• Glassing in the open. Unless you plan to stay perfectly motionless, sitting down in a clearing to glass a hillside puts you at much greater risk of letting your movements give you away. Look for bushes, brush, trees and shadows to provide cover and break up your outline.

• Too much walking. Animals are looking for any movement that could be a predator.

If they see you walking around, they’ll just vanish into the brush. If they’re close, they may just lay low and let you walk right by.

“Just take five slow steps, then stop and look around, glassing everything near and far, especially in timber,” Paul said. “Deer would rather watch you walk by. But if you move slowly and stop, it can really unnerve them and may create a shot opportunity.”

• Muzzle madness. Most hunters already know better than to walk along a hilltop or ridgeline, where every living thing below can see them. They know to use the terrain to their advantage.

But there’s one mistake that some guides see over and over.

“When you’re stalking, you need to keep that gun barrel down and off your shoulder,” Denne said.

“I’ve had too many clients use the terrain to hide their body. But they’ve got the gun on their shoulder, and there’s the barrel sticking up like a flagpole over the ridgeline.”

7. MUFFING THE SHOT
Books could be written about the mistakes hunters make when they take the shot. You could eliminate many of them by spending enough time at the range.

There are two mistakes, however, exclusive to the field.

• Rushing the shot. In Hunter Safety, we all learned that if we’re uncomfortable with the shot, we shouldn’t take it.

But in the heat of the chase, it’s sometimes easy to forget to focus, think and really set up the shot.

“Hunters are too quick to shoot. The deer busts out, and then they unload on the thing, trying to shoot freehand at a moving target,” Zennie said. “That creates a huge risk that the animal will end up wounded instead of in a game bag.”

• Forgetting to work the angles. This is another one right out of Hunting 101, but it’s amazing how much you forget when the biggest buck you’ve ever seen is only a couple of hundred yards away.

When shooting uphill or downhill at an angle, don’t forget that the distance to the animal is only some percentage of what shows up in the range finder. At a 45-degree angle, for example, the actual distance is about 70 percent of what the range finder shows. Forget that, and you’re likely to shoot over the deer’s back.

• Losing good meat. With a 250-pound deer at your feet, dragging the deer back to camp isn’t an option.

Unless you have buddies who can come to your aid, you’re going to have to quarter the animal or bone out the meat.

“It amazes me how many good hunters don’t know how to bone out a deer,” Zennie said. “There are plenty of books and videos that will teach you. It’s worth the investment so none of that deer meat goes to waste.

So which mistakes did I make on that first hunt? I’ll never tell! What matters is that I learned from them and became a better hunter for it.

I’ve also learned to appreciate the whole hunting experience, even when a perfect hunt doesn’t put venison in my freezer. Sometimes the game gets away, no matter how good you are, and most of us wouldn’t have it any other way.