My Life as a Hunter

I grew up in a family that didn’t hunt or own guns, which seems odd to me since I have always had an infatuation with the outdoors. I was fortunate to be raised in the country on a farm in Northern Indiana that my parents rented, we never farmed ourselves only lived on the land and the home was surrounded by corn and bean fields which backed up to the woods. The woods are where I wanted to be as a kid, I wanted to play in the creek, catch snakes, dig for worms, watch for deer and do anything else that I could that involved being out in nature. I had an uncle that hunted and one summer he gave me my first bow after I showed an interest in watching him shoot. It was a small recurve bow without a string. I took it home and fashioned a bow string out of the only thing I could find around the house, weed eater string. Now I will admit that weed eater string is not a suitable bow string, but I was pretty proud of my bow back then. I made arrows out of sticks I found in the woods and my points were nails or thorns I would pull off of a tree attached to the stick with electrical tape. I felt like Robin Hood when I had that bow and I practiced with it religiously. I started taking my bow to the woods with me whenever I went and without any knowledge of hunting rules or seasons would shoot at anything I could find to hunt. In full transparency I don’t recall ever actually hitting anything while hunting other than a cow but that’s a story for another day.

I made friends with some likeminded kids who liked to hunt and fish, and my parents would allow me to go fishing with them but never hunt because it was believed to be too dangerous. One weekend I stayed at a friend’s house and his dad took us both to a hunter’s education course, after that I began hunting with my friends behind my parents back. I was terrible shot, since I had never owned or shot a gun before. It took a few outings before I was able to hit anything, but I eventually shot a squirrel when I was around 15. It was a giant squirrel, and my friend convinced me that I should have it mounted. As luck would have it my friend had an uncle that was learning taxidermy and offered to mount it for me for $40. I saved up some money and had my squirrel mounted and it’s still hanging in my garage to this day 20 years later. I was hooked on hunting from this point on. I eventually upgraded to a real bow when I was 16 and surprisingly enough my parents let me shoot it all I wanted without much complaining. I continued hunting and fishing with my friends throughout my high school years.

One of the first purchases I made after moving out of my parents’ house after just turning 19 was a .22 rifle. I went squirrel and coon hunting crazy, since these were the only things, I could really hunt with my .22. Once I met my wife and we bought our first home, I got my first hunting dog, a bluetick hound which I named Blue. I had no idea how to train a hunting dog but I was lucky enough that our new neighbor was an old, retired coon hunter that agreed to show me the ropes. I bought a live trap and started catching racoons, we would drag those racoons in the trap around our houses and hang them in a tree and turn the dog loose on the trail. Honestly my dog wasn’t much of a coon dog at all and it took a lot of effort to even get her to bark at it, but I still hunted her every chance I got. Fur prices were really dropping at this time and a lot of people were getting out of hunting them, so I was one of the few fur sellers left around. I would get them anyway I could, in fact the most money I got my last year of coon hunting was $12 for a racoon I found dead on the road. I continued deer hunting with my while living in Indiana and had a lot of close encounters but never sealed the deal. In 2011 my wife and I moved to Tennessee, and that’s where my real deer hunting obsession began.

I had wanted to live in Tennessee ever since I was a kid, I had always felt like that was where I was meant to be, in the mountains fishing and hunting every day. I was fortunate to get to live that life in the mountains for a few years, but my career had other plans for me and took my family and I to Nashville. We never lived in Nashville but always within an hour commute to work. The great part about the Nashville area is that the hunting opportunities in the area are unreal. There is a huge deer population and a plethora of public land to chase them on. I’m sure some of the local hunters will be upset that I spilled the beans about our hunting oasis in this article, but I can’t leave those details out of this story, or you won’t believe me when you read the rest of it. It didn’t take long to make friends in the area that hunted, and boy did we hunt. Hunting consumed my life outside of work, and my wife understood the fire and drive behind me to need to hunt. I started shooting deer, processing deer, and scouting land every chance I got. I was able to feed my family of 5 almost entirely off venison for a year at a time. We have eaten so much venison over the years that I always chuckle a little when I hear people talk about how they had some chili one time with deer meat and it was so good, or that they love deer jerky and have had it a few times. Wild game is such a large part of my diet I have to remind myself that it’s a rare delicacy to those that aren’t fortunate enough to consume it as much as I do.

My passion has always been the outdoors, hunting, and fishing. I started BuckMaxx to share my passion for hunting with the world and offer what I feel are the best quality products available to help hunters be successful in the woods. My hunting has slowed down a little more than I would like but you can still find me in the woods or on the water almost on a weekly basis if not more.

Josh Logan

Buckmaxx Outdoors