In mid-September, I saddled up for my first whitetail hunt of the season. I’d yet to shoot a public land animal with my bow, but I was full of piss and vinegar. I live in Kansas—the heart of deer country—and I wanted a big buck. One week later, I was a shell of a woman, begging the universe to send me anything resembling a deer so I could remember what they look like.
If you hunt long enough for pretty much any game, you’ll eventually find yourself in a slump. A humiliating, demoralizing, and frustrating dry spell. Every failed attempt feels like getting a psychological swirly from some divine bully and makes you wonder why you didn’t choose a more mundane and predictable hobby like golf or stamp collecting. For better or worse, being wired to hunt is not a choice. So what can you do to save your deer season when you’re drowning in a sea of disappointment?
Make like a Marine: improvise, adapt, and overcome.
Abandon Plan A
It’s hard to let go of a dream scenario. I spent weeks picturing that perfect moment on the corner of a soybean field, where a Pope & Young buck would come sauntering in for an evening snack. I scouted dozens of public bean fields in August, and picked the most secluded one, which also showed the heaviest browsing. I hung two sets for different winds and started counting down the opener.
My opening week consisted of six sits in and around that bean field, and I didn’t see a single deer. It wasn’t bad luck, but instead an entirely strategic error courtesy of my own stubbornness. I put all of my eggs into a basket full of holes because I wanted that fantasy more than the deer wanted to be there.
I knew the browse lines in the soybeans were the cumulative result of an entire summer and not an indication of current activity. There were no fresh droppings and a very unconvincing number of fresh tracks around the field edge. I was hunting solid setups for the wind, but the deer never showed.
I should never have hunted that field, and I certainly shouldn’t have waited a full week to bail on it. But it was my plan A, and some dumb part of me wanted to die on that hill rather than pull the chocks and find something better. Desperation finally drove me to scout again, and I immediately struck whitetail gold–a hot white oak.
I went from zero deer sightings in six sits on the bean field to nonstop action and a punched buck tag in just three sits. The moral? Don’t get married to plan A.
Lower Your Standards
If you hunt public land, you probably shouldn’t marry your standards either. You might not want to hear that, but it’s true. When you’re in a whitetail drought, hyper-fixation on big bucks becomes a toxic relationship. It can make you break the golden rule of never passing on the first day what you would be happy to get on the last, but more importantly, it poisons your entire hunting approach.
I know I’m not the only one who has found a pile of generic deer sign—beat down trails, beds, steaming fresh poop—and kept walking because I didn’t see a neon sign flashing “BIG BUCK HERE.” Sure, it feels good to sit over a line of shredded saplings and car-hood scrapes. But when you’re in a dry spell, constantly searching for a fairytale buck can ensure that it keeps going.
Sometimes, you need to hit the reset button and just hunt. Nothing makes me appreciate fresh sign like removing the trophy filter after weeks of blanking. Your hackles might have raised the second you started reading this section because you were expecting me to tell you to start dusting spikes. Spikes are delicious, but that’s not my point.
You should always shoot what makes you happy. But if you set the bar too high, you’re likely to overthink the entire process or productive setups. If you want to be picky with deer, do it when they’re in bow range. In 14 years of public land whitetail hunting, that’s the most important lesson I’ve learned.
When you string together a series of blank sits, lowering your standards can revive your deer season and restore your confidence.
The Confidence Factor
It’s an insidious thing, and you might not notice while it’s happening. But when your setups aren’t producing the results you hoped for, it’s easy to start losing faith in them. Maybe even in your own skills as a whitetail hunter.
In my hunting career, a lack of confidence has manifested itself in three ways: sloppy setups, carelessness on stand, and skipping sits. All the primary ingredients for tag soup. When you start believing it won’t work out anyway, you start working against yourself in imperceptible ways. Maybe you get out the door a few minutes later. Maybe you shuffle your feet and check your phone more than you should. Every tiny slip lowers your odds and fuels your slump.
The easiest way to hunt with confidence in the deer woods is to hunt with high odds of success. That’s where lower standards come into play. If your definition of success is a booner, your odds of success start inherently low. Move the bar to a decent 2.5-year-old buck, or a mature doe, or my favorite option—whatever tickles my fancy in the moment—and it’s suddenly a lot easier to stay locked in.
The Big Cliché
I started my season with the firm belief that I would not shoot a buck under 120 inches. But, 15 days later, I was standing over one that I will never measure. Probably because he wouldn’t break 40, but I’d do it again tomorrow. A layup was exactly what I needed at that moment, and that goofy yearling gave it to me. I rode a high all the way home that I wouldn’t trade for the world.
Roll your eyes all you want, but it’s true–the trophy is in the eye of the hunter. And when you just need a win to bust out of a whitetail slump, punching a tag becomes a trophy in itself.
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