Greg / MO

I was fortunate enough to have a father passionate about the outdoors, and I can recall sitting on the side ofa ditch bank underneath a bridge watching my red and white floater dance around an old stump long before I was school age...

Later, in addition to our fishing trips, Dad picked up a pair of beagles and began taking me along. At first, I wasn't old enough or big enough to carry a gun. In time, I shot my first cottontail, and by the time I graduated high school, had literally killed probably close to a thousand rabbits. There's still nothing I enjoy more than hearing a good dog work a rabbit.

Upon entering college, I was looking for a way to supplement my grocery bill... I would take my shotgun out and kick some brush and walk some fencerows, but it seemed without the dogs, myreturn on investment wasn't panning out. One day, I got out the Wildlife Code handbook, and was aimlessly rifling through its pages when I stumbled upon the deer section.

Growing up in Southeast Missouri, deer hunting was the farthest thing from our minds... For one, we were as hardcore rabbit hunters as I am a bowhunter today. But two, the flat farmground of the Bootheel wasn't condusive to holding whitetails; I think there's only like a couple per year even now killed in the counties that comprise that geographical region. But I was attending undergrad school in Northeast Arkansas, and the hills around Jonesboro did hold some deer.

Reading closer in the Wildlife handbook, I saw that gun season for deer was like it was in most states: a couple weeks long. But... if you pursued them with archery tackle, you had nearly four MONTHS to place your tag on a deer! I figured even a novice could luck into a deer in four months, surely. Boy, did I have a lot to learn! Never the less, the following pay period found me heading to my local Wal-Mart (I didn't even know enough to seek out an archery shop). I lucked into finding a used Bear Whitetail Hunter complete with quiver and a stubby stabilizer. I snatched up some Easton Gamegetters, oblivious to spine or weight tolerances -- I bought them because they were brown, like the bow -- and some fixed-blade broadheads off the shelf.

I had no help, and no one around me was into archery either. It was a lot of trial and error, frustration, and just enough joy mixed in to keep me going forward. To think of the inauspicious start I got off to by attempting to supplement my grocery needs, into someone whois fortunate enough tohave been invited to beon the pro staff for seven national bowhunting companies makes me shake my head.

I think these two pics capture my journey the best... from my first deer with that Bear Whitetail (which didn't come until grad school, by the way), to a more recent time sharing with my first son in an attempt to lite the fires and pass the torch on...

MichiganWhitetails74

It w3s the summer of 1985 when I was 11 years old.. my uncle and my dad & I were sitting on our deck after one of my baseball games...

My uncle said...How would you like to try deer hunting with me.??..from that day forward I followed in his footsteps...

22 years later and 142 deer...My passion is stronger than ever....not for what I've done....but for what I feel each and every year when I enter the woods. There is an Instinct in our blood to provide and hunt....some of us experience it in life...and others will never....

Philg

this may sound a bit stange or dumb to some but my mothers family are all Tsalagiyi (Cherokee) and I am registared too. I have always been fasinated with the stick and string. I guess what little german i have in me was lost to the Ayastigi in me. what is reallystrang is that all of the older people over the years said itwill get old (talking about hunting of all kinds) but i get more and more into it as i age.

Are any of you the same with that last statement?

8pt~Bowhunter

x3

halfrack VIII

my father told me that he saw a lot of nice bucks during the bow season. and i saw very few nice deer during shotgun/muzzleloader.