We were belly-crawling down a dirt road when Newt paused, raised his binos, and whispered, “I think they’re whitetails.” I couldn’t see anything, and my hands were too cold to break out the binos. It was a sharp November morning during the beginning of Nebraska’s week-long rifle season. A mountain boy from Colorado, I was entirely out of my element in Western Nebraska, where I’d come to spot and stalk rutting whitetails—and hopefully kill my first buck. Pale morning light had just begun to wash the cut cornfield.
“Stay low. We’ve got to close the gap,” said Newt. “I think I see at least one buck.”
I still didn’t see anything, but I followed Newt’s lead, eating mouthfuls of dust and scraping my elbows in the process. What in the world am I doing? That thought recurred frequently as I learned to hunt as an adult. But there was no time to dwell on it. Newt led the way, and I struggled to keep up. The road had sparse cover, just small tufts of cheatgrass and several cedars spaced out sporadically. Belly-crawling felt painfully slow, but Newt stayed flat to the dirt, and so did I. Then, I paused when I saw a glimmer of movement. Deer. My heartbeat quickened.
I was nearly in range of my first buck.
I didn’t grow up in a hunting family. Neither of my parents hunt, and the same goes for most of my extended family. It’s not that they’re against it, but it’s just not something we ever did.
Most of my childhood was spent in a ski town in Colorado’s Western Slope. It was the kind of place where it wasn’t uncommon for a friend or neighbor to give you elk meat from a recent kill, but where hunting still wasn’t the most popular outdoor pursuit. So, I was vaguely familiar with hunting—and loved the delicious taste of big game meat. But learning how to hunt, myself, felt out of reach.
My dad taught me how to fish, catching trout with nightcrawlers and Powerbait at nearby lakes and reservoirs. On vacations to visit family out East, we used Texas rigs to catch largemouth bass. By the time I was in middle school, I became obsessed with it. I figured out all kinds of lure fishing before eventually picking up a fly rod.
Hunting seemed different, though. While I’d reeled my fair of trout, killing a big game animal was intimidating, in part because of the size of the animal, the difficulty of doing so—and then processing it—and simply because it wasn’t a part of my family’s culture. Still, I was intrigued by it.
I started hunting, eventually, because of work. I interned at Field & Stream and Outdoor Life before my senior year of college. After that, I freelanced for hook and bullet publications before landing full-time as Field & Stream’s news editor, where I covered everything from big bucks to record fish to pressing conservation issues.
And every day, I read articles and even occasionally wrote about hunting. I wanted to understand it to be able to write about it more proficiently. And also, I craved the interesting experiences at the heart of many of our hunting stories.
I needed to try it myself.
I started small—squirrel hunting with one of our senior editors. Then I progressed into bird hunting. I grew accustomed with using firearms and killing animals, which I hoped would prepare me for what I considered to be the most quintessential, Platonic ideal of the pursuit: deer hunting.
But I was still nervous. I fretted that killing a big game animal would exact an emotional toll I wasn’t prepared to face. Or worse: that I would wound and lose a deer. To ease my fears—and lacking a familial connection to hunting—I read stories from others about their first deer.
Many of the tales I encountered were profound in one way or another. Writers often recounted, with a heavy dose of nostalgia, the bonding moments they had with parents, siblings, or even friends. Other adult-onset hunters wrote about how it helped them work through personal grief. And others even talked about how hunting gave them deeper understandings of mortality and their relationship to nature. All of these seemed like worthy reasons to kill a deer, and I had high hopes for my own revelatory moment with my first buck.
But that wasn’t what happened.
I hunted my first deer at the invitation of Newt Borowski and Buck Martin, two media PR pros whose companies footed the bill for my trip. I was decked out in new camo, knew the bucks that were on the property with Moultrie Mobile trail cam shots, and had a beautiful Maven scope mounted to my brand-new 6.5 Creedmoor. Newt and Buck—whom I’d met for the first time in-person when I arrived in Nebraska—were my mentors. We were fast friends and enjoyed our time in the field, but did not form a deep bond. And while the hunt was memorable, it didn’t cause an especially strong emotional reaction.
We didn’t get the buck on that first stalk. But that afternoon, it came together rather smoothly. We hunted a crop corner a half mile from where we finished in the morning. A combine was harvesting the nearby field. The corner was surrounded by a row of planted cedars. We waded through standing corn to reach our spot, then set up next to one of the trees. In the CRP, a couple of young bucks were chasing a group of does. I was too slow on my first couple of opportunities. Then a three-by-three stopped broadside at 80 yards, and I pulled the trigger.
Minutes later, I reached the buck. It went down ten yards from where I hit it. I shook hands with Newt and Buck and admired the deer. I reached out and touched the antlers first, running my fingers from the sharp points down the cool vein-like ridges on the bone. The bottom portion of the antlers were dug into the dry Nebraska dirt. The full-bodied deer’s fur was ruffled from the shot, and I smoothed it with one hand while keeping my other on the antlers. I wasn’t sure how to react or what to say, so I didn’t say anything and just waited a moment. Then I stood and smiled. I felt warm despite a crisp November wind.
I soon found out that processing a deer was a lot of work, but we had fun with that, too, drinking Coors Heavy in one of Newt’s buddies’ garages. It wasn’t until later that I had time to reflect on the experiences, and truthfully, for a while, I still wasn’t sure what to think. My first deer hunt wasn’t particularly challenging or meaningful. While I felt a tinge of bittersweet emotions when I walked up to the buck, mostly I just felt a sense of accomplishment and excitement from the experience.
Looking back, it’s easy to see that some of the reading and thinking I’d done prior to the hunt had warped my expectations and led me to put too much pressure on the experience to have some kind of meaning or revelation that isn’t all that common. The reason, of course, that such moments are often retold in media, or even around a campfire, is clear: we like to read and write about the most impactful experiences because those are the interesting ones. But the reality is often far more mundane.
Sometimes hunting—even a first hunt—is just fun. Nothing more. Having had this realization allowed me to have other hunting experiences where I have had moments of profundity, though those have been few and far between. Most of the time, I’m out there in the mountain, woods, or swamp, wondering: what in the world am I doing here? Then I smile. And laugh.
Read the full article here