Humbled By Whitetails

Perhaps 25 million strong in North America alone, the whitetail deer is the most numerous big-game animal in the world. Since some 10 million North American hunters pursue him, he is also the most important big-game animal on the planet. An entire industry revolves around his propagation and pursuit, and the magazines that are kind enough to purchase most of my work (like this one) devote considerable pages to hunting him.

This means that, for an American outdoor writer, hunting whitetail deer and producing articles is not only like apple pie and motherhood, it's also bread and butter. It's true that I do a lot of writing about far-flung pursuits. I've been in the writing game a long time, and some of my editors give me a bit of latitude in my subject matter. A few consider it a personal favor to allow me to write about hunting three-toed gazorks and such, but all expect me to do their bidding at least some of the time; for most editors and most magazines that includes a healthy annual word count on whitetails.

This is just fine with me. As I've often written, I grew up in Kansas--now a great whitetail state, but when I was a kid we had few deer and no deer season. The opportunity to hunt deer was a big deal when I was a teenager, as it still is today. Nothing gets me as excited as a nice buck of any species. I truly do like whitetail hunting. No animal on Earth is as hunter-educated as our whitetail, and thus no animal is as wary as a mature whitetail buck--or, sometimes, as frustrating. But I like to hunt whitetails and wish I spent more time hunting them.

You see, I started writing about hunting in the early '70s. This was before the great whitetail population explosion and long before the cult of whitetail hunting that resulted. Back then, it never occurred to me that a whitetail story would become a staple. As a kid from Kansas who had to travel to hunt big game, I got in the habit and never quit traveling. I first went to Africa in 1977 and of course got hooked. I've often stated that, as a writer, I'd be much further ahead financially if I'd never gone to Africa at all but had instead invested all that time, money and energy in hunting whitetail deer.

Of course, it's much too late for that. I am what I am, and I will never be an expert on hunting whitetails. That doesn't mean I don't like them, and it certainly doesn't mean that I don't spend a fair amount of time hunting them each fall. Partly this is because my editors expect and demand it, but it's also because I love it. Some seasons are great, some are not so great, but I notice that things get ever more difficult as the bar keeps getting raised.

There was a time when I could take a nice-looking buck and get a story or two and make my editors happy. Today I just can't do that. Thank God I don't have to shoot a huge buck or a high-scoring buck because those things don't matter so much, but I can no longer shoot a good-looking young buck, because I have learned the difference. I have to look for a mature whitetail buck that has passed along his genes, and that makes things very difficult indeed.