“The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

— Samuel Goldwyn

“So tell me how it went down,” I ask.

Moments earlier I saw the telltale sign of a successful hunt, a man leaned over at work with blue latex gloves busily moving about. Right in the epicenter of where I made a long circumnavigation to where I had planned to meet up with a buck I had been chasing.

“It was complete and total luck. I mean I walked over the ridge, saw him bed, walked up slowly from below and shot him,” comes the reply of a man standing over a mule deer I’m all too familiar with.

“How far was the shot?” I pry on.

“Thirty yards. He never got out of his bed. Hell, I think the arrow skipped off the ground and ricochet into him,” he answers.

Son of a bitch. I haven’t been able to get within 95 yards of the bastard and this guy pinballs one off the ground at spitting distance.

I’d been working this mesa on and off the last several days. I had got to know this particular buck quite well. We were quite intimate. I knew his quirks and he knew mine. He knew to hightail ass when he heard the now familiar clicking of my torn up ankle, I knew to look off in the distance for his does to find him laying about overlooking his harem.

Luck, huh? I want to believe you but I know it’s not completely true.

“Again, congratulations. That’s a damn fine buck. One any archer would be proud to wrap his hands around. I’m not so sure about that luck thing, however. Old bruisers like that don’t die by luck,” I say as we shake hands and I let him get to work.

I start the long trek off the vista and back to camp for a cup of black soup. I need the caffeine and I need to regroup. Most of all I need to make sense of what just happened.

Luck.

I mumble that word over and over as I kick steps in the loose dirt that inhabits the descent. It’s something that I’ve been grappling with for a long time in its relation to hunting. I’ve always felt uneasy about that word. Notoriously a cop-out for failure and an ego-crushing recognition often owed for success.

But after each and every kill’s postmortem, I would hurriedly skim over certain details not wanting to focus on the presence of luck. I knew it was part of the equation, I just didn’t know what proportion I owed to it.

I, like everyone else, want to believe that I have complete control over the outcome. Put in the time, put in the effort and eventually success will follow. That’s not luck, that’s determination.

So here’s a scenario. Two men hunt the same woods. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll say they are on the same skill level (that’s a far reach I know). One doesn’t kill in five days worth of effort, the other kills his first hour in.

Luck?

Isn’t that really just rolling the dice, hoping for it to come up sevens? Roll enough and you’re damn sure to eventually come up a winner.

I ponder my own accomplishments in the field as I zig-zag my way down off the mesa.

How many of my kills are owed to being at the right place at the right time? Blindly fumbling around the woods only to have some unsuspecting buck curious about the commotion and make the unfortunate accident of standing within range.

Was it luck? Or was it the sheer magnitude of time I spent in the field to make the encounter inevitable? What part did skill have in it?

We like things in black and white. It’s either this way or that. We are Republicans or we’re Democrats. We root for this team or that team. There’s no middle ground, we are or we aren’t. Success is derived from skill or its complete luck. It helps our simple brains understand complex issues. It allows us to put things into categories, process that information and move on.

But there was cream in this coffee.

Hunting, however, is different. We aren’t dealing with constants. We are dealing with individual creatures that to some extent can think, reason (I’ll use that in loose terms) and sure as hell learn to stay away from danger. And just like humans, they all have different capacities in doing so. What’s more than that they are susceptible to good days and bad days just like the rest of us.

Hell, some days they are just off. Occasionally the oldest and wisest of bucks stumble around and fall into our laps, oblivious of the numerous mistakes we made.

In hunting, we don’t always get what we deserve. There is just plain old dumb luck.

So in my equation that my little brain has put together so far it goes something like this.

Luck + Time in the Field + Skill = Success.

There’s never been any use harping on what we can’t control. Luck is luck. You have nothing to do with it so take it out of the equation. The only thing you can control is the amount of time spent in the field and your skill. Skill takes a long time to develop and can only come through the experience time in the field provides for you. So the one that looks like we have the most control over would be Time in the Field.

There it is. The more time you spend out there the better your chances are at success. I think I have just written down what could be the most obvious and well know way to achieve success in hunting. I hope I didn’t make you dumber for reading it.

However, I needed to come to this realization on my own. I’ve never been one to learn from others.

So maybe that quote I stole at the beginning of this little story should read more like: The more time I spend in the field, the luckier I get.

I guess I was just lucky enough to figure this equation out and be able to put it to use in future hunts...

// Fred Bohm