The scale said sixty-one pounds and I remember thinking that sounded about right, which should tell you everything you need to know about the kind of hunter I was back then. Sixty-one pounds for a three day archery hunt in September, when the lows at night would maybe touch forty degrees. My chest strap was cinched so tight I couldn’t get a full breath, and I stood there in the kitchen in the dark, doing a little shuffle to check how the pack rode, like a man who had somehow gotten more organized by adding more stuff.
Here is the full list of things I was carrying that morning that I did not use once. A folding saw. A hatchet, because the saw might not be enough. A second knife, because the first one might dull. A full first aid kit the size of a lunchbox. A hundred feet of parachute cord. A tarp I had no plan to string. A cook set with three pots and a frying pan. Two changes of clothes. A pair of camp shoes. A waterproof match case, a ferro rod, a lighter, and a second lighter. A backup headlamp with its own backup batteries. Ten extra arrows so I wouldn’t run out. A spotting scope. Binoculars and a monocular, because someone online said a monocular weighs less, so I carried both. You see the theme.
I packed for every emergency that had ever happened to a man on television, and none of them happened to me. What happened instead was that I walked a mile and a half up a ridge I had walked a hundred times, and by the time I got to the top my legs were shaking and my heart was slamming against the inside of my chest strap. I sat down on a rock and unclipped the waist belt and just sat there, wheezing, at nine in the morning, on a hunt I had been excited about for three weeks.
I did not see a deer that day. That is not the moral, but it is a fact. I saw a lot of the inside of my own eyelids and the sweaty inside of my own hat, and I heard my own breathing, which sounded like a man drowning in shallow water. An hour before dark a doe walked out about eighty yards below me, and I got the bow up and the pin settled and then I couldn’t hold it steady, because my arms were shot from carrying sixty pounds up and down a hill all day. The arrow would have been a prayer. I let down and watched her walk off, and I sat there until it was fully dark, too tired to even be mad.
The man who taught me to hunt, my wife’s uncle Dale, found out how much I packed because I told him, which was my first mistake. He laughed in a way that let me know the joke was me and not with me. Then he said something I have never forgotten, even though I did not believe him at the time. He said, “You packed for a man who is afraid, and a man who is afraid walks heavy, and a man who walks heavy goes home with an empty pack and a full truck.”
I packed for fear, is the truth of it. Every one of those just-in-case items was a little chip of worry with a price tag and a weight. What if it rains. What if I get lost. What if I get hurt. What if I break an arrow. What if, what if, what if. So I bought insurance by the ounce, and I carried it on my back until the insurance itself was the thing most likely to hurt me, because a man stumbling down a hill with sixty pounds strapped to his spine is a man one loose rock away from a sprained ankle and a real bad afternoon.
It took me a few more hunts to actually believe what Dale told me, because I am slow and I like buying things. But somewhere around my third season I finally dumped the pack on the tailgate and started over from zero, and I asked the only question that ever actually mattered. Not what could happen. What will I do?
What Actually Stays in My Pack Now
I am not going to tell you to go out there with nothing, because that is its own kind of stupid and I have banged that drum to death in my head too. But here is the honest list of what I carry on a day hunt now, and the whole thing, water included, comes in under twenty pounds. I know because I finally bought a scale and I weigh it before I go, the way I should have from the first trip.
A kill kit in a single Ziploc bag. Two knives, a field dressing one and a little folding one, a pair of shoulder length gloves, two game bags, and half a roll of flagging tape. That is it. That is the whole answer to what happens after the shot, and it weighs about a pound and a half. The guy who taught me to gut a deer did it with one knife he sharpened on a river rock, so the second knife and the third knife are just me being afraid again.
Water, and more than I think I need, because a man can hunt on a little hunger but he cannot hunt worth a damn thirsty. I carry two liters on a day hunt and I have never once wished I had half as much food as I thought I would want. One sandwich, a handful of trail mix, one granola bar. Any more than that and I am feeding the pack, not myself.
One warm layer beyond what I am wearing, even when it is warm out. In September the sun goes down and the wind comes up and a wet shirt on a ridge is how a fun evening becomes a shivering walk out in the dark. I learned that the hard way, which is its own story, but the short version is that I was not scared of the right thing and I was scared of a lot of the wrong ones.
A headlamp, a lighter, and a few feet of cord, not a hundred. A small first aid kit the size of my fist, not a lunchbox. A roll of toilet paper, because you can be brave on paper but out there the finest speeches come in single ply. And that is honestly most of it. The bow, the arrows in a quiver, the release, and a rangefinder, and I am walking.
The whole thing rides quiet. I can duck under branches without snagging. I can walk flat-footed instead of crashing. Most days I forget the pack is there, which is the entire point of a pack, and I did not know that for years because I thought the point of a pack was to hold everything a man might need someday.
The Real Reason It Matters
It is not about the weight. Well, it is a little about the weight, but it is mostly about what the weight does to your head. When I hunt light I move different. I go farther into places I used to stop short of, because the walk out at dark doesn’t seem like a punishment. I sit still longer, because I am not sore and fidgety and readjusting the chest strap every ten minutes. I make the choice to go check a bench or a saddle instead of talking myself out of it, because going over there is twenty minutes, not an hour.
And the shot, when it finally comes, is steadier, because I have not spent all day lifting a small child up and down a mountain. The pin sits where I put it. My arms hold. The whole thing works the way it always should have, and the only difference is that I stopped carrying fear on my back.
I still catch myself sometimes, standing over an open pack the night before, holding some little gadget and thinking, well, what if. Dale’s gone now, went about two years back, but I can still hear him clear as a bell in those moments. “What if,” he’d say, “is the heaviest thing a man can strap on.” I put the gadget back in the drawer and close the pack and go to sleep, and in the morning I walk up the ridge light enough to hear the woods instead of my own lungs.
Sixty-one pounds worth of stuff never got me within bow range of anything. Eighteen pounds, and a little bit of sense, finally did.
