Something Worse

This article was first published in the October 2025 issue of Fur-Fish-Game magazine.

I was just about to sit down to what smelled like a delicious Saturday morning breakfast when the back door opened and then slammed shut. I heard my son kick off his boots in the hall and mutter a few choice words under his breath. Good thing his momma was frying bacon at the stove and couldn’t hear him. What in the world was the boy doing home already anyway? He should have been in his tree stand for at least another hour. Maybe even two, this time of year.

My son had been chasing the same old bruiser buck for the last three years. There had been a few summer sightings and literally hundreds of trail camera pictures, but he hadn’t had a single encounter with the whitetail during a hunting season. Safe to say that the young hunter was obsessed. He had made it abundantly clear this year that it was going to be this buck or bust, so I should have known that the news wasn’t good when he came home early and didn’t break down the door yelling for me to come outside and look in the bed of his truck.

I pushed out a chair for him, and he collapsed into it. I slid over my plate of bacon and eggs. He slid it right back.

“I can’t eat right now. Not without being sick. I had him, dad. I had him! He chased a doe right under my stand and stopped broadside at just fifteen yards. And I blew it! Shot right over his back.”

“Now slow down a minute, boy. Are you absolutely sure you missed him? Maybe you just hit him high or something.”

Instead of answering the question, my son pushed away from the table and walked out of the room. He came back a few seconds later and handed me an arrow. Then he buried his head in his hands. Other than a little mud on the broadhead, the arrow was as clean as the day it came out of the box. I laid it on the kitchen table, an act that amounted to a cardinal sin in our house and one that would have earned me a lecture had my wife still been in the room. Conveniently, she had remembered an errand she needed to run the minute she figured out what had happened, leaving me alone to console our son. I looked from the arrow to the boy to my breakfast in turn, trying in vain to conjure up a word of comfort so I wouldn’t feel so guilty about eating my bacon and eggs and moving on with my life right there in front of him.

“I can’t believe this, dad. There’s not a worse feeling in the world than missing the buck of your dreams!”

I felt for the kid, I really did. Missing a target buck, especially one with as much history as my son had with this one, could haunt a man for the rest of his life. But my boy was wrong, dead wrong, and I had to tell him so. I dropped my fork and took a deep breath.

“Actually, son, there is something worse. And unfortunately, I speak from personal experience.”

“What? What are you talking about? There’s no way, dad! Nothing could be worse than this.”

I laid a hand on his shoulder and looked him square in the eye.

“Now listen to me, boy, and listen close. I’m going to tell you a story you’ve never heard before, a story that just might make you feel better.”

“Fourteen years ago now, I had three shooter bucks on camera heading into archery season. I would have been happy to wrap my tag around any one of them, but they were all nocturnal. Never got a single daylight picture of any of them.”

“Then, around Halloween, a newcomer showed up that made me forget all about those nocturnal bucks. He was something special, for sure. As classic an eight pointer as a guy could ask for. Shoulders like a bodybuilder. Tines a foot long. There couldn’t have been more than two inches of deductions on his rack. He was the kind of whitetail that every hunter hopes for, but he was absolutely the deer of my dreams. You know how I’ve always had a thing for big eights. And best of all, this buck was moving in daylight.”

That got the boy’s attention. He reached over and snagged a piece of my bacon.

“First Saturday in November, I decided I’d sit all day, and just after lunch I heard a deer come off the ridge behind me. Sure enough, it was the big eight, and he was walking a trail that would lead him right past my stand. The buck stopped on his own, just 13 yards away. He stood there broadside and as big as a barn, practically begging me to shoot him. And I sailed my arrow right over his back. Thirteen yards away, and I missed him clean.”

My son drained my glass of milk in a single gulp. Then, he grabbed my fork and tucked into my eggs, all without breaking eye contact.

“The buck wasn’t spooked too bad, though. After a couple of days, he showed back up on my trail camera so I continued to hunt him every chance I could. Rifle season opened the third Saturday in November, and the following Wednesday, which would have been the day before Thanksgiving, I finally saw him again. The buck came around a bend in the trail some 200 yards away, and I recognized him immediately. He walked straight at me for 50 yards or so and then turned north towards the timber. Before he could get into thick cover, I whistled at him. He locked up, and I squeezed off a shot. Then he tore out of there like he was being chased by the devil himself.”

I could see the wheels turning in my son’s head. He was trying to figure out which one of the shoulder mounts in our living room belonged to the buck I was talking about. I didn’t wait around for him to put two and two together.

“I found blood immediately, but there wasn’t much of it so I backed out and called a buddy. The two of us trailed that buck one blood drop at a time all the way to the northwest corner of the property. We found where he’d jumped the fence onto the neighbor’s place. I drove straight home and called the guy that owned it. He gave me the go ahead to keep tracking so I went right back out and followed that thin blood trail one drop at a time right up until I lost it for good in a big field of bluestem. I walked that property for weeks hoping to stumble upon the buck, hoping for some kind of closure. I never found a thing.“

We sat in the misery of memory for a minute; his fresh and raw, mine old and familiar, before I finally broke the silence.

“So, what’s worse, son, than missing a chip shot on the buck of your dreams? Shooting him and not finding him.”

The boy stared at me for a long moment. Then he slid my plate back over. It still had a bite or two of scrambled eggs on it and a scrap of bacon he hadn’t finished, but I pushed it right back.

“No thanks, son. I can’t eat right now. Not without being sick.”