The Tale Behind the Trophy Shot
For Hunters, A Picture Only Tells Half The Story
We are known for the trophy shot. Not the shot taken with the squeeze of a trigger or the release of a bowstring, but with the click of a camera shutter or the tap of a phone screen. It is this shot that sprawls across the front of the hunting magazine or peppers the Instagram feed, with antlers, horns, or fan pushed forward as if to say, look at me! Look at how great of a hunter I am.
The trophy shot is what we dream about; the adrenaline rush of the kill of a lifetime culminating in an image that will capture the moment forever.
But for most hunters, trophy shots are merely a highlight reel. They do not encompass the work put into finally taking that dream animal or the lessons learned along the way. In one of these images, you cannot see the perspiration wiped day after day from the hunter’s brow, as they set up tree stands, plant food plots, and build ground blinds. They bear no hint of the countless four-in-the-morning alarms sounding, or the hours of waiting patiently only to have a dead hunt. To the new hunter, trigger finger wobbling like the legs of a newborn fawn, the trophy shot presents a false idea of consistent success, without any of the challenges and trials faced in working towards the goal.
However, the trophy shot, or even the trophy kill is not the end-all-be-all for a hunter. They may not be the most exciting hunts, nor even the most rewarding. In reality, the hunts one may learn the most from are not always the hunts in which the trophy is bagged.
I took my first buck from within a ground blind that was being ripped to shreds. Hurricane Sandy was ravaging the Atlantic seaboard, pummeling Central Florida with rain band after rain band. But I’d checked out of school early to sneak in an extra muzzleloader hunt, and even as the roof of the blind collapsed completely on top of my dad and me, I slipped a Zip-Loc over the muzzle of my gun and huddled further into my jacket, determined to wait it out.
Late in the afternoon, the rain slowed in a welcome lull from the battering squalls. The broadleaves on the ground turned to the sky, bright and succulent as the sun cautiously peeked from behind the clouds. Wiping the water from my eyes, I almost missed hearing my dad saying “There’s a buck.”
Though only a small six-point, the deer looked majestic to my seven-year-old eyes. Muscles rippled beneath his neck as he bent down to feed, nimbly pulling the tiniest apical tips from the clover and brassicas dotting the soil.
I slowly removed the plastic bag from my gun’s barrel, hands already shaking. I tried to sing a song in my head to calm my breathing, though once I found the buck in my scope, my heart went right back to hammering.
“Breathe,” my dad murmured. “Squeeze.”
Boom. Black smoke filled the air in front of our blind, and as if triggered by the gunshot, the rain began falling with a fury. When the smoke cloud cleared, there was no sign of the buck, and as the grey sheet of rain swept over the trees in front of us, I knew that there would be no blood trail.
So we looked blindly, weaving our way through a maze of palmettos and oaks as the rain battered our already-soaked bodies. I was shivering, on the verge of tears, slogging through the rich mud looking for tracks or a drop of blood that would be long washed away.
When we hit the two-hour mark, I was ready to give up.
“What’s that?” my dad asked, stopping short of a dense mass of palmettos. My eyes darted to his feet, where the very tip of an antler poked out from under the fronds. It was my buck, only fifty yards from where he stood at the time of the shot.
It was from this hunt that I learned perseverance; the ability to always say let’s look just a bit longer; the ability to block out the rain, the cold, and the aching, wet feet, and to focus on the task at hand: recovering the animal no matter how difficult it may be, rather than taking the wasteful, though easy, way out.
Every Hunt Matters
Just last fall, nearly twelve years after killing my first buck, I came home from college to spend the opening weekend of muzzleloader season with my dad. Most of that time we spent in a shooting house, waiting for a wide, heavy-antlered nine-point we’d named Flatline.
The first weekend of archery season, we’d been in the same stand, and we watched as Flatline browsed to about fifty-five yards out in front of us: a further shot than I was comfortable taking with my crossbow.
He was a beautiful buck, with a red summer coat not yet gone for the winter, though his tarsal glands were already beginning to darken in preparation for the rut. I watched him through the binoculars as he tiptoed through the brush, nibbling up a quick dinner before disappearing into the trees to our right, still well out of range.
When I returned, this time with a muzzleloader that could easily cover all of the ground before us, I was looking forward to seeing those chocolate-brown antlers dip out of the trees once again.
On our second sit, my dad and I were well into a mobile game of Scrabble. I was locked into my turn when my dad said, “There’s a buck coming.”
I slowly eased the barrel of my gun out of the front window, though I hadn’t seen the deer yet. My dad was squinting through the binoculars. “I swear I saw antlers, just past that cabbage palm there.” I looked through my scope, and sure enough, those chocolate-brown antlers emerged from the trees. It was a beautiful three-year-old ten-point, his rack high and tight atop the crown of his head.
It wasn’t the buck I had come for, but there would be other days to hunt, and he would feed my family just as well as any other deer.
I clicked the hammer safety backward, breathed out halfway, and squeezed the trigger with the perfect rhythm. The smoke cloud cleared, and the buck was lying motionless where he’d stood only a moment before.
We got our “trophy shot,” and though it wasn’t with the buck I’d intended, I wasn’t the least bit disappointed in my decision to take the shot. In celebration, my dad sent the pictures to our friends and family, who replied with oohs and ahhs and wows.
A few weeks later, at Thanksgiving, my uncle stood admiring the European mounts on my bedroom wall. “And who’s this little dinker?” he asked, chuckling at the brand-new mount that had only been finished a few days before.
I was taken aback, not having noticed how small he may have looked in comparison with some of the other racks on the wall. “That’s my ten-point,” I said. “From October.”
But the photo doesn’t mean anything, I wanted to say. The photo doesn’t tell you how beautiful he looked stepping out from between the trees. The photo doesn’t show you the fifty-two pounds of meat we were able to fill our freezer with. The photo doesn’t show you the hours we spent building the shooting house we sat in, or cleaning the tiller blades as we planted the food plot. You can’t hear the call of the little green heron that we saw on the morning of the hunt, or see the monarch butterflies flitting between milkweed plants, just past the peak of their migration.
It was with this hunt, and this conversation, that I learned to take pride in the animals I kill, regardless of whether they meet someone else’s standards. It did not matter to me in the moment that the deer I killed wasn’t the big buck I was waiting for. It mattered that I made a clean, ethical shot. It mattered that I butchered the deer myself, turning an animal into nutritious, usable pieces of meat that would absolutely not go to waste. It mattered that I was immediately proud, with no second thoughts about what the deer’s antlers looked like.
Huge antlers are just an accessory, a bonus on top of the real benefits we garner from our craft: accomplishment, food, and a deep connection with all parts of the land that we hunt, not just the few game animals that we succeed in killing.
Keeping Ethics In Focus
Even those hunts in which there is no shot teach us valuable lessons; a particular coyote hunt from several years ago comes to mind. My dad and I were on a cattle ranch, attempting to help limit the varmint population prior to spring calving season. We set up well before daylight, using an empty cow feeder as a backrest. It was a cool but damp morning, and as the sun slowly rose, muted light spread across the field, giving a glow to the dense bank of fog hovering just above the grass.
The rising sun only intensified the fog, photons bouncing around within a cloud of tiny water droplets and forming a nearly opaque mass in front of us. I could only see clearly for about thirty yards, though I knew the field extended all the way to the horizon.
It was nearing seven-thirty when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. I shouldered my dad’s .22-.250 rifle, searching in the scope for the shape I’d seen. It was a running coyote, quickly flanking our left side and moving out in front of us.
Through the fog, however, the animal was unclear, its form blanking out almost entirely as it passed behind thicker patches of mist. I kept it in my scope, waiting for it to slow down for a moment.
That moment came, but the coyote had gotten much farther away, and it was almost completely obscured by fog. I clicked the rifle to half-safe, breathed in, and hovered my thumb over the safety slider. After another breath, I shifted it back to full-safe and leaned the rifle back where it had been against the wall behind me.
One of the primary rules of gun safety is to be sure of your target, and of what is beyond it. I’d never needed to exercise this rule in real life, but during this hunt, I felt the pull of the reckless shot and had to remind myself that no kill, no matter what animal or how rare an opportunity, would be worth hitting something or someone with an unintentional stray bullet. Through the fog, I had no idea if there were cows a thousand yards away, or if there was a hiker on the other side of the fence that was well within the ballistic range of the rifle.
This hunt taught me the value of self-control, one of the most important skills for the ethical hunter. Self-control is the reason we have conservation practices today, and it is the reason that hunters and anglers contribute more than any other group to such practices. It is the defining characteristic of a sportsman.
Hunting's True Value
These are only a few of the things that I’ve learned from hunting. But where would I have been without these experiences? Had I never searched for hours in the pouring rain, would I take an easy blood trail for granted? Had I never killed a “dinker” of a buck, would the eventual trophy buck mean as much to me? Had I never felt the pressure to take a reckless shot and stopped myself, would I have the same intent focus on taking ethical and diligent ones in the future?
When realizing this vast potential for knowledge, both of oneself and the environment around us, the value of hunting increases far beyond the tangible “trophy shot” we are best known for.
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. If we are known for the trophy shot, then let us also be known for the story of knowledge, hard work, and determination that is woven throughout the pixels, for that is what truly makes the hunt worth something.