In 1974, a seventeen year old farm boy convinced himself he could harvest a deer with a bow and arrow. It didn’t take a lot of coaxing or encouragement; it just seemed like the natural thing to do in his part of the Midwest. This self-taught hunter was motivated by the misperception of free meat, and the need to answer an internal question, “Can I do it?”

In those days he didn’t have access to hundreds of magazines devoted exclusively to the sport of hunting whitetails with a bow.

When it looked as though this random seed of deer hunting would die from lack of information and encouragement, another hunter named Don Hires, 40 years his senior introduced himself. That sunny day after church services the two birds of a feather were drawn together in conversation. The young upstart had hundreds of questions, and the senior woodsman had a hundred stories and adventures to match. Although many years separated this unlikely pair they would become hunting buddies for life. Once armed with an extremely basic understanding of the steps needed to cash in on that “free meat”, the rookie was off to the wooded river-bottoms his family farmed.

October 1st finely came and the cool night air moved in as he sat on the trunk of a fallen tree. There was no stand, no camouflage, just a boy, a bow and one good straight arrow left, now on his string. The number of things that had to have gone right, by pure accident, were off the scale that evening, nevertheless, I found myself at full draw on, not just a deer, but a buck the size of a John Deere tractor. Yes, I was the awkward teen, and the buck seemed that big to me at the time.

From that point on, I was hooked on hunt’en, and anything I could get my hands on to increase my understanding of it, and the outdoors. My time in the US Navy would come to be the only thing capable of keeping me from missing opening day of bow season.

Thirty six years later I find myself to be the “Senior Outdoorsman” compelled to pass on the lessons imparted to us all by man and nature. The goal of this piece in Outdoor All-stars is to shorten the learning curve for beginning hunters and bring new strategies to the experienced outdoorsman. I invite you to return to this section for information on field proven hunting tactics and a look at some of today’s controversial issues from a hunters “Point of View.”