Humility and deer hunting go hand in hand.  If a person has chased the whitetail deer long enough, they surely come away with stories about how the four-legged creatures have foiled the perfect hunting plan and used their superior senses to outwit even the most tech savvy human hunter.

Despite the abundance of technological advances at their disposal, from scent eliminating sprays and gadgets to sophisticated game cameras, the humans keep losing the overall hunt. According to aggregate MN DNR data, success rates languish each year somewhere in the 40 percentile range. In other words, in over 6 out of every 10 times a hunter takes the field, the deer wins.

Most people understand how the law of averages works, meaning that for every hunter who exceeds those odds, there’s another hunter (usually me or the people I take with me) out there that are a drag on the scoreboard and keep giving the win to the other team.

I have pictures to prove that I am able to secure an occasional harvest (Bill Morgan must have cut those out from the article), but as most hunters know, it’s the tales of the whitetails that got away that make up the majority of the memories from the field.

I remember one year, the Graning boys took me out on opening morning and pointed me down a trail.  

“The stand is right there by the trail, you can’t miss it,” they said.

An hour later, when the sun finally began to rise and I was tired of looking, they were right.  I couldn’t miss it - lying right there on the ground not 20 feet away and still strapped to the trunk of the oak.  Sometime in the previous week, the entire tree had blown down in a wind storm.  Or else, the boys had pulled a fast one on me... I’ve asked about it for years and they just hunch up their shoulders and smirk.

Then there was the time that I had the shot all lined up with my muzzleloader, so I slowly squeezed the trigger and “poof”!  I heard the primer ignite and I watched the bullet fall out of the end of my barrel.  Bad powder?  Not enough powder?  Wet powder?  I have no idea how Davey Crockett or Grizzly Adams ever harvested anything with those black powder guns.  Even with the advances in technology, there is a very low harvest rate during the muzzleloader season.

A great memory from last year is when me and a buddy staked out a great spot in a corn field. The deer had been running a convention down a trail that came by and I thought for sure we could score a “double.” Apparently, the Cervidae moved the party to a new venue and just as dusk settled, we heard a small grunt behind us. We barely turned around in time to see a doe just as befuddled as we were. Two more feet and she would have walked smack dab into us. I guess the scent blocker worked, but her hearing was certainly superior to ours.

I can’t count how many times over the years I have driven my truck to a parking spot, quietly exited the vehicle and walked over the hill and through the woods to my stand, only to return hours later and see deer tracks right over the top of the ones I made going in. I think the deer do that one on purpose just for spite.

Hunters love to tell the stories about the times they were successful, but there’s usually a far greater number of agonizing anecdotes about the “one that got away.”

As many of our readers are picking up their copy of the Patriot on Saturday morning, there’s going to be a fair number of readers who are out in their stand in pursuit of the monster “30 point” buck.  

The best advice to remember is that any hunt that ends in coming home safely is a chance at another great story to share with those other liars, I mean hunters, that have donned the orange.

For me, I’ll be waiting again this year for muzzleloader season. After all, blaming a bad batch of powder is the perfect excuse for me as to why “another one got away.”

Despite all the technology in the world, it remains a challenge to better Mother Nature.