Most speeches could be titled how to be more like me. However, you might not want to be more like this author. Yesterday I had to make a retrieval drive back up to Tigerton. Thursday I was hunting by myself. I got a deer and just yesterday (Saturday) when I was looking for something in my Explorer I noticed that my bow case was empty. Then was the realization that after shooting a deer on Thursday I was so excited and caught up in the moment I lost track of most everything again. This time I left my bow laying out on the trail next to the food plot. As long as I was there I could look for my lost watch and the arrow I dropped. And the thing is I didn’t learn anything from last year because I left my bow and lost a hunting bow release after harvesting a deer then too. I guess that is just a form of buck (deer) fever.

Yes a hunter susceptible to buck fever can do some strange things. When I was sixteen Mike and I went deer hunting on opening day. We got there really early in the morning and headed off into the wilderness. After wandering around in the dark for an hour or so I got totally lost. Didn’t bring a flash light so I couldn’t see my compass and a GPS wasn’t invented yet. Finally I decided to just stop wandering and climb in a tree to wait till daylight. Then in the daylight I might better figure out what to do. When it got light I was standing on a tree branch about 10 feet off the ground. I was thinking about how stupid it is to get lost in the woods especially on opening day of deer season. My concentration on that thought was broken when, would you believe it, a small buck walks by about 40 yards. And by golly hey I got him, my first buck.

After this memorable first buck experience, the procedure in this case should have been to, climb down the tree, tag the deer, gut it out, and wait for my buddy Mike. Hopefully Mike heard the shot and can find me because remember I was lost. There was an important and highly recommended element of the above procedure I failed to do. After shooting my first buck I was so excited that I did not take the time to climb out of the tree but rather jumped ten feet out of the tree. When you are 16 and lucky you can do stuff like that and not even get hurt. My wife really doesn’t like me to hunt by myself that much any more and it is a good idea for me to hunt with my sons. That’s because when I go with my boys they can help me by gathering all my stuff and straighten out the craziness that happens because of my buck fever affliction. You would think that after 44 years of hunting you could get a better handle on buck fever. But a guy told me once, “You know, if you don’t get excited once in a while when you go hunting maybe you shouldn’t be hunting”.