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Confidence

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Confidence

Postby Swede » 03 31, 2020 •  [Post 1]

I have never claimed to be a better shot than the next guy, or tougher or smarter, or anything else. I have a few attributes that seem available to anyone: man or woman.
I can persevere. I don't like hearing complaining. It will work out and be better tomorrow, or sometime.
I am patient. One time it was the last day of the season. I had gone to church in the morning, but told my wife I wanted one more chance at it. She said "You have hunted hard all season and have got nothing. Why don't you call it a season?" I commented, I was heading out and felt good about it. That evening about an hour before dark, I finally scored. The season is not over until you call it quits or the State says you have to stop.
I understand that if I stay at it, ultimately things will work out well. Usually that proves to be true.
I can usually adapt. That is not something I read or hear about much, but it is important. Indian Summer is one who writes about it, and I know he sees it as a high mark for hunting. It is far more than changing calls. It may mean staying out alone and continuing to hunt on your own. Several times I have been caught out at night and just stayed put out in the forest. I had some granola, and put on my coat and hunkered down for the night by a large log, right where night fall caught me. Adapting can mean a million different things I suppose. Don't limit yourself.
Ultimately it is confidence. It is not that I always get my elk, but knowing I can get one if I just get a break.
What I would like to do here is see some stories about how confidence made a difference in a hunt for you or someone you know.
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Re: Confidence

Postby saddlesore » 04 01, 2020 •  [Post 2]

Not a long story,but I have shot quite a few elk on the last day of the season which are 9 days long.I have confidence in myself that I know what I am doing and usually it is only having me and the elk in the same place
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Re: Confidence

Postby Tigger » 04 01, 2020 •  [Post 3]

Out in the elk woods, every elk encounter or non-encounter is made up of skill and randomness. Confidence in your skills puts you in the best place to encounter an elk. However, randomness rears its ugly head and the bull that was gonna walk right by you was sleepy that day and stayed in bed another half hour. Or he just happened to all but step on a black bear and that changed his path a couple hundred yards. But by having confidence in your skills, sooner or later, that bull will be where he is supposed to be and appear in your sights.

Or you can rely upon randomness. And don't get me wrong, a few guys will pull up to a crowded trailhead at 8:30 am on opener, walk down a well used trail and sit in a big meadow that adjoins the meadow 150 yards down the trail. A huge bull will walk out and they will shoot it. They will then proclaim themselves great elk hunters. I don't know about the rest of you, but #1, that isn't how I want to hunt and #2, Luck like that never happens to me.
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Re: Confidence

Postby Swede » 04 01, 2020 •  [Post 4]

I can write about several times where I gutted it out all season having confidence that it could and would happen if I just hung in there. One of those time was the season I spent with RJ and his friend Joe in Idaho. None of us were doing any shooting that season, and for me sightings of elk were almost nonresistant. Only occasionally did I hear one. Toward the end of the season RJ and Joe helped me relocate my stand to a ridge along an old burn that had turned into a brush field. That brush field is huge. The first day I sat in that stand I heard and saw nothing until shortly before dark, when I started hearing a bull bugle about 200 yards away. I was ready to go back the next day knowing the elk were still in the area, and hopeful they would come my way.
About 9:00 I heard the bull bugle again. This time he was in the timber just above me. Above him was a road which was close enough I could occasionally hear hunters and others driving over. At about 10:30 Someone stopped on that road above and got out and started hammering on something metal. I suppose they were beating on a trailer, or something in one, as it sounded like they had been pulling a trailer. What they did not know was the elk were right below them. Slowly the elk got up and started quietly moving away. A couple of the elk came out and appeared along the ridge where I was waiting. I had persevered all season until the middle of that last week and had been patient. I was confident and rewarded with a nice spike bull that last Wednesday of the season.
For me the moral of the story is that you will not get elk by being discouraged and going home. There are a million reasons/excuses to quit, and I know some are truly legit, but regardless, quitting will not get you an elk. The dumbest hunter in the woods has a better chance at bagging a bull than the genius watching elk movies on his tv.
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Re: Confidence

Postby Lefty » 04 01, 2020 •  [Post 5]

The never quit attitude is different than confidence. I go out to hunt,
My FIL says" why ruin a good hunt by killing something :lol: "
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Re: Confidence

Postby Indian Summer » 04 01, 2020 •  [Post 6]

This is my cup. It is always at least half full. If I think about a bull crossing paths with a bear the last thing that would cross my mind is that he’ll head the other way. That’s just not how I think. I’d tell myself he was heading the other way and the bear, my fellow hunter, pushed him my way.


Realistically there are times when I’m in great spirits but let’s face it a mountain elk hunter pushing himself to the limits doesn’t walk around humming Jingle Bells all day! But I never start on a downward spiral when it comes to my attitude or level of confidence. I know like Swede and others that it’s not over until I say it is. I know this because I’ve seen and shot bulls on my way off the hill on the last day of the season. A day when I am sure others said to themselves that today would likely be like all of the days before that where they returned to camp without firing a shot. I coach myself sometimes. Telling myself that elk don’t know that it’s the last day of my hunt. Why should it be any different than the first day when I was all full of confidence?

I’ll tell you one thing for sure. Nobody ever stood next to a dead bull that could honestly say that 2 or 3 hours before that they knew they’d be pulling their knife out. The other thing that’s for certain is if you hang it up before you kill an elk.... you won’t kill an elk! Rocket science eh!
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Re: Confidence

Postby Lefty » 04 01, 2020 •  [Post 7]

Time to fill in a bit about my moose hunt a few years back.
a couple of retired buddies hunted the same region we do. Between all their hunts they live for 6 weeks at their camp in the fall. for a few previous years we had seen them when archery hunting or my youngest during her moose hunt.
My wife was doing some humanitarian work in South America( I dont know how to spell guatemala :lol: )
Cold cold morning. -10 going up the canyon. I made a quick run looking for a moose before heading into town. We had had a couple big dumps of snow. in the bottoms 10-15 inches but 150 feet up there was easily 40 inches of snow.
On the road 100 yards from camp I could see an elk herd high up on the ridge, with some big bulls. the elk tracks in the snow showed from 3/4 mile away in the bright sun glowing on the snow.
I pulled into camp just as my neighbors were strapping down their snow tracked OHV. I Stopped to say goodbye for the year They told me where they had seen the biggest moose of the year and I needed to kill that bull
I mentioned too bad their hunt ended yesterday and pointed to the elk on the ridge.


Well, their bull elk hunt ended today not yesterday. In minutes they were unloaded and making the round trip towards the herd.
I went to town, got gas, food, went to church. Returned to camp and decided to go after that bull. I Killed my moose at 1:00 Pm,.. spent a few hours getting my sled and kill kit,. Cut up and hauled the moose back to the truck. 8:30PM. Back at camp their trucks and gear was still their. So my guess they each got their bull.

We had run across each other dozens of times over the year,.. but I never seen them since; kinda sad .
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Re: Confidence

Postby 7mmfan » 04 02, 2020 •  [Post 8]

Sticking it out is one of those things that I guess I've always taken for granted. Probably just the way I was raised. Everything we did outdoors was a dawn to dusk deal. If I get off the river or out of the woods with light left, I feel like I am slacking. I know that's not the case, and definitely not the case for everyone else out there, it's just my mindset. It has led me to many late evening kills that resulted in many late night pack outs.

The one hunt that sticks out in my mind as far as really sticking it out and having success for it was a small blacktail buck I killed a few years ago. I had been hunting this particular series of clear cuts for about a week. I'd been seeing deer consistently, including bucks. I had taken a shot at a nice buck a couple days before but missed. The last morning of the season, my partner and I headed in to be in place at daylight. An hour later he killed one of the biggest blacktail bucks I've ever laid eyes on. I was happy for him and green with envy. We got his buck quartered and packed back to the truck, 3 miles away. It was now pouring rain and the wind was blowing. We got him loaded up, shook hands and he was on his way home. I sat in my truck for half an hour or so eating a snack, getting warm and dried out a little. It was 2:00 and I was trying to decide if I should head back in, or just call it a day. I decided I'd never kill a deer at home so I threw my pack back on, grabbed my shooting iron and hit the trail.

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An hour later I was at a different clear cut that I had seen some good sign in earlier in the year. I was just reaching the spot I wanted to set up on when I noticed a guy and his son across the cut from me. They were clearly already there, so I waved, and quietly backed out. Now I had a dilemma. I had about 1.5 hours of daylight left. The only cut in walking range of me was the cut we had killed a buck in that morning. I didn't have a ton of confidence going back to where we had just killed an animal, but it was my only shot. It was a 45 minute walk, so I'd only have 45 minutes of light to hunt.

I walked/trotted as fast as I could to get there. As I eased out of the timber into the open, I stopped and glassed ahead. The rain had stopped, and the wind had picked back up. It was perfect conditions and I was beginning to feel good about it. I was literally 50' from where my partner had killed his buck that morning, and stepped down into the ditch to go around the tank trap in the logging road, when I caught movement ahead of me. Here came two bucks walking right down the road, past the kill site, coming right to me. I slowly hunkered down and got my rifle on my knee. My scope was already dialed down to 3 power, as I waited for the lead buck to clear the brush between him and I. At 20' he cleared the brush line and shot him through the brisket with my 7 mag. Amazingly, he maintained his feet and managed to slink off into the brush 15 feet. I stood up and one shot to the neck ended his suffering. His partner, a slightly larger 2 pt stood there 50' away staring at me for nearly a minute before he turned and fled back to the timber.

I had just killed a buck with about 30 minutes of daylight left on the last day in the last spot that I could possibly get to. It was a spot I generally had a ton of confidence in, but given the circumstances, wasn't overly confident I'd see much, but it was my last and only option so I went for it. I called my partner and asked him what he was doing. He said he had just gotten out of the shower and was about to have a beer. I told him he needed to put his boots back on and hit the road. an hour and a half later, just as I finished quartering the buck out and was getting cleaned up, his head lamp came bobbing down the road. Man it's nice to have good hunting partners.
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Re: Confidence

Postby Swede » 04 02, 2020 •  [Post 9]

I sure enjoyed your story 7mm. I consider both bucks to be trophies. Congrats.
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Re: Confidence

Postby 7mmfan » 04 03, 2020 •  [Post 10]

Swede wrote:I sure enjoyed your story 7mm. I consider both bucks to be trophies. Congrats.


Thank you Swede. I was very grateful for that buck. It was year 3 of wild game only for red meat in our household. I had killed a small forkie buck in Idaho a couple weeks before, but that was all that was in our freezer. Not nearly enough to get us through to the next opportunity for red meat. This buck got us over the hump. We're now on year 7 of not buying any meat other than chicken and an occasional rack of ribs for the smoker.
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Re: Confidence

Postby Trumkin the Dwarf » 04 03, 2020 •  [Post 11]

I'm a little confused here. Are we talking about confidence as a skill? Or persistence?

When I'm confident, there's nothing that will tear me away from the chase until the fat lady sings. When I'm not confident it takes all my mental fortitude to badger my sorry butt into hunting hard till it's all over. I think of that as the grind... I remind myself that I hunt the way a coyote does, that I need to keep going till my legs fall off or I kill. That's being obstinate, not confident.
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Re: Confidence

Postby saddlesore » 04 03, 2020 •  [Post 12]

If you don't have confidence in your skill or ability, you most likely won't be persistent
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Re: Confidence

Postby Indian Summer » 04 04, 2020 •  [Post 13]

saddlesore wrote:If you don't have confidence in your skill or ability, you most likely won't be persistent

Definitely. Persistence is a sign of confidence.
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