The first time a real buck walked under my stand, I dropped my arrow. Not once. Twice. And both times he was well outside forty yards, just a shadow moving through the oaks, and still my hands shook like I’d been holding a jackhammer all morning.
I was twenty-two and I’d killed exactly one deer in my life, a doe my dad had basically pointed me at when I was sixteen. I’d practiced that summer until my release sounded like a metronome and the foam block in the backyard looked like it had some kind of disease. I had my draw weight dialed in, my sight pins glowing, my broadheads sharp enough to shave a patch off my arm that I then regretted the rest of the day. I thought I was ready. I was ready for paper. Paper doesn’t make you forget how to breathe.
The buck came in from the south, the direction I’d never once checked because I’d convinced myself the deer would come from the creek. He wasn’t a monster. Maybe a six point, thick neck, that forward lean a buck gets in late October when he’s starting to move. When I first saw him my brain told my body to do everything at once, which is the exact opposite of how a bow works.
I stood up. My stand creaked, which in my head sounded like a firecracker, even though the buck didn’t so much as lift his head. I reached for the arrow on the bow’s rest. My fingers were so wet with sweat that the nock slipped right out of my hand. The arrow dropped, tipped, and banged off the steel grate under my boots like a spoon hit against a trailer hitch.
He didn’t bolt. He just stopped and stared at the noise, the way deer do, trying to decide if it’s worth the energy to spook. I froze. I stood there like a complete idiot with one arrow in my quiver and my hand empty and this buck forty-some yards out looking in my direction through the gaps in the leaves.
I don’t know what I was thinking. I reached back, slow, and pulled the second arrow. I set it on the rest. I actually had it on the string this time, and then I tried to attach my release and my thumb wouldn’t cooperate. It’s a stupid little movement, hook the D-loop, that’s it. I’d done it ten thousand times without looking. But my thumb was shaking so hard I missed the loop, knocked the arrow sideways, and down it went too. Clang. Right off the grate. Second arrow, gone.
That buck didn’t spook on the second clang either, and I want you to know that, because it makes what happened next my fault completely. He’d started walking again, quartering toward me slow, and I was down to one arrow and an empty hand and a pulse I could feel in my own jaw.
I pulled the last arrow. Nocked it. Hooked the release like I was threading a needle wearing oven mitts. The buck stopped broadside at what had to be about thirty yards, right in a little pocket of sunlight between two red maples. He was eating acorns like he had all the time in the world, because he did. I came to full draw and my pin was dancing all over his ribs in a circle the size of a dinner plate.
I told myself the classic lie. Just breathe. Aim small. Pick a spot.
The problem is you can’t pick a spot when your entire upper body wants to run. I held it, held it, and then instead of squeezing I just sort of let go, the way you’d flinch away from something hot. My bottom limb hit my knee, the arrow flew high and hit a branch I never saw, and that branch spit a dozen little red leaves into the air like confetti.
The buck exploded. Eighteen inches of daylight under him before I could blink, and then just the sound of him crashing off through the brush, and then nothing. Silence so loud it pressed on my ears.
I sat down on my stand and cried. I’m not ashamed to say it. I was twenty-two, I’d practiced all summer, and I’d just missed the easiest, cleanest, most give-me shot of my entire life because my body decided the correct response to a six point was to turn into a blender. I had one arrow left, no wait, I had zero, because I’d dropped them all or shot them at branches. I clipped in my safety harness and climbed down and walked back to the truck in the dark wondering if I was even cut out for any of this.
Here’s what nobody tells you when you start bowhunting. Buck fever doesn’t feel like the movies. It’s not a dramatic slow-motion moment where you heroically steady your breath. It’s your hands not doing what your brain asks. It’s a nock slipping out of your fingers. It’s your thumb being unable to find a loop you’ve hooked a thousand times. It’s dropping your goddamn arrow off a metal stand twice before the deer is even in range.
It took me a second season and a very patient friend named Jerry to figure out it wasn’t a character flaw, it was physiology. Adrenaline dumps into your blood and your fine motor skills go out the window. The trick isn’t to stop the shake. You can’t stop it. The trick is to do your work before the shake hits, and to build a routine so dumb and so rehearsed that your body can run it on autopilot while your brain is screaming.
So the next summer I stopped shooting for groups and started shooting for routine. I’d get my heart rate up first, sprint around the yard or do twenty pushups, then pick up the bow, and go through the whole dumb sequence while my hands were still shaking. Nock. Hook. Draw. Hold. Let down. Over and over. I’d hang my stand in the backyard and practice the exact movements I’d need in a tree, with gloves on, in the dark, with my release already clipped to the loop so my thumb never had to find anything.
And the one thing I changed up in the tree was the order. When I stood up on a deer now, the first thing I did was check my arrow was on the string, because last year I’d stood there with an empty rest while a buck ate acorns thirty yards out. Sounds obvious. It is. But when every nerve in your body is telling you to hurry, obvious is the first thing to go.
That fall I didn’t kill a giant. I killed a small seven point, and I did it clean, but the honest part is that the shot almost didn’t matter. What mattered was the ninety seconds before it, when my thumb found the loop on the first try because I’d beaten that motion into my hands until it didn’t need my brain anymore.
I still shake on big deer. I think I always will. The difference now is I don’t fight it, and I don’t drop my arrows, and I don’t let two clangs off a steel grate tell every deer in the county exactly where I am. Buck fever is going to be there. You can a be a guy who lets it run you out of the tree, or you can build a routine so stupid you could run it in your sleep. I was the first guy. Took me a whole season of dropping arrows to decide I didn’t want to be him anymore.