I celebrated my one year anniversary this week, very quietly and with no ceremony. One year ago, I wrote a $50 check to buy a used youth bow to dip my toe into archery. Little did I know that with the first pull, I would be hooked. That first fall, I shot daily, wearing a cut on the edge of my lip from the kisser button and slowly learning the rhythm of shooting that I still follow. Draw, pulling shoulder blades together, resting the kisser button at the corner of my mouth. Wedge knuckle in the soft spot between my jawbone and my right ear. Close one eye, focusing on the target through my lime green peep. Find level, opening my left hand on the grip and extending fingers down towards the ground. Look past the pin, waiting for the natural waver in my arm to settle over my target. Exhale, release, and retrieve my arrow from the ground (in the beginning) or the foam (as of late). Repeat.
     I never could have guessed where I would be today, 365 days later, but a chance encounter over the summer made me reflect on what I would tell someone taking similar steps down the hunting path. Her name was Domi, and she came to shoot at Seven Hills Archery on the recommendation of the local bow shop guru. New to the course, and shooting alone, the range guides asked if I would take her around and show her the ropes (quite literally--Station 3 is the bear on a rope pulley that I've finally figured out). Her enthusiasm was infectious and we had a great morning shooting the breeze as well as the foam. Suddenly, I was the "expert," heavy emphasis on the quotation marks and spoken in a sarcastic tone, and my nuggets of wisdom to her that day included the following sage pieces of advice.
     Tidbit #1: If you want to shoot well from 20, practice at 50.
This is the single best piece of advice I have received, and I believe it with all my heart. I'm not an expert long distance shooter, but practicing at 50, 60, and 70 yards has been a game changer and made me far more confident and accurate for the shots I will actually take on game in the field. Maybe someday in the far, far future, this type of practice will pay off on an elk or mule deer hunt. Someday.
     Tidbit #2: Aim small, miss small.
I stink at golf, absolutely stink. I can putt for days, but driving befuddles me and I have shanked enough golf balls to confirm that it is a sport I shall never master. However, give me a fistful of tees and I'm happy as a clam, wedging them into targets and shooting to my heart's content. Aiming at a 1/2" target from 30 yards is maddening, but will make you a better shooter. Period.
      Tidbit #3: Always check your level.
Shooting left? Check your level. Uneven ground? Check your level. In a stand? Check your level. See a monster buck? For the love of all that is holy, check your level. When you get the shakes and your heart is pounding in your ears, check and recheck your level.
     Tidbit #4: Watch the arrow, not the target.
I still struggle with this one, and am miserable at retrieving any arrow that hasn't found its intended  home, but I'm working on it. Watch the flight of the arrow and track where it lands, and listen closely for the telltale pop of metal hitting flesh compared to the sad, sad crackle of carbon on branches. And invest heavily in Lumenocks...and perhaps a metal detector. Seriously, it's on my Christmas list.
     Tidbit #5: Adjust for your angle.
Shots uphill add yardage, shots downhill subtract. This is such a hard concept for my brain to master, and I still rely on dumb luck and guessing for how much to fudge. Shooting down from a stand requires special attention to form, bending at the waist instead of dropping your arm. I hope to practice this more in the coming weeks, and I pray that if the opportunity presents itself, I manage to get it right the first time around.
     
​     None of these tidbits were original, thought of by yours truly. I wholeheartedly credit the group of hunters that took me under their collective wings as a Very Special Project to try to teach an old dog some new tricks. To MR, GM, SS, CF, TB, RH, JF, and all the pro staff on Bowhunt Or Die (who have no idea that I watch them religiously and study their every move like a creeper), I can't thank you enough for your role in making me better. To Domi, I wish an outstanding fall with arrows that find their home more times than not. And lastly, to myself, I wish for that one day where the stars align and I get it all right, all at once, and I can text my friends those three letters that get our heart rates going: BBD.

     I'm not quite certain how something that can bring me so much joy can make me furious, dejected, impatient, and poor, all at the same time. I have thrown shameful temper tantrums, complete with gear being pitched across the room, after a botched evening hunt. I have woken up at 4:30 am on one of my infrequent days off, intending to go to the woods, only to be beaten back by weather that, quite literally, rained on my parade. However, these lows have been offset by some pretty fantastic experiences, and when I measure my hunting memories on the scale of life, the needle most definitely tips in favor of the positive. 
     And then, we have these past two weeks.
     If you asked me "how's your bow season going," I could sum it up with "I'm riding the struggle bus, but thanks for asking." For those of you unfamiliar with the expression, I'm not doing so well; in fact, this may have been the worst window of my hunting experiences to date. I've been having terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad hunts. And the worst part about it is that, with just a little tweak here, better timing there, things wouldn't be so bad and I wouldn't find myself broken and busted at the end of week #2.
                                                           Broken
     I am a very careful person. I still have college t-shirts in mint condition, I have yet to don a cast or require stitches (yes, I just knocked on wood), and I take all my morning multivitamins as a good grown up should. This careful nature is directly at odds with the streak of bad luck in which I am currently swimming. During the past fortnight, I have managed to break or lose more equipment than I have in the previous eleven and a half months combined. Five, count them, five arrows are MIA, wedged in thickets, grass tufts, passing zeppelins, or space-time continuums for all I know because they certainly aren't in my quiver, in a deer, or neatly on the ground where I thought they would be. To help me better locate my errant arrows, I bought some new Nockturnal luminocks--one of which I promptly snapped in half trying to insert it into my arrow shaft, eliciting a string of expletives that would make a sailor proud. During a practice session, I managed to crack an arrow shaft on an wild shot while trying to figure out why my bow was suddenly shooting one and a half feet to the left. Even more infuriating was the shot that was just a tad high, skimming the top of a target and somehow shearing the fletching from the shaft, cleanly snapping the arrow in half, flipping the sections in the air like some kind of bad cartoon segment as I watched in disbelief. By my rough calculations, I am currently $160 in the hole, not counting the cost of replacements or the new blinds and gear I picked up in late September. Oh, have I mentioned I am also cheap, so this is a particularly painful figure. I am one lost arrow away from developing a permanent eye twitch from incredulity at my bad luck.
                                                              Busted
     I pride myself in my scent concealment, although I am a novice compared to my hunting friends. I have a scent-free bag, but it is a DIY version and is more scent-free due to location (outside) than technology. I don't own any Ozonics, but have a wide range of Scent Killer Gold products for every possible application. I developed a habit of eating an apple before every hunt to cover the smell of my breath. Last fall, I had a coyote track prey within five feet of my ground location before he noticed my presence. I have years of experience telling me that I am able to go undetected, which infuriates me even more with the number of times I have been busted this fall. To date, I have hunted 21 hours, seen 22 deer, and have been busted all but two times, which accounts for all the missing arrows. Have I mentioned that there are FIVE of them? The worst part is, I am getting busted in ridiculous ways. One doe walked up behind my friend and I through dense woods, stopping five yards away before either of us noticed each other, my eyes turned toward the field rather than the brush at my back. Another doe was lying directly in my hunting spot as I walked in one afternoon at 3:30, the soonest I could get there after school. Trapped in the open, I stalked up to her within 20 yards before she finally noticed and bolted. Three other does paraded through the field that evening, just to bust me one at a time, much to my chagrin. One doe and her fawns busted me as I tried a new spot, seated just a little too near the trail for the amount of cover I had to work with, a rookie mistake. The final, and most embarrassing, happened as I left my blind at the end of the hunt, gear packed away, only to emerge to face a doe at what I figured to be fifty yards--I couldn't tell for sure, because like an idiot, I had packed away my rangefinder. I shot anyway, and hit her, but never recovered my deer. I believe "crestfallen" best described my mood that evening, and to some degree, still does.
     Yes, I know season has just begun. Yes, I know the Rutting Moon has yet to come. Yes, I am aware that even the hunters I watch on YouTube have bad outings and their own fair share of misses. To be honest, the laughter and consolation of my friends has eased the sting, but hasn't healed the burn. I'm ready for a win, a shot I'm proud of, a deer that is humanely harvested and recovered. That day will come, I'm sure, but until it does, I will keep plugging along, flinging arrows and writing checks to support a hobby that has become a life that I can't do without.

     Anyone who is passionate about a thing, regardless of what that thing actually is, has a countdown. Baseball fans, deeply engrossed in playoff fervor, are already thinking about April. Christmas fanatics have customized calendars on cell phones, ticking off every Friday from now to December 25th. Movie buffs anxiously await the next blockbuster release and search for spoilers online, and tech geeks camp out in long lines for days for the release of the next iPhone. We all have that one thing that brings us to to our knees in anticipation, filling our days and nights with daydreams of when we can get our hands on "our precious."  This urge is in our DNA; resisting the call is a fool's game.
     My day is October 1.
     I have been waiting for my thing since 5:02 pm on January 17th, the precise time when the sun slipped below the horizon and closed the door on whitetail archery season in Illinois. The day was brutal cold, eeking out only 13 measly degrees, and yet I dragged my gear out to the woods, hoping and praying for one final shot, one last chance to fill an archery tag during my first season. Sadly, I walked away empty handed, replaying every mistake from the previous three and a half months. Had I checked my level on that first doe, I would be able to feel my fingers right now. Had I used my rangefinder on that second doe, my feet wouldn't feel like lead blocks, tingling with every step back to the house. Had I waited just a bit longer on that last buck, tempted him in closer with a bleat or call, I wouldn't have ice crystals at the corners of my nose. I left that season with scales balanced between great experiences and heavy regrets, two sides of my hunting coin that I slipped into my pocket to revisit throughout the upcoming weeks, flipping it between my fingers to pass the time.
     In my off season, I trained like I had a paycheck riding on it. Weekly league nights. New equipment. 3D targets. Weight training. Competitive shooting. Research. Distance shooting. Bigger. Faster. Stronger. I watched does and fawns from the tractor as I mowed field edges, enamored with their quiet movements and mentally estimating how far they were away. Seven an a half months passed in the blink of an eye, and as the weather warmed and I added fishing as a distraction, I almost lost sight of the calendar as my thing quietly approached. 
     What snapped me back to reality was a smell, all too familiar, and gone for all too long. As I drove through town one sweltering September evening, windows down despite temperatures still in the 80s at 9 pm, the smell of fall was suddenly, briefly, in the air. We all know that smell--something sharp, with a hint of woodsmoke, and the promise of cold winds under stars snapping bright and clear. The smell of endings and beginnings as summer's heat gives way to winter's chill. The smell of hunting season.
     That smell pushed me to action. No longer was my countdown an arbitrary thing marking a day too far away to be real; I was past the month mark, rounding the corner on two weeks, reading the signal to head for home on a day count that could almost be done on two hands. The past few days have been spent on final details--the broadheads that needed sharpened, the field pack that required reorganizing, the quiver that didn't fit quite right on my bow. The scent-free chemicals came out of storage, and every piece of camo fabric in the house was appropriately removed of traces of my human stench. I spent an embarrassing amount of money in a moment of weakness on an array of equipment to improve my chances this year (or at the very least, improve my comfort). It was time.
     As the calendar flipped from September to October, I drove to my family farm, ready to start a new season. The weather really was too warm for good hunting, and 2016 is predicted to have a later-than-usual rut. None of this mattered. I headed to the woods with a friend, mentally flipping my 2015 season coin in my mind. I'm sure this year will bring its own bevy of successes and failures, some I can expect (my lack of food plots and trail cameras are weighing heavily on my mind at the moment) and others that will come as a surprise. But I take it as a good omen that we had a doe appear behind us at five yards, practically in our laps, and settle by us for 45 minutes until she and her fawn bounded across open ground, heading for the only corn field in the area. On day one, I picked the right field, the right time, and the right direction. Although my Opening Day didn't lead to a kill, I'm still fairly certain the coin has landed heads up.