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When the opening day of firearms season rolls around, I will get a buck. How do I know?
I know it like I know I will eat breakfast tomorrow. You'd be right to say I'm probably wrong -- about both breakfast and the buck. But I'm still sure.
You might already be tired of "I statements." They are tiring for readers, but they're hard to avoid in personal testimony. "I statements" are always present (for all of us), even when we have no confidence at all. If you say "I doubt it," you prove my point.
When I first started hunting, my odds of getting a buck seemed inversely proportional to the intensity of my desire. The odds hovered near zero. For me as a kid, "I doubt it" was a self-fulfilling mantra in the deer woods.
In a sense, we all enter our first deer season with a lifelong slump, and breaking out of a slump isn't easy. In 1951 Mickey Mantle was in a hitting slump that sent him to the minors, and his doubts were so strong he contemplated quitting baseball. His dad told him, "You can come back to Oklahoma and work the mines with me."
Those words changed something in Mantle. He banished doubt and started hitting. Every Major Leaguer, every time he steps into the batter's box, believes he will get a hit. The best hitters are wrong 70% of the time, but confidence is still their way of life.
I'm not talking about the so-called "power of positive thinking." While there is truth to the idea that positive thinking is a plus, no positive thinking deer hunting guru has ever put a buck in his crosshairs by thinking the deer into that position.
The power in a positive attitude is that it pushes you to do things differently. The attitude "I'm going to get a buck" stops you from waiting for something to happen and moves you to make it happen.* Here are three ways.
1. Learn to walk differently. Since becoming an adult hunter, I've slowed way, way down. Guys talk about covering 10 miles in a day. Not me. It's a rare day that I cover more than a mile. It's not about how far I walk. It's about moving through the woods with the sound of ooze, and no one ever hears ooze. It's about effective walking, which means standing still a lot. It's knowing when to pick up the speed, but most of the time it's a snail's pace. No one knows when a snail is coming.
2. Learn to see differently. Every step changes my view; it shows me a new angle on the terrain all the way around me. A step or two back I didn't see that log -- maybe it's the horizontal line of a deer's back. Whoa! There's a curved limb -- it might be an antler. I see something in the stillness that looks like it might not stay still. I see deer bedded down. I see deer coming into view. I see deer behind me, in front of me, to the left or the right. My goal is to see everything.
3. Learn to think differently. I integrate what happened yesterday into what I'm doing now. I plan for tomorrow while I'm hunting today. I learn to change my plans as I hunt. My tools are not just the ones I brought from home. They are the slope, the sun, the edge of a stand of hemlocks, a blowdown, the sight of another hunter. For me, deer hunting is not passive; it's active. It can be intense -- a hundred decisions throughout the day.
I could talk about a lot more -- shooting differently, planning differently, reacting to deer that have seen me, what I wear, even how I quit for the day. Possibilities always exist.
How do you get 100% confidence? Like Mickey, for you it might be a father's words. It might be something you read. It might even be getting tired of doubt and failure. Be like Mickey Mantle in the batter's box -- make confidence a way of life in the deer woods.
*I'm talking about hunting on the ground, not from an elevated stand location. Once you're in an elevated stand, almost everything depends on the deer. Hunting on the ground leaves much more up to me, and what I can do to find success.
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When "The Everyday Hunter" isn't hunting, he's thinking about hunting, talking about hunting, dreaming about hunting, writing about hunting, or wishing he were hunting. If you want to tell Steve exactly where your favorite hunting spot is, contact him through his website, www.EverydayHunter.com. He writes for top outdoor magazines, and won the 2015, 2018 and 2023 national "Pinnacle Award" for outdoor writing.