I’m an executive in one of the largest insurance companies in California. My 9 to 5 keeps me in the heart of Orange County where I have easy access to four freeways and our building boasts a front seat view of their rush hour traffic. The pay is good, the work is great, and the people are family, but the scenery isn’t glamorous. I’m surrounded by cement and glass. On a normal day, the closest I get to fresh air and the smell of pine trees is turning on my hepa filter and pushing a piece of paper across my desk. There are people who see the fancy suits and the sports car and think I’m living the dream. I’m blessed and I am grateful for the things I’ve earned through my career, but my dream isn’t one you find inside four walls.
As an avid outdoorsman, I spend my weekends and vacations fishing for Mahi in the Pacific or trailing four-legged animals somewhere else. I’d take a compliment on my camo above a compliment on my suit any day because it means I’m getting to wear it. Maybe some of you are sitting in pinstripes, day dreaming yourselves. Maybe you too would love to spend your days chasing down elk and bear but spend most of the time running in the rat race. That’s where my head was when watching endless hours on the Hunting Channel and seeing professionals drop trophy deer finally took its toll on me.
My need to get out in the great outdoors became very obvious when I was sitting at lunch with employees trying to explain that it’s important to soak my shoes in animal pee before a hunt because if I don’t, game can smell me coming. It’s good to keep employees on their toes and all, but I don’t really want them thinking I’m certifiable.
The time had come. My hunt began at my desk. I had the entire country available to me from my keyboard, but it wasn’t long before I stumbled across an outfitter that caught my attention in Mound City, Kansas called Wheelers Whitetails. I picked up the phone and dialed. Mike had 30 years of experience behind him, a deep knowledge of his area, and, most importantly, the man had whitetails. It was well worth the deposit. It had been a dream of mine to take down a whitetail for my trophy wall, and I was finally planning to take a shot at it.
The next call was to my close friend and hunting buddy, Chris Reinberger. Now I may be a paper pusher, but that guy’s got me beat because he’s a paper printer, literally, but just like me, he loves to hunt, so he was down to vacation with me in the Great Plains. All that we had to do was wait for our draw results to be 100% committed.
For all of you who have traveled from suburbia to a destination hunt, you probably know that it is a surreal experience to spend hours in a frenzy of packing and driving and parking and flying and driving and then finally stepping out into the great outdoors. The silence is deafening. The tall pines and the broad sky are awe-inspiring. Mike has it wired to the T! There are comfortable beds, good food, and, most importantly, knowledgeable guides with good attitudes. We weren’t there for sightseeing, though. We were ready to hunt, so we dropped our packs and pulled on our gear.
Mike came out and told us, “Boys, there’s no time like the present. Grab your gear. We’re going to the blinds.”
That’s when the storm blew in. If you’ve been to Kansas, you probably remember three things: sky, windmills, and tall trees. That was one of the worst hit states during the Great Depression when drought and wind stripped the land of all vegetation. There is not a single mountain in the entire state to break up the weather as it travels through. When you’re driving, you see more sky than land around you. Heck, you can see the curvature of the earth when you’re on the highway, but for decades, they’ve planted pine trees to break up the weather as best they can and that’s where we took shelter? So there we were, two California boys hunching in our blinds. The tornado state winds picked up to 50 miles per hour. It was futile to try to peer through the torrential downpour. I resolved myself to the idea that we weren’t going to be able to hunt through the conditions, but the guide kept pushing forward. Turns out they have a saying around those parts, “If you don’t like the weather, wait an hour,” so we did.
We arrived at the hunting spot and waited until there was a gap in the rain. Off I went to my ground blind, perfectly positioned along a bean field with some great food plots. I was able to dedicate a few hours to think time and might have come up with a way to get the Niners to the Super Bowl now that “Cap” is gone, if my daydreaming hadn’t been interrupted by several does approaching. I could tell by the way they were acting that something off in the distance had them nervous, and it wasn’t long before they traveled out of sight. My mind started to drift again, but in a moment’s notice, I could just make out a muzzle through the trees. It was a brief standoff before he was there, a whitetail deer standing glorious in full light. It was the biggest deer I had ever come across. His broad horns stretched and blended into the eternity of that bright Kansas sky. He stood 93 yards away, broadside, and he was staring right at me. He lowered his head and began to feed. I slowly lifted my Thompson Center Pro Hunter to the rest. My heart was pounding so hard it shook my entire body. You know the feeling, pure adrenaline. I had to calm myself because the moment had arrived. I took several deep breaths to regulate my heartbeat. All I could think was that I had to pull it together. I had just gone from zero to exhilaration in an instant, but that was no excuse to lose out on the buck-of-a-lifetime. I laid the crosshairs behind the shoulder and squeezed one off. Smoke filled the air, and my vision was blurred for the second time that day. I hadn’t seen the direction that my deer had run after the shot, so I waited about 30 minutes and then packed my gear to find my buck. I took a few strides and searched the horizon, and 50 yards away, there he lay.
The feeling of a successful hunt cannot be described in words. It is an emotion unlike anything I have ever felt and only another hunter can appreciate. For those of us who spend our days keeping up with the Joneses, it is an amazing gift to be able to escape for a hunt on occasion. Thankfully, I am blessed with a supportive wife and daughters who allow me to pursue my passion.
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