Button Hookin' Bucks

I’ve always been a fast learner. I can learn anything if you show me it enough times. Big bucks have the nastiest habit of looping back on their own trails in order to see if anything is following them. I only had to be button hooked by big bucks a kajillion times before I figured out what they were up to.

Day after day, season after season, I would get on the trail of a big buck only to have him pop up out of nowhere and skedaddle before I could get a shot. Albert Einstein once said, “repeating the same pattern over and over again while expecting different results is insanity.”

I spent the first several years of my hunting career in a state of “Pure Insanity”.

Eventually and with some reluctance on my part, I discovered if I paralleled the deer’s trail 30 to 40 yards on the downwind side I had a much greater chance of intercepting him. It doesn’t work every time, nothing does, but for a change I was putting the odds in my favor.

The first time I tried this technique I killed a big 4 x 4 buck lying in his bed at seven yards. He was watching his back trail, expecting to catch me following him and was totally unaware of my presence until it was too late. I’ve been able to trail and harvest several big bucks over the years with this technique.

You can learn more about this and other techniques in my new book, Buck Naked; The Straight Dope on Trophy Whitetails. Available in bookstores and on the Internet.

Good Luck and Good Hunting,
Jim:

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