With five Pope & Young world records and twice as many Safari Club records, at 57, Chuck Adams is one of, if not the best, bowhunters. Yet some dispute his fame. Some say he takes unethical shots, has a platoon of scouts and hunts only the choicest private land. Here it is, straight form the source.

A portion of this interview appeared in the Jan-Feb 2008 Bugle.

Where did it all begin for you—with the outdoors and hunting?
I’m the only bowhunter in my family, but I started hunting with a .22 rifle, then a shotgun at a very early age. As soon as I could walk I was trying to toddle along behind my dad and granddad. When I was 12, which was the legal age to start hunting deer in California, I shot my deer in about three days on public land. I thought, “Boy, this is too quick.” That’s why I ultimately took up bowhunting at 13 because I loved hunting. I wanted to hunt more and kill less.

Who influenced you as a young bowhunter?
My real hero was the late, great Fred Bear. I had the good fortune to actually interview him for an article early in my career. I spent several dinners with him and I was awestruck because I had read about his exploits with a bow and seen the movies like his brown bear hunting movies when I was a kid. He was really my hero as a kid and somebody I hoped to emulate. He just seemed like a down-to-earth, nice guy

Where did you grow up?
I grew up in northern California, born and raised in a little town called Chico, about 90 miles north of Sacramento. Interestingly enough, you’ve probably heard of Ishi, the last wild Indian in California. Ishi taught Saxton Pope and Art Young, the forefathers of the famous Pope & Young archery record club. He taught them how to shoot a bow and arrow and hunt with a bow and arrow back in the early 1920s. I was born only 18 miles from where they found Ishi after he came out of the hills where he was cornered by dogs in a slaughter house. Saxton Pope was a professor in San Francisco which is only about a three or four hour drive away. Art Young grew up in coastal California near a town called Kelsyville on the west coast. I was born in the middle of the triangle where those three guys were, which I think is kind of ironic. I grew up in the cradle of modern bowhunting.

You’ve said in previous interviews that elk hunting is your favorite of all hunting and elk are your favorite of all animals to pursue. Is that still the case?
It’s still the case and I don’t figure that’s ever going to change. I love elk because a big bull is difficult and the most exciting animal I’ve ever bowhunted. He’s big. He’s got awesome antlers. He makes a whole bunch of noise during the rut, and he lives in the most magnificent country in North America. I love physical ground-level hunting, and there’s nothing more physical than hunting elk.

So you love elk hunting first and foremost. Would anything make a close second for you?
Second on the list would be any kind of a big deer. I don’t care if it’s a white tail, a mule deer, or a black tail like the ones I grew up hunting in California. If it’s a mature, trophy-sized deer that knows all about hunters, it’s a supreme challenge. I think deer are maybe slightly more difficult to hunt than elk on average, but they don’t combine all those other factors I mentioned. They’re not as big. Sometimes the country is not as magnificent. They don’t make all that noise during the rut.

You’ve got 122 animals listed in Pope & Young. Is that still accurate?
Not really. When I moved to Wyoming, I lost touch with my favorite Pope & Young measurer. Now, I got a big pile of antlers and horns that I need measured. The unofficial count is up around 145 now, but I haven’t had anything measured since 2004. I’ve got about 23 record-sized animals in North America. I found a good Pope and Young measurer locally, and I just have to load up that stuff and get it to him

A lot of hunters will go through life not even taking like 100 animals. To what can you contribute your consistency?  How can you do this over and over and over again?
Part of it is I taught college English for a few years, and I didn’t like the fact that college started the same time as bow season. I went out and became a free-lance writer. That particular career allows me to work seven days a week eight-and-a-half months of the year. Then I can carve out a good solid chunk of time to go bowhunting. So I have the time to do it, and I don’t feel pressured to take an animal early in a trip.

Secondly, I think the more time you spend hunting with a bow and arrow, the better you get. Everyone who knows me says I’m the most persistent guy they know. That’s just part of my nature; I’m like a bulldog—if I get my teeth into something, I don’t let go. I’m willing to just hang in there and keep hunting from daylight to dark ‘til I get what I’m after. It usually works out sooner or later, and sometimes it doesn’t. In 2004 I didn’t even shoot an elk with my bow. I hunted a month for elk, and I didn’t even draw my bow because I didn’t see anything big enough that turned my crank.

Have you ever lost any animals bowhunting?
I think any bowhunter who says they haven’t lost an animal is the world’s luckiest person or a liar, and I don’t know any of the luckiest people. I’ve lost a few. I don’t know any good gun hunters who haven’t hit and lost a few animals in their career. It happens. The only thing I can say is I don’t believe I’ve ever lost an animal that I thought went off and died. I’ve nicked a few animals that jumped the bowstring. I’ve blown shots because I was tired or cold or excited, but it doesn’t happen very often, I can tell you that. I’ve had the misfortune to make a few paunch shots—I’ve never hit an elk in the gut—but deer are real string jumpy. I’ve made a few of those bad shots in my career, but I’ve found every one of those animals. It’s because of the persistence again.

You go on 10 or 12 hunts a year. Do you take all that meat home?
I take it all home, or I donate it. I hunt Sitka blacktail deer in Alaska just about every year. You can shoot three deer there every year, and I usually bring back some of it. I donate some of it to the mission in the town of Kodiak for the poor and the homeless. Then I fill three deep freezes at home. Anything I don’t think I’m going to eat within a year, I give to local soup kitchens and good friends and family. My better half, Greta and I, eat wild game just about every day of the year, but there’s no way you could eat up everything that I shoot.

Do you ever go out simply to stock the freezer? Do you kill animals without racks—take a doe now and then or a cow?
Not cows; the elk tags are too precious for me. When I lived in Montana, I always filled my quota of antlerless whitetails because I just love whitetail meat. Anymore though, to be honest, I shoot enough animals every year that I fill the freezer with the trophy animals. Granted they may not be as tender as younger animals, but you take care of any animal, even a big old bull, and he tastes pretty darn good

I wanted to ask you that, too. You go on quite a few hunts every year, I assume.
I do. I go on 10 or 12 bowhunts every year, or I try to.

Do you hunt for television?
You know, I’ve never shot an animal on TV. I’ve hunted for the camera a handful of times over the years, but I ran into the dilemma that so many TV hunters have. We were up against a deadline and we hadn’t seen an animal that I wanted to shoot. There was pressure for me to shoot a smaller animal, and I always refused to do that. I finally decided to be honest, and I don’t mind you tellin’ your readers this, I decided that hunting on camera is work for me. It’s not fun. I found myself hunting for camera angles rather than big animals. I decided a couple years ago that I wasn’t ever going to do it again because I really love hunting and if I ruined the one thing I love most by making it a job, I don’t know why I’d be on this earth. I always figured I work hard to make money so I could go hunt. When you go on film, it’s kind of the reverse; you’re hunting to make money. Magazines are different because I can go out, have fun and after I’ve knocked the animal down, then I can do my photography, and it doesn’t interfere with the fun.

So what is the work part for you?
Work? You mean, what do I consider work in my life?

Yeah, like going to things like the Archery Trade Show and being on the road all the time. Is that the work?
The work is writing articles. Everybody ideally should enjoy their work, and I do enjoy my work. I consider writing articles and taking photographs work. I consider doing seminars work. I do a lot of TV tips on various shows like Easton’s Bowhunting and Tom Miranda’s shows, Advantage Adventures and Whitetail Country. That TV stuff is work. It’s standing up in front of a camera and doing two or three-minute tips. It’s not really fun, and then the travel, I would say, is the worst. After 9/11, travel got even dicier. It’s just standing in line, going through security, and spending many, many hours on airplanes is just tedious for me

What do you think are some common misconceptions out there in the hunting world of you?
I can honestly say I almost never run into anybody who isn’t super nice to me wherever I go. But I hear through the grapevine from friends of mine that a handful of hunters think that everything’s handed to me, that there are people out there scouting for me, that somehow I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth, that I’ve got lots of money so I can just go hunt anywhere I want. All of that stuff is baloney. When I started my career, I didn’t have two nickels I could rub together. I work hard to make money to go hunting. I’ve never had anybody scout for any animal in my life. Outfitters don’t find animals ahead of time for me; I do my own scouting. I don’t even hunt with outfitters unless it’s legally required. The biggest challenge I think is to go do it all yourself with your friends, and that’s the way I prefer to do it.

Regarding your public lands bulls, I’ve heard criticism and read criticism that they may have been taken in areas off-limits to the average Joe because of access. Do you need special permission to hunt the places you do, or can Joe Public go and hunt there if he draws the right tag?
By and large, Joe Public can go and hunt where I hunt. I do a tremendous amount of research, and I hunt places that I’ve found on maps that might be odd sections or multiple sections that the average person doesn’t even realize have elk. I shot my world record elk in the year 2000 on a public section of land that was accessible from one spot. Anybody could figure that out, but nobody had figured it out. There were five other resident bowhunters in the area that were chasing that elk I got, and they were hunting on public land they did know about. They were also hunting on some private land that they had access to, but that bull was going, as an escape, into the most God-awful place around there. That was another section of public land that that anybody could have gotten into if they’d done their research, but there was nobody there. It was a long way in, you had to walk a ways, and I don’t think anybody realized they could access that area. I know those five bowhunters; I talked to all of them. I didn’t tell them what I was doing, but my impression was they thought it was all private land where that elk was going, and it wasn’t.

So you basically got that maps out and figured out what the heck was going on as far as land ownership.
Yeah, you got to… Montana’s a good example. It has a whole bunch of state sections of land, and half sections, school sections and stuff like that. Some of those are not accessible because you have to cross private land, but some of them are accessible, and some of them you can ask permission to go across and people will still tell you yes. I will say that there are always sour grapes when anybody does anything right. I do a lot wrong but I’d like to think that I do some things right. The world-record elk I did right. There’s always going to be people trying to downgrade your experience and make excuses for why they didn’t do the same thing. That doesn’t bother me. Most people are happy when somebody has a good experience and does something right.

Do you have any past-times that don’t involve hunting?
I love to fly fish. I love to play Texas hold ‘em poker with good friends

As for your hunting notoriety, did it really start picking up for you when you started shooting the big animals?
Yeah. The real turning point for me was when I finished the Super Slam in 1990. Early January 1990 I shot the 27th big-game animal recognized by the record clubs and a few gun hunters had done that. In the 1980’s, I realized one day that I’d taken about half of the 27 animals, I think it was 14 of the 27 recognized by Pope & Young. I thought ‘What better way to enjoy yourself than go out and try to take ‘em all?’ I love variety. So I started in about 1984 deliberately trying to get the rest of ‘em. I finally finished up in 1990. I was the first bowhunter to do it, and that made a huge splash in the archery industry.

So the Super Slam is every animal in Boone & Crockett?
It’s every animal in the record book. Boone & Crockett and Pope & Young both recognize 28, I believe, at this point. When I did it, it was 27 and Pope & Young added the central Canada caribou. I went back as soon as they did that and took one of those to upgrade my Super Slam. But yeah, that really put me on the map as far as accomplishments go. At that point, I had already been writing a long time and people knew who I was. I taught a course in photography in college, just as an aside for the heck of it, so I think my photos were pretty good for magazines, but then the credibility of taking all those animals, although I had credibility before, that really kind of cemented it

When you hunt, let’s says you have a bull 20 yards away and this is a bull you want to take. Do you have a mental checklist, or do you just know if it’s right?
I think it’s semi-subconscious at this point. I’ve been doing it for so many years, but I definitely have a checklist. You know the first thing I think about is distance. Is he within my sure-kill distance? I carry a laser rangefinder with me. If I can use that, I get the range because unlike shooting a gun, an arrow, even with a very fast bow, is a very arching projectile. You need to know the distance so you don’t hit high or low. If I don’t have time to use the rangefinder, I practice all the time eyeballing distance, so I eyeball the distance as best I can.

The second thing I think about is if I have a clear shot or not. I have to if my arrow is going to go through nothing but thin air to get to the animal.

The third thing I think about is the animal’s attitude. Is it relaxed? If an animal is wound up, if it’s suspicious, even an elk can jump the bowstring. They can move because they hear the bow or they see a slight movement when you release the arrow.

The final thing is if I can really draw my bow without the critter seeing me. If I can see that eye, I just have to wait until it turns its head straight away or drops its head behind a bush or walks behind a tree. When its eyeball disappears, I draw my bow and I hope it’s going to stop on the other side.

You were originally a traditional shooter. Why did you switch from traditional to compound?
When I started shooting, there was no such thing as a compound. I shot intercollegiate archery years ago with an old Bear re-curve bow. I say old, it wasn’t old then. I was on the college archery team so I grew up with re-curve bows. When Tom Jennings came out with the first commercial compound bows back in the late ‘60s, I was a little skeptical. I played around with them, and I’d never been hung up on the shooting tool. I figure if I can shoot a little bit better, I’m doing myself a favor and the animal a favor, and I actually started shooting a compound bow because of an elk hunt in Colorado.
At the time, I was driving from California to go bowhunting with a good friend of mine. I knew there were a lot bigger animals than I was used to hunting in California, and I thought if a compound bow would give me more power, pound-for-pound than a re-curve, I wanted to shoot a compound on elk. I would get even better penetration and improve my chances of cleanly killing the animal—that’s the main reason I took up compounds because of elk hunting. I had no trouble with a re-curve, and a re-curve will kill an elk, but I thought if I can get 10 percent more power and drive that thing a little bit deeper or blow it all the way through an elk, I like that idea.

Do you ever go back and shoot a traditional bow, or are you strictly compound these days?
Somebody asked me the other day, so I counted. I’ve got about three-dozen re-curve bows I’ve accumulated over the years, and I’ve got about a dozen long bows, and I do actually shoot those pretty well, but the other reason I shoot mostly compounds is that’s where the market is. That’s what most editors like to see articles about. I do a lot of equipment testing and writing about that for some of the magazines like Bowhunting World magazine. I’m their hunting bow accuracy editor, and there’s not much market, although there’s a niche for traditional archery for sure, and I respect them a lot. The big magazines cater more toward the compound bow shooters ‘cause that’s well over 90 percent of the archers today.

Now having said that, you shoot compound most of the time, but still fingers and aluminum shafts, right?
Still fingers and aluminum shafts, although I’m shooting the Easton’s Full-Metal Jackets shafts also these days because I liked the idea of aluminum on the outside, carbon on the inside. Its lighter weight, gives me a little flatter trajectory for some types of hunting. But the main reason I shoot fingers is I figure if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. I recommend release aids to every beginning compound shooter because a release aid is easier to tune your bow with, it’s always easier to get good accuracy if you squeeze a trigger or push a button than trying to get off of three fingers when you’re holding quite a bit of weight at full draw. You can always do a lot of things with your fingers, a trigger’s always more accurate, but for me, I’ve shot fingers so long that I shoot reasonably well with fingers. I just figure I’m not going to complicate my life with one more piece of mechanical equipment if I don’t have to. The other thing is I shoot a little bit faster, like most people do, with fingers than I do with a release aid, particularly walking on the ground for animals like elk because you can’t walk around all day with your release hooked up to the string. If you’re in a tree stand you can keep it hooked up, but it’s just too hard on your body to be in one position hooked up all the time when you’re walking around for elk, hiking and stuff. So when the opportunity comes up and you gotta hook up your release to the string, it could slow you down.

I, for example, don’t think I would have killed my world-record elk in the year 2000 if I’d had a release aid because things happened too fast. I was circling to try to get ahead of the herd. I poked my head over the ridge and there they were. I got into action fast and I shot that elk at 39 yards. With a release aid, I seriously doubt if I would have gotten that shot.

You mentioned you taught college English for a while. What else did you do before Chuck Adams, professional bowhunter?
Well, I still don’t regard myself as a professional bowhunter. I regard myself as a professional writer and a professional seminar speaker. As for the professional bowhunter part…I hunt for fun.

I got right out of college, went through the masters program and taught at Chico State University in my hometown. Then, like I said earlier, I really wanted to be hunting when college was starting so I did some research and decided that freelance writing was a good way to go totally broke, especially early in your career. I sent out some resume letters and Petersen’s Hunting magazine had only been in existence for six months. I wrote a real aggressive letter to Ken Elliott, the editor at that time, because as I had been reading the magazine, I noticed there were a lot of typos in it. I told him I was an English major, I taught English and I thought I could help clean up their magazine. I didn’t even expect a reply, but he hired me over the phone. He looked at my resume, and I did go down for an interview, but he’d already made up his mind. I found out later he was going to hire me unless the interview was a total disaster. My strategy was to spend a couple of years learning the magazine ropes. I was associate editor at that magazine for two years in Los Angeles and my strategy was to make some contacts, learn the ropes and then start writing full-time. I told the guys at Petersen’s I didn’t plan to be in that awful place called L.A. more than two years and I got out of there pretty much on schedule. I’ve been busier than I wanted to be ever since then

What roles do you think hunters should play in the preservation of their lifestyle, of their past-time?
I think everybody needs to be as active as possible. If you’re a bowhunter, you should belong to your state organization. I belong to about half the state organizations in the US just because of my job, but you need to get active in lobbying for particular things; go to the meetings if there’s some particular hot-button issue that might shut down some phase of hunting. I think you need to belong to organizations like Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and the NRA and North American Hunting Club, any organization that is pro-hunting and makes a difference I think everybody should support.

And then on a personal, one-on-one level, I do my best to take kids hunting. As you know, there’s a lot of one-parent households out there in this day and age and it’s usually the mother raising the son. A lot of mothers are not necessarily anti-hunting, but they’re mostly non-hunters. Those young boys don’t have the opportunity that I did a lot of times to have male role models who hunt. If you can get active in a big brother program and take a kid hunting, or take some kid that’s a relative or a friend of the family hunting, I think that’s really important on a grassroots level. I do that. I took a friend of mine’s son. He shot a nice 3x4 mule deer with his bow. I was right beside him. It was a real cool experience. Before, he was kind of lukewarm on bowhunting, but I talked to him the other day and he’s coming out to visit me here in about a week. He wants me to set up a treestand so he can practice out at my house because he wants to shoot an elk with his bow this year over a wallow that he found. He’s all fired up.

Did you have it planned from the very beginning that you’d be able to hunt and write about hunting? Did you know this is how you were going to pay the bills? 
Well I don’t think anybody can really plan their life as well as they think they can. What was that old saying, ‘life happens while you’re trying to figure out what to do.’ Ever since I was a little kid I read Jack O’Connor and Grancel Fitz in Outdoor Life, and Fred Bear. I would eagerly wait for the magazine to come every month so I could devour the pages. What I always wanted to do was be an outdoor writer from the time I was a little kid. Then I got kind of side-tracked.

My dad is a retired college professor in English, and I grew up in a strong English family. My mom was really adept at writing and reading. I got sidetracked and started teaching. Then I just woke up one day and said man, you know if I’m really gonna do it I need to try what I always wanted to do. So the general plan was there, but my general plan was I just wanted to write and make enough money so I could go hunting and if I had to live in a tent to do it, I was fully prepared to do it. I think if you work hard enough and keep your eye on the ball, things usually work out better than you hope they will. That’s been my experience, and I ended up being busier than I wanted to be.

What are you most proud of after all these years, as far as your bowhunting’s concerned?
To be honest, I’m most proud of the writing. My goal has always been if I could help somebody else have as much fun bow hunting as I have, I’ve done my job. I have people tell me every year that through my books, articles, seminars and my TV appearances that it’s helped them in some way be a better bowhunter I love bowhunting more than anything, and if I can give somebody a tip on how to tune their bow or how to get closer to a bull elk and they come back to me and say ‘man, that really worked,’ that just makes my day.

Let’s talk about your shooting and the long shot. What’s too long for you? What makes you pass on a shot?
It’s kind of complicated. Some bow hunters distill it down to length of shot alone, and they get mad if you say you’ve shot beyond a particular distance, usually the distance they can’t hit beyond. There aren’t  many people who are critical, it’s a small percent, but shot distance is a real hot-button issue in bow hunting; it always has been. It’s been my experience that the guy who can’t shoot past 20 yards is mad at anyone who shoots beyond 30 yards and the guy who can shoot well at 40 yards doesn’t mind if somebody says they shot something at 35. It gets really personal sometimes.
The National Bow Hunter Education Foundation— for which I’m an official mentor, and who I’ve helped actually write some of their rules and regulations over the years—says that most bowhunters are best advised not to shoot beyond 25 yards. There are some bowhunters skillful enough to shoot beyond 40 yards, and I feel that I’m one of those bow hunters, because of all the practice—I shoot twice a week year-round; I work at tuning my bow, and I can hold, with broadheads, about six-inch groups at 60 yards. Since a deer has an eight- to nine-inch vital chest cavity and an elk has about a 16-inch vital chest cavity, six-inch groups are good enough if everything else is right, but that’s what gets complicated. I don’t shoot at any animal regardless of distance unless that animal is stationary and relaxed with its ears back, obviously not wound up and ready to jump. And I never shoot unless I’ve got a good, clear shooting lane that my arrow can go through. I never try to blow an arrow through bushes or limbs or anything like that. You’ve got to have the right shot and I never draw my bow if I can see an animal’s eyeball. If you can see a deer or an elk’s eye, that elk’s going to see you move because they have such great peripheral vision. So it is complicated, shooting distance alone is only one of several factors.

What worries you the most about the future of hunting? Is it the lack of kids getting involved of the lack of interest, or should we be worried about the future of hunting?
I don’t know. I’m a pretty up-beat guy, but I think hunting is going to slowly decline in the U.S. because habitat is shrinking, but that’s not the main reason. The main reason is what’s socially acceptable and what’s socially changing in this country. The number of hunters is going down, the statistics indicate that, although hunting is going to be viable for many, many years to come. I think it’s going to continue to shrink just because our society’s changing. There are more metropolitan people and fewer kids who grow up with the hunting interest that I had. I don’t think we can do much about that to be honest.

I mean, the young people are the key, and the more young people we can get involved in hunting the longer the future for hunting in general. I don’t think I have to worry about it. I don’t think the next generation beyond me has to worry about it, but I think it’s going to shrink. I think it’s inevitable. I don’t think it’s pessimistic, I just think it’s realistic. The average age of hunters, as you probably know, is getting older and older. When I was at Petersen’s Hunting magazine at the beginning of my career, about 35 years ago, the average age of the hunter was under 30 years of age, I think it was 29. The average hunter now, according to statistics I’ve seen, is slightly over 40, so we are an aging population. I don’t think that trend’s going to change.

Regarding the decline in hunter numbers, do you think it’s just a general, overall disconnect from the land, laziness, more distractions, all the above?
Yeah, I think it’s just society in general. I mean they say young people are more overweight and out of shape than they’ve been in recent history because, for one thing, everyone sits in front of the computer and plays games or does research. We’re a more sedentary society, and the electronic age is upon us. That doesn’t really mesh well with going out and being a self-entertainer by hunting or fishing or just enjoying the outdoors. The two just really aren’t that compatible. It’s just a different society. I wouldn’t say people are any lazier than they were, but people are more metropolitan. Although there are a lot of whitetail deer back east, a lot of people who grow up in cities don’t really think in terms of going out and enjoying the outdoors.

You’ve hunted the world, but you love elk hunting, and you’ve hunted elk country for decades. Have you seen major changes in the land over the years, say in places that you hunt, in that time?
I actually think elk hunting is better right now than it has been. I’m not blowin’ smoke when I say in large part it’s due to groups like Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. There are people out there who weren’t doing conservation when I started bow hunting who are actively trying to buy land and preserve good management for species like elk. I think in general elk hunting is better than it ever has been. You certainly see more big bulls being shot these days than when I started bowhunting way back when.

There is one thing I do notice on public land. I went back to the place I was hunting elk in the 1970s in Colorado. I climbed the same couple of thousand feet in the wilderness a few years ago and there were bowhunter camps, outfitter and self-guided camps all over that area where I never saw a bowhunter when I first was out there. Congestion on public land is a problem in some places.

During the decades you’ve been hunting elk, how has the archery industry changed?
Well, the archery industry has gotten a lot more high tech about everything. If you go to the Archery Trade Association show, you’ll see every gadget and every gizmo under the sun, and there’s more stuff every year it seems like. But overall, I don’t think the industry has changed that much. Most of the people who own the successful companies are bowhunters themselves and they’re producing probably better quality gear than ever because manufacturing techniques continue to improve. There’s a lot of junk out there, but it doesn’t survive more than a year or two because it just doesn’t work. But you still have good quality companies run by people who actually bowhunt. They’re producing good bows and great arrows.

Do you ever feel bad about killing?
I feel sad for every animal that I kill to this day, you know; they’re beautiful. I love animals. In Wyoming, Greta and I have about 40 cotton-tail rabbits that come out on the lawn every night. We feed them carrots, and I wouldn’t think of shooting one of those rabbits. And yet, that’s the ironic part about hunting. I’m designed to hunt. I’m a predator with my eyes in the front of my head like a coyote or a wolf or a bear or a mountain lion for good depth perception. I’m designed from one end to the other to launch a projectile of some sort and take down game. I don’t fight that. I figure it’s in my genetics and in the way I was raised. I love to eat wild game. Any time you eat, you’ve killed something, so I do feel sad, but I just figure that’s the way it is.

Do you ever hunt high-fence areas?
I’ve shot two elk under high fence. It was on a ranch in Texas in the early ‘90s. They had some elk that were running around and the guy said, “Do you want to shoot an elk here. I’m going to get rid of them. I don’t want them on this place because they’re over-grazing it.” So I said, “Sure,” and I shot a couple. I gotta tell you, it was a total second-rate experience, and I would never do that again.

Does it ever get old, this hunting bit?
Never. No. I love to hunt. I love to hunt more than anything. I hunt for the challenge. I hunt for the love of the outdoors. I hunt for physical activity I love to climb the mountains, and if anything, I don’t get to hunt as much as I want.

Anything you want to add?
I tend say things the way I think it is. I don’t pull punches very often and I am polite, but that can get a little bit controversial at times. I’ve never worried about that. My main concern has always been trying to help readers out. I’ll give you one example. I was at a Pope & Young convention about 20 years ago. I had written some articles on mule deer hunting the year before. In one of those articles I was talking about shot distance and how I’d shot a mule deer at about 50 yards. The magazine got about 10 or 15 letters from bowhunters saying, “Boy, how unscrupulous” and “How can he recommend that kind of shot?” In the article, I said if you work at it and practice enough, get your groups tight enough with broadheads, you can take animals from that far and make no apologies for it.

I went to the convention, and I had a couple of guys there come up to me and tell me that that was a real disservice to bowhunting writing about that. Then the guy who got the top award at Pope & Young for non-typical mule deer—it was a new world record—came up to me, shook my hand and said, “If I hadn’t read that article and practiced with my bow, I would not have shot that deer because I wouldn’t have been confident.” He said, “I shot the deer at 50 yards on the nose; I used my rangefinder, and I put my arrow through both lungs.” As far as I was concerned, that was all the verification I needed for what I had done. This deer, he had like 20 points on each side of the rack, just an awesome deer, and this guy was thanking me for writing an article that allowed him to take that deer. And that’s always been my main thrust is to try to help other people.