also helps to be in a state like Wyoming where a lot of the folks there within fifty miles of where I killed my white tail. You can be in like some world class lk hunting and big horn sheep and and antelope and uh giant mule deer and stuff like that, white tails become like such an afterthought even for the folks that live there and like hunting themselves. Um. It's almost like I'm asking permission to coyot hunt with some of these people. That's how like low they think of a white tail. Um. So I think one of the best things that I do, though, is, like I said, seeking out what I would identify as like a B minus property, rather than only spending my time trying to get permission on something that's an A plus. I think that's great advice, especially if you're trying to get last minute permission like this, like in season, that's such a hard ask in a lot of places that those overlooked spots. That's that's a really really good idea. Um, well well done man, nicely nicely pulled off spin move there. Then thank you, thank you. And so that was that was my day five and happened in the evening and then uh, I mean that was basically then the main gist of year week. You filled your second tag showing us all how it's done, Tony. Tony, you were still going close us out here with the story of your two days of of chaos or whatever ended up being there in Wisconsin to close things out. How how did you how do you adjust on day five? And what happened? Well, on day five, I just about put rocks into my pockets and jumped into the Mississippi after the morning hunt. So I went back into that pond stand and had it was it was supposed to get I think in the fifties that day, so it was supposed to get pretty warm, but it was clear from the sits in there that they were there were there was extra stuff going on there besides just the water. There was a really good funnel that I could shoot too, and I knew, I mean, I knew that was there. I had a camera on it. But there was also a knob on the hill above us that the does seem to go in there, and bed I've never been in there. I'm going to be this winner. But a lot of the action kind of it went to there, and it originated from there, and so it was sort of like I felt like I was sitting below one of the best betting areas doe betting areas on the property, kind of by accident. But anyway, the fifth morning of the hunt starts out when a little scrapper comes down, gets the drink, goes back up the hill and like perfect, you know, he didn't win to us anything. And then at like nine o'clock in the morning, like a hundred and fifty inch comes running down the hill and I stand up, you know, get clipped on my cameraman scrambling, and that buck stops. He walks by at fifteen yards. I can't shoot him yet because I'm waiting for the cameraman, and then he stops at the pond twenty one yards below me, and this is a beautiful book, like all of and so I'm just waiting. He's he's got to turn like a foot and a half and I've got a twenty one yard shot, wide open opportunity. And he drinks and he walks into the pond. He drinks some more. And every deer to that point has gone there and then walked right back up through that shooting lane. So this buck starts to turn and I draw, and he walks right below me in all this brush. So now he's like ten yards away. I have no shot, so I let down, and instead of doing what every other deer did, this deer decides to go up along the dike where I can't shoot, and he's walking out of my life. And so he ends up cutting through this brush at like thirty yards walking away. So I grabbed my grunt tube and I grunt at him, and he stops and turns, and then he's kind of thinking about it, and then he turns to walk away and ground again turns around. This happens like I think three times. He starts making a scrape and and working his antlers in the tree, and I'm looking at him like I got a perfect hole to his vitals, and so I range him. It's thirty four yards, and so I dial into thirty four and just get ready to draw. He turns starts walking right at me. So I dial back down to twenty. I'm like, this deer's toast, and he starts getting closer, and instead of going under this log across the trail, he cuts down into this brush. And so this buck is like he's like bulletproof, Like every move he's made has kept him just like with enough stuff on his vitals. And now he's like maybe twenty yards away, standing in the brush, and I've got a shot at every part of this deer but his lungs, Like I could shoot him in the head, I coul shoot him in the butt, everywhere that you don't want to shoot a deer. And he stands there, stands there, and finally moves a little bit, gets down wind of us, and takes off, and it was like, I don't know, I don't know if my camera guy was filmed. And after that deer ran away or not, I threw a pitty party. I was so bummed to have that deer. I I felt like it was like five minutes, I have aft within you know, thirty four yards of me. It ended up being a seven and a half minute encounter and I never killed that deer, and I booked him out of there. He got he winded us, and I was like, how you know I had already killed one in the one fifties on Monday. I'm like, how how long am I gonna have to wait for? I have another week where I get two really good opportunities at hundred fifty bucks And it was just a downer. So we set that out and I ended up I had fully gone into this this project. I'm like, I'm going home with a bunch of meat. I got a bunch of dough tags, I got two buck tags, I got a fall turkey tag, and I hadn't had a really good opportunity at a dough yet. And I wanted to rest that pond spot because I knew, uh, we were going to get progressively warmer. So I knew I was gonna pull all days sits from there on out there because it was gonna get into the sixties. And so my buddy had put in this clover plot and I was like, I'm gonna go put a blind up on there, just try to try to get a dough and you know, maybe a doll bring in a buck, you know. But I literally went into it thinking I'm gonna maybe shoot a doll or calling a turkey that afternoon and sitting there, you know, it's getting a little bit later, and all of a sudden, I thought I heard a grunt. I'm like, yeah, man, that sounded close. Six doughs run by the blind and I look up and here comes this nice three and a half year old type eight pointer and he stops twenty nine yards quartered away, and I'm on the ground. I'm like, oh my god, he's toast. Well. My cameraman can't get on him because the side of the blind. So I start panicking because I know this buck's going to chase those doughs like he's I had already stopped him once, and so I knew I had to let him walk, stop him when he got on film, and then try to shoot him. And by then my brain was sludge, and that deer walked out. I stopped him, I guessed, I can't remember what I guess now, thirty thirty something, and I stopped him, wide open, nothing between me and him, but air an opportunity, and I shot right over his back and he ran off, and I was like, I cannot believe I just blew that shot. Nobody's fault on my own. So like now I've had two amazing opportunities today after struggling for three days. And that deer he kind of he got a little wiggy. Obviously he left those doughs stayed out there. And as it got later, you know, we run, you run out of camera light earlier than you run out of shooting light. And it was getting to that point where you're like, it's it's pretty much time to call it. But there's a bunch of does out in front of us and my camera and starts kind of packing up, and I'm like, dude, let's just let's hang tight for a little bit. Let's hease dear clear out. I don't want to spook him. And I said, I think a big one is going to come out. And no, sooner had I said that than I looked out and this monster body deer comes out and I bring up my binos and my first impression is one eight, like it's it's one of the biggest bucks I've ever laid eyes on. Ever, and he starts chasing a dough and I'm looking at him and it's getting darker, but it's still legal shooting light. But I'm like, I have that like conundrum going on where You're like, Okay, I gotta film this project, but if that deer comes close enough, I really want to kill him. He ended up starting to chase a dough at me, and I don't know, I don't know if any of this footage turned out or not, but he got to thirty nine yards, turned and stopped, turnaround, ran away, And by the time that deer was out of my life, I had settled on like I think he's a just unbelievable And so I was sitting there thinking I legitimately had three amazing bucks within shooting range and I'm going back to the cabin with no filled tags, nothing but like a whole lot of self doubt and a whole lot of stupid moves. And it was just a wild It was a wild day for me, Like I was. I was spent by the end of that day. When the last time that either one of you missed a deer, I think I missed one every year. I don't know. Um, I hadn't missed one this year, but probably last year or two years ago. Yeah, I missed. I missed my target buck in Michigan last year. Try to slip into the hole that I shouldn't have. So we have a pattern, Tony, That's what we're trying to saying. I think I think we have Spencer giving us a little bit too much credit here. But you're good for the rest of the season. Then that means no, uh no more missed encounters or or miss shots. Then for that must be it. I like that. I like that. So Tony, you were spent, you were frustrated. So it sounds like coming out of that day, it wasn't like, oh man, I'm right in the action. I had three close calls, this is gonna happen. It was probably more like, oh man, I had three close calls and I couldn't capitalize. I suck? Was it? That? Was that where you were at? By the time day six rolled around, I was a little bit of both. I knew, you know that big one I spooked in the morning. He wasn't coming back unless unless a dope brought him in, and then you know, you miss one year, Like I'm probably not gonna have a chance at that dear again. And so I had a ton of confidence in that pond spot, with the way it laid out and the way that the weather was going to break for me. But you also sit there and you go, you know, you don't get that many days like that as a bowl hunter. I mean, it's just you know when it when it when it breaks like that, and you don't you don't capitalize, you know, I mean, it might be years before something like that happens again. And so I had that in the back of my mind. But I was also like, I know, I've got a couple of days left. I'm going all day on that water, and I'm gonna hope those sixty degree temperatures bring a buck to me. All right, bring us home. Then give me a little bit more on why you're still confident with this water thing, because if people haven't been following you, maybe they aren't as familiar with the water game at this time of year. Now, Hopefully people have been listening to foundations, Hopefully people know this perspective, but just in case they don't, give us a little bit more detail on why this was something you were really willing to bet the rest of your trip on Uh, you know, when you're when you're looking at November six, then it's gonna be sixty two, sixty three degrees. I mean, the ruts, the ruts gonna happen, like those deer are gonna chase uh, those doors are gonna get thirsty, the bucks are gonna get thirsty. And I just felt like, you know, obviously we had we had somewhat of a limited water source. I think there was more water around than I originally thought, but it was it was a good tucked into the cover pond, which I love, and we just had a lot of good timber and a lot of good cover around it, and really good winds and really good access. And so it's set up. It's honestly one of the coolest stands I've ever hung in my life. You sit there and you look around, You're like it could happen from anywhere here at any time. And so I knew, you know, pulling an all day sit when by one or two o'clock in the afternoon we were going to be bumping into kind of beach weather that you know, there was a good chance somebody that I was interested in was going to come in and I'll tell you what you know. I went in there the next morning and parked parked by truck in a spot where I was like, no deer is ever going to know you're here. And I got out of my truck, out my stuff. Friday, walking up the road with the cameraman, jumped a deer in the ditch. I heard it running and I was like, man, that did not sound like a little dough. Got a little farther in, jumped that deer again, and I'm like, well, there's one deer we'll never see, and climbed into the stand. Even before it was first light, I could hear a buck chasing and grunting. And then as soon as it got light out, I looked up on the hill. Here comes this great buck walking out. I thought it was the eight point where I missed the night before, but when I actually saw the footage, it was a different bucket was a ten pointer, and he came in and stopped at thirty three yards, and I tried to call him down the hill because he looked like he wasn't gonna come down the hill. I didn't know he was that close until he sat there for a long time, and then I arranged him. I'm like, I just need to shoot him now, but I was already pinned down, and it was It was not my finest moment, but that deer ended up walking off and coming into water in a different way. But I mean, we started the morning right away covered in action, and then it was little bucks and started getting hotter, and we had a weird situation there where right away early morning was good, what you'd expect. I saw one buck chase up on the hill and then it got it died for a couple hours, and had a random doing a fawn come into water. And then at like noon, when you know, you kind of think, like this is not gonna happen. I had never killed a buck in the mid day of my life, Like I've killed him up until about maybe eleven in the morning and then maybe starting at like two in the afternoon. But I'm like, I've never killed that lunch shift buck. But we started seeing deer movement around us and had some fawns loan fawns come in and drank. At like twelve thirty, I looked up on the hill and way up toward that betting knob as far as I could see in the woods. I saw a nice buck cruising and I said, if that deer comes down and gives me a shot, I'm gonna shoot that deer. And he ended up working his way all the way down and going instead of going to water where I thought he was, he saw those fawns and switched and ended up I just stopped him just before he got out of my life and ended up getting a shot in him. And it worked out. And that was one o'clock in the af for noon. So the confidence in that spot paid off. It just took a lot. It took a while. So so what's the takeaway there when you when you look back at that hunt? Was it what was the key? Do you think? Was it that you just had the faith and stuck it out all day? Was it something else? I mean it's partially that, but it's partially just given yourself as much to work with as possible. You know, you think about we kind of distill the rut hunting down into like get on a funnel and it's gonna be amazing, or get down windo that dough betting area and it's gonna be amazing. And I look at it and go, sure, like that's a good starting point. But what if you have a funnel next to water within you know, seeing distance, hearing distance of the best betting area on the property. But if you start building those things in there, it's easier to sit when you believe like there's multiple reasons for a deer to come here, you know, and a lot and a lot of times we do you know, the destination food source thing or the betting area thing, and those are good. But if you can tack a few more things that are work going on in your favor, like that that spot I killed that Minnesota buck. If that was just one waterway going through, that would be a good spot during the rut. But because it splits and it and it attaches that property to other properties, we can't hunt and other places where you know, people are they're trying to kill big bucks, and like it's feeding that one little hub that you're sitting in. Now you've just increased your odds instead of just maybe they'll come from this way, maybe they'll come from that way. Now you're like, well, or they could come from down there, or they could come from behind me. And this pond was like that, like it had it had all of those things going forward as far as terrain, it had water and it had bedding, and it was all lumped into one spot. And when you know that and you believe that, it's so much easier to put in those hours because it's just like somebody's coming, you know. Yeah. I love those spots where you can stack, where you stack all the different features and all the other attractive points and you get those those ven diagram spots where they all meet and and they skyrockets are offense. Makes it makes such a difference just the mental side of things. Um, big time spencer, what about you when you look back at your success and your rut? Uh, what were your big takeaway is? Was there anything that stood out for you that you're gonna take with you from here until next year and you're always gonna keep in your back pocket as a lesson or something you can point to. Yeah, I think, Uh, the big thing, Like both of my successes happened on private property where I was a total stranger to the landowner and either like wrote them a letter or might knocked on their door and talk to him and ended up getting permission. Um. And it's just like a thing that's so much easier said than done. Though there's this sort of thing that's happening right now with gen Z that they've they've made sexy over the last couple of years where they do like rejection therapy, where they put themselves through something that is like a really uncomfortable situation where they're most likely going to get told no, and they do it like every day, and then it makes the more mundane things seem a lot easier. So an example might be like they would go into uh A grocery store and they ask somebody if they can speak over the intercom or something like that. Of course they're gonna get told now. But if you do that or some variation of that a lot, then it makes the more mundane things like um, asking for a day off at work, or asking someone you're attracted to if they want to get a drink, It makes that kind of thing seem way easier, right, And so it used to take like every bit of courage I had to go ask a landowner for hunting permission in college, I'd like have to psych myself out to just go knock on a couple doors, and then I would I would get told. Though now at this point I've done it hundreds of times over and I've I've learned, just like this real simple thing that the worst thing that's gonna happen is I get told now, and and that's not a big deal. Um. So I've I've just gotten used to like getting rejection through asking landowners for hunting permission. But it makes it so much easier. So someone who's like not stoked on the properties they have access to or thrilled about, you know, the public land in their area. And of course it is the thing that's easier said than done in a place where white tails are an afterthought. In the West, where I'm at, it's probably is gonna have the same success and to stay like Michigan or Indiana. Um, but like, just just go seek out permissions, like write some letters, knock on doors. The worst thing that's gonna happen is now. And the more you do it, the easier it's gonna get to the point where I have an unreasonable confidence that I can roll into a state like Wyoming and and find some permission at two pm and then kill a deer at five pm. Yeah, I love that. I just have to disagree with one thing I always used to agree with you, and I used to say the same thing, that that the worst thing that can happen is that you'll get a no. That was always that was always the line I told myself, The worst thing it can happen is that it will stay in because it's already a note to start with, right, But that all changed this year when I had knocked on the door for permission and got the caught the cops called on me, So you know it could be a little bit worse. Man. Yeah, that's that's an extreme I haven't experienced quite yet. Yeah, that'll that'll be a podcast for a future episode down the road. And that was that wasn't This is technically a little different because I wasn't asking for hunting permission. I was asking for tracking permission. Um so, slightly different, although seemingly a smaller request. Um So, I gotta love those suburbs of Washington, d c. Um different kind of different. I think points still remains just like, put yourself out there. Um, I think you'll be surprised at how many folks just like don't get asked for hunting permission on their property. And you may be not the first, but the first person in a couple of years and Uh, there's there's some amount of charisma you had that the last four people that asked didn't. And now you got a new five acre spot to hunt, and it'll be like a thing that you, you know, may have relationship now for the next decade and in a new place to go look for white tails. Yeah, totally totally worth taking the shot for sure. Uh. Well, guys, I appreciate taking the time to recap this to share, you know, your thoughts and your lessons learned. And I'm glad you guys did well. You carried the show. Thank you for getting four kills for our week in November. Uh Clay managed one there at the end that I'm sure we'll get to discuss at some point. And uh, you know you're your friendly host the Wired Hunt podcast here I blanked. So glad you guys supported me and carried me through. Uh. Any last thoughts, any last things you want to make sure people look for. Make sure check out the Mediator YouTube channel. Folks should be out this week. Uh it's either out today or was out a couple of days ago. There's I'm a little confused about when it's launching. It's gonna be out there this week. At some point. The first episode of the show will be November six, and then because we hunted for seven days or seven episodes, so seven weeks of content every Tuesday, they's gonna be coming out and by the series should be wrapped. I'm glad you know what's going on. I thought it was coming out Thursday. So either way, by the time this episode drops, the show will be available. Yeah, that's all that matters. Well, it's gonna be good stuff, guys. I've seen the first episode. It's strong, it's fun, and uh, I think people are gonna enjoy it. So thank you Tony, thank you Spencer, and let's put a bowl on this one, all right, and that's a rap. Thanks for listening. Appreciate you joining on this one. Like Spencer said, be sure to check out episode one of one weekend November on the Meat Eater YouTube channel. I hope you enjoy it, and until next time, stay wired.