By Michael Sullivan
Anyone else like to screw things up? Because I sure do. Especially when it comes to hunting. I’m tired of successful hunting stories, and I’ve seen more big deer pictures on Instagram than I’ll ever care to recall. Let’s flip the coin and reminisce on the best “learning experiences.” Sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you screw things up, and if you’ve never made a mistake, you’re lying.
I have a personal vendetta against turkeys. There’s a gaggle of them that lives next to the river where we deer hunt. During deer season they often come out at midday and circle the corn field before roosting for the night. Somehow, they know to stay exactly 50 yards from my stand. The one time they did get within 40 yards? As I drew back my old Mathews single-cam my phone weaseled its way out of my pocket, tumbling 25 feet to the forest floor. They scattered like wildfire, and naturally my phone screen shattered.
Failing Afield — Rights of Passage
A few years back we took a trek out to a friend’s beautiful ranch in western Wisconsin. Rolling hills and small streams with thick woods are a turkey’s paradise. I was sitting against a log on a wooded hill overlooking a gravel road, a turkey decoy 15 yards in front of me. After a long conversation with a behemoth tom, he strutted in all sorts of horned up. As I flipped the safety off: WOOSH. The loose spring vegetation gave way to my foot slipping out from my leg’s bent position. Leg and gun followed suit, making a thud as they hit the ground. Quite frankly, I’m lucky I didn’t take a 12-gauge turkey load to my big toe. Either way, he was gone.
Spot-and-stalk deer hunting in the farmland of southeast Wisconsin is virtually impossible. We like to spend long hours freezing our tails off in tree stands no bigger than the desk chair you’re sitting in. There’s no rush like having a monster whitetail sneak into range while bowhunting. That is, unless you’re like me and had the buck of a lifetime stop at 20 yards with his vitals directly behind an old oak tree. I could see ass and antlers, and boy did he test my arm strength. After what felt like an eternity, I let my bow down and, of course, the second I did, he bolted.
Duck hunting is a personal favorite of mine. You’ll never get the perfect decoy spread, you’ll break calls right before first light, and whenever you somehow think you screwed the whole thing up, you’ll shoot a limit before 8 a.m. It’s a never-ending game of trying to get it right.
Shit Happens
If you take one thing away from my never-ending list of screwups, let it be this: pace your breakfast. A granola bar does the body well, but insulated chest waders will float the scent of every bean and egg in that 4 a.m. breakfast burrito. The ducks don’t care, but your nose does. Mix that with some coffee and you quickly come to the realization that waders don’t come off easily in a rush either.
Duck dogs are a rare breed and an amazing asset in the blind and in life. Unfortunately, they don’t often mix well with canoes. On the way back from the far blind on our property, I learned this lesson the hard way on a particularly cold October morning. My old man and I were about halfway back to the input (200 yards) when our beloved hunting dog decided she didn’t want to swim the rest of the way.
Now before I get PETA called on me, there’s a shoreline I directed her to wade along. A canoe is just easier for gear hauling. With her best Michael Phelps impression, she tried to hoist herself into the canoe and promptly flipped the whole enchilada into the murky abyss. Thankfully, the water was chest high, so our guns weren’t lost, but my waders were filled to the brim, and every single thing previously in the canoe was now caked in a layer of ice immediately upon retrieval. Instead of an afternoon hunt, we spent the rest of the day drying, thawing, and cleaning all of our gear.
Watermen Woes
Fishing? I’m bad at it. You’ve read about our engine dying three miles out on Lake Michigan… Damn bananas. The first salmon I ever caught I somehow snagged it under the dorsal fin and reeled it in sideways. A statistics lesson presented itself one day when a 30-inch muskie snapped at my little Walmart walleye rod boasting 10-pound test. I’ve chalked fishing up to beer being the solution to a good day unless it’s on the big pond.
If you’re reading this, you likely already enjoy hunting. It scratches some sort of primal itch that we’ve had since the beginning of time. Social media has shown us more trophies than anyone should ever see. I still wonder why people care that Cam Hanes shot his sixth bull elk of the year. Go on every real adventure you can, be hard on your gear, and screw something up. Lord knows I’ll be doing it wrong until the day I hang up my shotgun for the last time.
