Did you eat tag soup this past deer season? Take stock of why

For my first five deer seasons, I ate tag soup. To say the least, this was a very humbling and frustrating beginning.

I had sold myself on the idea that to become a man, one had to be a proficient deer hunter and to end five seasons without filling a tag made me feel like a family failure.

Though I eventually began knocking down my share of bucks, still, whenever I would finish out a season with the “you’ll get ‘em next year” speech, I would revert back to that insecure kid who counted fruitless days afield as a loss. It took many years of failure and success for me to understand that harvesting a buck isn’t the only way to determine a season’s worth.

Season in review

Though we don’t see it right off the bat, there are many other ingredients in tag soup than just failure. Learning moments and revelations abound in an unsuccessful season that we otherwise wouldn’t have noticed if we had filled our tag. The trouble is diving back into the weeds to find these nuggets of knowledge.

I experienced this a couple of years ago when, despite my best efforts, I closed out the year with nothing but close calls and exhaustion. Though I didn’t want to relive what had been my hardest season to date, I knew that the only way I would avoid another bummer was to peel back the layers and learn from my unfilled tag.

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After breaking down the good and bad hunts, I was able to identify multiple weaknesses, such as my access, how I hunted certain areas of the farm, and windows of opportunity I had missed. To say the least, the following year, I applied this knowledge and harvested my target buck only two weeks into the season.

Debriefing the year can aid in breaking the cycle of failure, enabling you to hit the ground running next season and ensuring that prior mistakes weren’t made in vain. 

The “L” word

I’m going to preface this by saying that I hate blaming bad luck on anything. I feel it voids a possibly constructive experience while shielding us from our failures. But, while I hate to say it, sometimes the outcome of your season isn’t entirely your fault.

Luck – good and bad – can play a huge role in our successes and failures as hunters. It can be the determining factor found in a single moment that differs between tagging out in early October and toughing out the last day of the season.

Bad luck can come in many forms, but understanding that this is an aspect of hunting can help alleviate some of the pressure we put on ourselves. Now, can we chalk an entire unsuccessful season up to bad luck? I don’t think so. But we can notice where bad luck was a factor and prohibited our success in certain moments, thus prolonging our season.

Maybe that was a swirling wind that spooked a buck, a flat tire on the way to your hunting property, or life circumstances prohibiting time spent afield. Sometimes, things happen for unforeseeable reasons, but it’s how we view and process them that determines their utility.

For better or for worse

Remember waking up early to go hunting as a kid? Odds are, there were no trail cameras that told you what deer were in the area, and other than hubris, there was very little expectation of harvesting a giant buck.

Yet, there was still that electric feeling of the unknown. It felt like opening a gift on Christmas morning. But now, with technological advances, we’ve become so familiar with the deer on our properties that harvesting a specific buck can feel more like checking a task off of a to-do list than the hunt for a wild animal.

Factor in social media and the constant flow of success we see from hunters all around the country, and before we even hit the woods, we’re setting ourselves up for a letdown.

To resist this and stay true to the heart of hunting, we have to remember why we hunt, and I don’t think there’s a more meaningful revelation of this than ending a season without harvesting a buck. This apparent failure to attain a goal helps us to reset and rediscover why we do what we do. Is it just to kill an animal or a deeper pursuit of the natural world?

Sure, you can reflect on all this while sitting in your living room, staring up at a wall full of bucks. But to share that same affection after a season or two of getting your teeth kicked in? Now that’s something else and a feeling hard to define until you’ve experienced it.

Conclusion

We’ve all been there: walking empty-handed out of the timber for the last time of the season. The buck tag in your pocket is no longer a symbol of what can be, but a reminder of what isn’t, adding insult to injury.

It will be many months before we’re gifted the opportunity to chase these animals again, so what will you do in the meantime? Will you sit idly by, telling the stories of “the one that got away?” Or will you go back to the drawing board, determined to find where you can fix your mistakes?

Though I’ve eaten half as much tag soup as venison chili, it never gets easier to stomach. But it’s through these bitter pills that we’re able to understand that a good hunter isn’t defined by his or her successful seasons but how they respond to the unsuccessful ones.

Sometimes, in order to get better, you have to take your medicine.

Editor’s note: Drop us a note to tell us how you did during this year’s deer season. Send a short message to Ohio Outdoor News Editor Mike Moore at mmoore@outdoornews.com.