While you are reading this, an oversize whitetail buck deer is thrashing his polished antlers on a sapling right here in our southern woods. He has found a few does in estrus and he is looking for another one. The 200 pounder has a Roman nose and a sagging belly and keen instincts that have kept him from sight of scads of hunters over the six or so hunting seasons of his life.

    There are 18 inches between the curves of his massive antlers. This year he again is using all his practiced instincts to avoid hunters one more season. And this year hunters are using their experience and skills to seek a shot at him.

    Given the efforts on both sides of this life or death undertaking, luck will enter the equation in the form of good luck for the hunter and/or bad luck for the buck and he will finally fall. Will that hunter be you?

    I’m not going to tell you here how to bag that old and wise buck. Most of us know how. We hunt where big bucks are likely to be. We plant food plots and then hunt trails that lead to the fields where does go to feed during daylight hours.

    We scout for big buck sign. We figure out his habits. We wear camouflage and cover scents and carry good binoculars. We hunt the rut on the very, very cold days of January when other hunters are watching football games. We may sometimes use dogs to get his scent and jump him from his bed.

    Then, if we are lucky we get a glimpse of the monster buck and maybe even a shot and the very luckiest of the highly skilled and experienced hunters will bag him. It won’t happen often.

    Yes, I know. Now and then an unskilled and careless hunter will be the recipient of an overdose of luck and bag the trophy buck that was earned by others more deserving. But those who have paid the price have the better chance, and once they take the big buck they have more to justify their celebrations. They have invested more in the hunt; time and effort and money.

    Just looking at the money aspect here, a non-hunting friend in Texas once called me and, as he is fond of doing this time of year, ribbed me about the cost of venison. He begins by asking if I got an animal, either an elk when he knows I have often sought them, or, by Valentine’s Day his jeering will relate to deer. He quite wrongly assumes it is bagging an animal that is the measure of my hunting success.

    “No,” I replied last elk hunt, “no elk this year. You only get one every five or six years and I got one two years ago.”

    “So they cost you about $20,000.00 apiece, right?” he asked as always.

    His kidding set me to thinking about the dollar cost, although that doesn’t usually occupy my thoughts except when I am considering where I will find the dollars to make the next hunt.

    If you add every single cost of a harvested deer or elk, all the out-of-pocket dollars plus depreciation on the truck and all equipment and trips to sight in and plant oats and phone calls and maps and magazine subscriptions and food and insurance and lost income from my freelance work and the olive oil to cook the venison and on and on, you might arrive at a figure approaching say, $10,000.00 an animal for elk and a lesser but substantial amount for a trophy deer.  

    My thoughts revealed how I will reply next time to my friend’s recurring pestiferous question. “Yes,” I will say. “It’s some of the least expensive recreation around for the value I get.”

    He will see that reply as simply going along with what he sees as a humorous exaggeration. He can’t understand, because his vision stops at the dollar signs and pounds of meat.

    He won’t appreciate the philosopher who said wisely that it is the pursuit and not the kill that is the essence of hunting; the hunting and not the finding. It’s the maps and the oat patches and the magazines and the olive oil.

    He won’t get it. But just one more time I will have reminded myself just what the outdoor life means to me.