I thought I would write this from the perspective of someone who has been waiting since June for opening day in November, making the wait feel excruciating—especially when there haven’t been many opportunities to hunt all year, aside from the few squirrels we took. But no, that isn’t the waiting game that makes you question your sanity.

I used to have a fantasy that my hunts would be relatively easy. I’d wake up refreshed to the sound of the alarm. Breakfast cooked perfectly. No one parked in my spot. My target animal acquired, unbeknownst to my existence on the top of the ridge as the first rays of sun bathed the horizon. I did have a few good years that established this eternal false hope so bear with me and let me wallow in my memories and dreams.

But then reality sets back in.

The waiting game begins the night before opening day. I rarely sleep well, thanks to a healthy combination of anticipation and anxiety. I lie there going over my strategies, wondering if I chose the right Plan A. I check my alarm fifteen times to make sure I actually set it, and I can’t help running through my mental checklist one more time to make sure I haven’t forgotten anything—including my lucky socks.

Thankfully, adrenaline gets me through the first morning. My alarm startles me into existence after what feels like a twenty-minute power nap. My heart rate hasn’t been this high since my high school track meets. Breakfast ends up burnt, my coffee is cold, and I somehow managed to forget the Hostess. Always pack the Hostess. 

Then after hiking uphill long enough to seriously question my level of physical fitness, I arrive at a beautiful overlook with absolutely nothing moving except the sweat running down my back. And then the wind changes.

Welcome to hunting.

I spend months looking forward to these seasons. I check dates, study maps, sight in rifles, shoot my bow, sort gear, plan meals, and talk myself into believing that this year might finally be the year I shoot something big. I imagine the moments I might experience and the stories I’ll bring home. I picture the freezer full of meat and the satisfaction of knowing I worked for it.

What I don’t spend nearly as much time imagining is sitting on a hillside for six hours, watching a patch of brush or outcropping that refuses to produce anything other than a shadow. A deer shaped shadow. Sitting behind glass for hours take a special kind of patience. I also refuse to imagine hours spent in a blind. I hate sitting in a blind. Jason once sat over 50 days in a blind waiting on the right bull bison.

Hunting requires an almost unreasonable amount of optimism.

I have to remind myself that the alarm doesn’t always go off as early as a spring turkey wake up. I have to believe that walking another ridge might make all the difference. I have to convince myself that the animal I’m looking for is probably just over the next rise, even when the only thing over the next rise, is another valley of rocks and cactus or trees and an empty wash.

And then I have to convince myself to do it all again the next day.

The waiting is the part nobody really knows how to explain to someone who is first learning to hunt. Or maybe they do, but one doesn’t fully understand it until they’ve lived it. It’s one thing to know that hunting takes patience. It’s another thing entirely to sit perfectly still, trying not to make a sound, while every muscle in the body develops an urgent opinion about the situation.

My feet fall asleep. Dead asleep. And I have to fidget to keep the blood circulating. Then a twig snaps somewhere behind me, and suddenly I’m certain something enormous is sneaking up on me. I turn to look, only to discover that the culprit is a bird approximately the size of my fist. Or a chipmunk. Or in the case of my Kaibab archery hunt, a 175 inch 4×5 mule deer.

More often than not, the animal I’m actually hunting remains completely unavailable for me to even screw up a stalk on.

But somewhere in all that waiting all those years, something began to change.

I started noticing the little things. The way the first light spills across the hills and the temperature dips. The movement of birds through the trees and the distant sound of something I can’t quite identify. I begin to recognize the difference between ordinary silence and the kind of silence that makes me pay attention. Or the astounding quiet in the snowy tundra of Alaska where the only thing you hear is your heart beat and the pulsing of blood throughout your cranial cavity.

I learn to sit still long enough to see what I would have missed if I’d been in a hurry. I take too many photos. Ask Jason about the squirrel footage… And most of the time, I appreciate the day even when the hunt doesn’t go my way.

That doesn’t mean I stop wanting to fill a tag. Let’s be honest about that. I don’t spend months preparing for a hunt because I hope to come home empty-handed. There is a real satisfaction in a successful harvest, especially when I’ve worked hard for it. The meat matters. The experience matters. The responsibility of making a good shot and honoring the animal matters.

Having my family there matters.

I’ve picked a pretty miserable way to spend my time if the only measure of success is spilling blood.

Some days, I walk farther than I planned and see nothing. Some days, the weather makes my decisions for me. Some days, I make a mistake, spook an animal, or realize I should have taken a right instead of a left. Sometimes I do everything right and still come home with nothing to show for it but a tear in the ass of my favorite pants, blistered toes, and a tale about how close I think I was. Or how big that fish might have been.

Only Prince William Sound itself knows how big that fish was. Or even what it was.

But those days count, too.

They teach me to read the country a little better. They remind me that wild animals don’t follow my schedule and the mountains don’t care about my plans. They teach me humility, which is a lesson the outdoors seems particularly fond of delivering.

And those days give me something to laugh about later on with loved ones.

The miserable mornings, the ridiculous mistakes, or the days seeing zero target species specimens grants me the ability to look back and realize that those are still good days. Still moments where I learned something. Optimism generates from knowing that there will be more opportunities next season or the next time I draw a tag. And the bad days make the good days even sweeter.

The harsh truth is that hunting asks me to work for something I cannot control.

I can prepare. I can practice. I can learn the land, pay attention to the weather, and make thoughtful decisions. I can put in the miles and do my best to be ready when an opportunity comes along.

But at the end of the day, I still need a little luck. I cannot make an animal appear out of thin air, perfectly broadside and in range.

I am not patient with uncertainty. But when luck lands and everything finally comes together, I know it wasn’t handed to me. The experience is worth the effort.

The outdoor lifestyle reminds me that not everything worthwhile comes with a guaranteed outcome. Sometimes the reward is the harvest. Sometimes it’s the lesson. Sometimes it’s the people beside me, the meals we cook when we get back to camp.

Honestly, sometimes the best part of the hunt is just ending the day, taking off my boots and eating something good for dinner. Like caribou meatloaf sandwiches.

There will always be another ridge to climb, another morning to get up early, and another season to look forward to. I’ll keep checking the forecasts, packing my gear, filling my thermos, and convincing myself that this time everything might come together exactly as planned.

Being a hunter means being an eternal optimist.

After all, I wouldn’t willingly set an alarm for three in the morning, hike into the dark, freeze in a patch of brush, and spend an entire day waiting for an animal that may never show up if I didn’t believe something good might happen.

When something good does happen, adrenaline is the best high.

But even when it doesn’t, the mountains are still there. The coffee still tastes better outside. The stories still get told around the campfire and dinner table.

There’s always the possibility that things will be different the next day. I have to believe they will be. I have to try. 

I’ll just remember the extra coffee. Look. I like coffee okay? And maybe a sandwich. More snacks. And the Hostess.

Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about hunting, it’s that I could be there a while.