Success for most bowhunters depends heavily on having the patience to wait out that deer. As an incentive to stick with the sport at least this winter, consider what Texas' brush and woods already have yielded to the fabled Muy Grande big-buck contest in Freer. He had 11 points with a 1-inch kicker on one of his brow tines. These are all exceptional animals, of course, as measured against whitetails in general and even more so against the average deer taken with a bow. Even does are not easy marks with a weapon that, in most hands, has an effective range of barely 30 yards.
Whitetails are extremely skittish, a characteristic common to prey species large and small.
Never mind that deer in this part of the country have relatively few natural enemies. They are scared of their own shadows, ready to bolt over the horizon at the snap of a twig, tick of an arrow falling off its rest or brush of a boot heel against dry bark. Or any of 1,000 other things that, in our ears, barely make a sound at all. Getting the upper hand on such nervous animals, a prerequisite to getting any shot at all, can be accomplished in one of two ways. Other bowhunters tell me they can remain absolutely motionless on stand, save for the blinking of their eyes, for hours on end.