[Near the bottom of this post is a picture of a harvested deer]
This deer hunting season, my ninth, was a season of hard won lessons. And in the end, the biggest lesson is to do things differently next year.
To be honest, there was much I did not enjoy about the season. There were warm days in October when gnats and mosquitos were a frequent nuisance. There were long hours sitting in makeshift stands that lack creature comforts, leaving me stiff and sore. There was the usual disappointment of failed hunts. In many cases I saw zero deer through hours on the stand. Perhaps even worse were the various occasions when a deer spied me before I even had a chance to aim, and scurried off or stayed out of range.