How to Slip Hunt Whitetails | Chuck Bailey

Lightly edited for readability — auto-transcription errors, false starts, and repeated fragments have been cleaned up, and Chuck's Louisiana plant and place names have been rendered as best we could identify them; nothing has been added. Timestamps mark topic breaks, not every line. "Host" is Andrew Maxwell and the team from The Southern Outdoorsmen; "Chuck" is Chuck Bailey (Old Timer Outdoors).

0:00

Chuck: Nearly every one of those I've killed standing on my feet. None of them came from a stand — they're all from walking. I hate box-stand hunting on the corn pile, on the feeder. But that's what we do because it's the easiest. We've devolved out of the still-hunting, stalk-hunting methods down to the easy one. That is the woodsman skill everybody needs to do more of. For every day you spend hunting a corn pile or a food plot, spend one day walking and looking instead. It will make you a more successful deer hunter — 100%, no doubt about it.

1:09

Host: All right — Chuck Bailey. Glad to be here, man.

Chuck: I'm here, y'all are here, I'm in my comfort zone.

Host: We found out about you on TikTok — Old Timer Outdoors. Jacob started sending me your reels and I said, man, we want to interview that guy, he's got some good stuff. I think I originally messaged you through TikTok to see if you were going to the convention this past year, and you couldn't make it, so I figured we'd be in Louisiana at some point and try to stop in. And finally, here we are — appreciate you letting us come talk to you. This conversation isn't going to be about turkeys, by the way; it's going to be about deer. We'll get to turkeys another time.

2:00

Host: One thing I'd love for you to talk about — you're from this region of Louisiana. What's your family history here?

Chuck: I was born south of I-10, technically, but we moved north real quick. Right there on the corner of that road is where I've lived my whole life. These little wooded hills are all I really know. If you follow my TikTok, you know I don't hunt out of state and I don't hunt much private land — so you know where my skills come from. It's just making the best of what I've got here locally.

Host: And your family history with hunting and the outdoors?

Chuck: It's always been hunters. My dad — I can tell you a turkey story about him. He killed the first legal turkey on the first day of the first legal turkey season in Louisiana. After the reintroduction through the '70s, the game reserves and national forest had catch pens. There weren't many turkeys, so they bought birds from Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, a couple other places — brought those Easterns down, put them in catch pens to acclimate, then turned them loose. For years there was no season. On that first legal day, my dad — not knowing much about turkey hunting, just a box call and a passion for it — went out to a game reserve close by, got right up near the catch pen, and called one in. Took it to the check station, and everybody, even the game wardens, knew it was the first one. They made a big deal of it.

4:47

Host: What about deer hunting growing up?

Chuck: Deer were hunted nearly to extinction here too and had to be reintroduced. We're in west-central Louisiana, and they were being released back into the area. My grandpa and grandma were younger then, my dad was a boy. They'd just released some deer, and one came down the road. My grandpa saw it and hollered, "Grandma, bring me the target!" — the target was a .22 rifle. He tried to take that freshly released deer right there. So that one started about as soon as you could start, too.

Chuck: My family line has always been hunters and fishers. I saw a picture a couple days ago — I'm maybe two years old in my grandpa's arms, and they've got a double stringer of white perch, at least a hundred, twenty on it. So I was fishing before I can remember. It's the passion of Southern outdoors, right here.

6:33

Host: How far back does your family go in Louisiana?

Chuck: As far back as it'll go. This was the No Man's Land between Spain, France, and the United States — never really had a country for a while, where the outlaws ran to. They called it No Man's Land. It stayed that way until the logging industry came in. After the war, Northern men saw the timber in the South, came down, created companies, and took all that timber out to both coasts. That population boom happened from the 1880s to about the 1920s, and that logging industry is where all the family lineages here come from.

8:00

Host: What were your first opportunities to go deer hunting as a kid?

Chuck: Honey, I was jumping in the truck with Dad to go wherever we went. There were a couple of game reserves close, and a lot of the land around here wasn't leased — it was wide open, so you could hunt about anywhere. But the deer were sparse. It wasn't a huge population, so you had to know what you were doing to find them.

Host: Was it dog hunting back then, or still hunting?

Chuck: We knew there were dog hunters around but we didn't run dogs. We actually butted heads with them a lot, because we had property with deer, and it was a big thing for the dog runners to throw their dogs out right about here so they'd jump the deer in our field and run them off the back. It got to be an antagonistic — and sometimes dangerous — relationship, though I'm good friends with plenty of them. My own hunting started as soon as I could carry a Red Ryder BB gun out the back, plinking birds and lizards. By nine or ten I was carrying a 16 or 20 gauge, getting squirrels and anything edible. We didn't do it purely for subsistence, but it was expected to add to the freezer — you had to put a couple deer up every year.

10:39

Host: How old were you for your first deer?

Chuck: Twelve. We were riding around with my Uncle Ray and Dad in a Scout, doing a little hunt, and all of a sudden they hit the brakes and bailed out. I grabbed a shotgun, rolled out the side, and there was a yearling standing just off the ditch. One buckshot and it dropped. They were a little shocked I'd hit it — and in a hurry to get it back to the truck, because we were about a half mile from a checking station. My second deer was the same way, out the window that time. That one wasn't as good a shot and I had to stay with it; Dad drove off and came back later. So my outlawing dead-ended pretty quick after that.

12:27

Chuck: I got into a precarious situation and had an epiphany that cleared it all up. I quit the outlaw stuff and realized there was more to it than just collecting game — it was being part of the outdoors in full, which few people really master. That's woodsmanship: enjoying everything out there, getting out and experiencing it, smelling the fresh rain and the leaves. There's beauty in all of it.

Host: Tell me about that epiphany.

13:32

Chuck: A federal game warden gave it to me. I was roosting wood ducks and shooting too many, too late in the day. I'd gone to a little spot and popped a couple — five or six ducks, a couple too many maybe — and I got that feeling to pay attention. I got quiet and started watching, and here he came, slipping down through a big open bottom bordered by a slough and a swamp. I was hung in that triangle with nowhere to go — fifty yards of nothing but water. So I backed all the way into that slough and slid down the mud bank into the water, down to my chin, ducks and shotgun and all, trying not to make a ripple. He walked within about fifteen steps of me, stood at the end of the point a while, and walked back out. Did I mention that water was about 35 degrees? There was ice on the edges. I was freezing to death.

Chuck: I gave him time to get to his truck — his road dead-ended near mine — and when I heard his door shut, I knew I could beat him to the highway. I boogied to my truck, spun it around, and got gone. Freezing, soaking wet, knowing the consequence if I'd been caught — the embarrassment that would've followed — that was the worst part. I was about eighteen. Perfect age to understand what just about went wrong. From then on I had no interest in breaking a game law. If there's ever been one since, it was a total accident.

17:33

Host: I'm glad you shared that. It's a good lesson — killing three extra ducks isn't worth a big ticket, losing your gun, maybe losing your hunting rights. There's a real outlaw culture in the South and a lot of people don't take it seriously, but it just ain't worth it.

Chuck: Some of the outlaws I've known didn't do it because they needed the meat. They did it for the challenge — to see if they could get away with it. And a lot of things in life are like that. But to me the consequence was never worth the reward. Getting caught shooting a deer out of a truck window gives you nothing to look back on and appreciate. What skill did it take? What did I learn that I could teach my kids? Ask an outlaw why he jumps a fence to kill a turkey on somebody else's property instead of doing it on his own and being successful — you can brag about the honest one. You can't brag about the one you jumped the fence for.

20:04

Host: One reason we like driving to people and interviewing them where they live is we get to see the country you actually hunt. Coming over from Texas this morning, a few things stood out about this area — it's really flat, really thick, and there's a lot of water.

Chuck: We're in the hill country of Louisiana here — these hills are over 200 feet above sea level.

Host: So in an area this thick — a lot of pine plantations, swamps — how do you narrow down where the deer are?

Chuck: The woods have completely changed from what they were 20 or 30 years ago; it's a whole different ball game. First thing I'd do in any new area is ride the roads and look for tracks — ride as many dirt roads as I can to find the one place with the most concentrated sets of tracks crossing that road. Then I go either direction on that trail to find what holds them: the food source, the bedding area, an open patch of woods — because open patches are a commodity now.

22:06 — [Sponsor: Mossy Oak Woodsman merino]

Host: If you hunt the South, you know the temperature swings hard through the season — 80 one day, 40 the next. That's why I like merino wool. It's naturally temperature-regulating, so it keeps you warm on a cold morning and wicks moisture as you warm up through the day, and it's naturally odor-resistant, so you can wear it multiple days without washing it — great on a hunting trip. My issue with merino has always been durability out in the briers, but the Mossy Oak Woodsman series merino shirt I've had for about a year and a half has been through two turkey seasons and a deer season and it's still in great shape. It comes in Bottomland. Head to the Mossy Oak store and use code TSOP15 for a discount — that's TSOP15.

23:41 — [Sponsor: Vortex Viper HD]

Host: If you want a head start on deer season, scout feed trees in summer. I've got a pair of Vortex Viper HD binoculars out here glassing up into the oaks, looking for the little acorn buds on the limbs. As summer goes on they get easier to see. A tip: find a limb with nothing but daylight behind it and pick it apart with clear glass. I like to brace the binos on a trekking pole and sit under the tree and really study it. Go get yourself a pair of Vortex binoculars.

24:27 — [Sponsor: onX Hunt LiDAR]

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25:42 — [Sponsor: Latitude Outdoors Flier pack]

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27:12

Host: How were the woods different 30 or 40 years ago versus now?

Chuck: The pine woods were wide open. Two things did it. Fire — all the timber was burned on a regular seven-to-ten-year cycle. And free-range cows, everywhere, which kept the brush below head level eaten out. Thirty years ago you could stand on one pine hill and see the top of the next one three-quarters of a mile away, wide open. If you walked to a green head, the deer would run out of it and across that hill and you'd see them. The green heads — the thickest spots, little 40- or 50-yard-wide patches — were where the deer lived, so you hunted a green head from the thin woods, and one setup could cover all three sides depending on the wind.

Chuck: Now it's flipped. The green head is the thin part. You can't stick a rifle barrel in most of these pine woods and get it back out without scratches. You literally can't crawl through them. That's why I do TikToks about trimming trails — it's one of the least-used secrets. Not shooting lanes, just walking trails through good bedding, good food, good travel areas. Trim them just enough that the deer want to follow that path of least resistance in two or three directions, get them crossing with the right wind, and within two or three years you ought to have a Mecca of deer hunting spots in these piney woods.

30:09

Chuck: Why did it change? I've made videos about this and the loggers jumped on me — but I'm not anti-logging. I love logging, I own timber, I've got pines to sell. The woods changed because of the hydraulic shear, the cutter-head machine. Before that machine took over in the '80s and '90s, a man with a saw cut the tree down, walked it and trimmed the limbs, and a skidder took it to the truck. They burned the woods so that man could walk from tree to tree — not for conservation, but so the sawyer could work. That goes back to the 1880s. Now the big cutter-head machine doesn't care how thick the woods are; it waves that head and everything in front of it is cut.

Chuck: Here's the problem. That machine cuts the tree off at the base and leaves the stump. The root system is still healthy and ready to grow, and every root the tractor broke throws a ground shoot. So yaupon sprouts all the way around the base of that stump and grows up in a four- or five-foot-wide bush so thick and stiff you can't push through it — and right next to it is another yaupon, or a wax myrtle, or sweetgum, or boxwood hedge, all doing the same thing. The ground level is so dense now that these woods are terrible turkey habitat. Thirty years ago it was fantastic — wide-open grassy woods. Now the turkeys live on the roads, the log sets, and the clear-cuts, but only for the first two or three years before those grow up too.

33:08

Chuck: That's why my turkey hunting fundamentally changed. We used to hunt turkeys out in the creek bottoms and big hills. Now you hunt them close to the road, at the log sets and clear-cuts. On a 100,000-acre game reserve there might be 15,000 or 20,000 acres you can even hunt — the rest you can't fight through. A turkey survives a bobcat or coyote by taking five steps and five flaps to get airborne. In woods that thick it can't — it has to zigzag those first steps, and the bobcat's better at zigzagging, or the cat sits in ambush in the thick stuff and waits. So people get it backwards: they say the habitat's bad so the turkey won't nest. No — the habitat's bad, so the hen already got eaten. There's no nest because there's no hen. It stays that way until another one walks down the log road and finds the next clear-cut. Without burning the woods, the turkey population in the Southern timber belt is not going to improve. That's our primary problem — the thickness of the woods.

37:01

Host: What has that thickness done to the deer — numbers and quality?

Chuck: I think it increased both, around here. They live a little longer, in my opinion, and there's more browse per acre — more food, more cover. The thicker woods are a positive for deer and a negative for turkeys. Can't be perfect for everybody.

37:41

Host: I want your take on the timber industry, because it's relevant to Southeast hunters. There's a lot of talk about the pulpwood industry hurting — something like 20-some pulp mills across the Southeast have closed in the last few years. When mills close, it gets harder to get timber cut, because there's no mill nearby to process it or no money in it, and loggers go out of business. So if you've got dense loblolly stands nobody's burning and nobody's cutting, and you turn off the logging so you're not getting new clear-cuts — what do you think that does long term?

Chuck: Some of that's out of my skill set, but a few things I do know. One, overseas products are so cheap that's what's shutting our mills down — cardboard, paper, lumber produced in the Philippines, Brazil, Venezuela, even Canada, cheaper than we can make it here and shipped in. The paper mill in DeRidder pays union employees $26 an hour to do a job someone overseas does for a fraction of that. We're not going to compete with that.

Chuck: As for logging — I own timber, and when I try to get it cut I can't find anybody to cut it and take it to the mill, because there's basically one mill left and the big companies contract all their logging to one big cutter, who now gets a premium and even gets funding for brand-new machines. That puts the little logger — six trucks, two skidders, a loader — out of business. He can't compete, he's stuck cutting only private land, and the mill's already overloaded by the big loggers' volume, so it won't pay him what he needs. It's a four-pointed cycle. There are ways to fix it but it's way outside my power.

41:20

Chuck: The one thing I want timber companies to do is burn, burn, burn. I'd love it if the state asked timber companies to burn some percentage of their land every year, because that would support the habitat and the game across the state. Look at the government-run WMAs that do burn — that land's beautiful, loaded with turkeys and deer. It's just hard to hunt because everybody knows it and the pressure's high. It's a catch-22.

Host: It's a complicated subject, but it's worth talking about. If you want anything in the Southeast — deer, turkeys, game birds — it's something to pay attention to.

42:20

Host: Let's get back to cutting trails. So you're in extremely thick country, the green heads are the little hardwood strips down in the low drains — the open stuff — and the thick stuff's on top. You drive roads, find tracks, find the trails they're already using, and make those trails more passable?

Chuck: Right — pass them down to wherever concentrates them. A lot of those green heads have the only oak trees around, because they couldn't cut them — too mushy or boggy — so they dodged them for two or three logging cycles, and now there's a nice patch of white oaks at perfect acorn-producing age. You ride a ridge road with four fingers coming up from the creek: this one's got four sets of tracks, that one's got six, this one's got twenty-two. Why did that one green head have twenty-two? Follow the trails down and you'll find a patch of white oaks, red oaks, or pin oaks dropping, or a thick boxwood-hedge bedding area, or a saddle that's the perfect low crossing between two big creek bottoms full of oaks. Hunt those tracks. Find the buck trail — usually one trail off the main doe path — and manipulate those trails to go where you want.

Chuck: I've got a pair of hand snips in every vest and two or three in the truck. Anytime you still-hunt through the woods, trim a trail as you go. Next week when you've got time to hunt, you've already got a quieter, semi-cleared path, and you know which side to come in on for the right wind.

46:00

Host: Once you find that trail, how do you decide where to actually hunt along it?

Chuck: As I pass down it I'm looking at what's being browsed, the rubs, the scrapes, and the crossroads — where a trail off a green head fingers into the one running the creek. A crossroads is better than a trail by itself. I'll get to a spot and just hang out a while and notice where the squirrels are cutting.

46:35

Chuck: A squirrel tells you which acorn trees are producing the best acorns in that bottom. That's the woodsmanship — there's more to hunting than going down to the woods and sitting there with a gun. If there are three cat squirrels cutting like crazy in one grove and none in the next, something made those white oaks sweeter — and the deer know it too. They can hear that cutting and work the same areas. Blue jays love pin oaks and red oaks — where the jays are working, there's a spot. Coons love acorns at peak ripeness — find coon scat piled on a crossing log and there's a reason they're there.

48:11

Chuck: Here's a good one. Walk a green head with little creeks, and if there are frogs jumping into the water every so often, don't worry about snakes — there's no snake there worth worrying about, or the frogs wouldn't be there. But if you walk one of those and no frogs are jumping and there's no activity, there's a snake somewhere — he's already eaten all the frogs and he's working on crawfish now. Same as walking a levee: if turtles are sliding into the water, don't worry about alligators. If there's not a turtle on that levee, there's probably a gator — don't step on that log, it might be him.

50:31

Chuck: When the squirrels are working hard in one spot, go pay attention — you'll probably find deer tracks under there picking up everything the squirrels drop. Squirrels pluck acorns right before they're ripe, so if they knock down four or five, those are on the ground smelling fresh for the deer. Same with tupelo gum — the little blueberry-looking fruit on a black gum or tupelo gum. A lot of people have no idea deer eat those, but they love them; it's a delicacy. If there's a grove of gums and it's the only one in a big area, the deer flock to it, and the squirrels tell you which tree has the best berries. Hogs love them too. We used to call them gum ponds — a flat, moist spot that grew black gum or tupelo. You'll see a clear-cut with nothing but a few little water oaks or gums left in the middle, and that's a little Mecca of deer, turkey, and squirrel activity.

52:31

Host: What are some of the subtler things you look for walking through the woods? On one of your TikToks you were looking at privet — one limb had dark-green leaves and some real light-green ones, and you said the light-green growth was where a deer had eaten it off and it grew back, so you could tell it was older browse sign.

Chuck: That's exactly right. Chinese privet and boxwood hedge both do it — pull a leaf off and it makes another one, all growing season long. Strip a privet stem bare and within about two weeks the whole stick is covered in brand-new leaf, and the color's a little different. Down at browse level you'll see a lot of that fresh light-green stuff; up above browse height the leaves are bigger and darker green because nothing's eating them. If you want to feed those, break the tree over and give the deer the big leaves — they'll take them.

Chuck: A lot of folks hate Chinese privet — it's invasive, and once it's grown you can't really get rid of it. One way is to let the surrounding trees canopy over and starve it of light. I had a privet hedgerow in a field for 40 years; when I fertilized that field for plantings, the deer went to eating the privet like crazy and put a browse line right through it. That was my first realization of how much they like it.

54:48

Chuck: So if you want to make a fantastic bow spot, find a patch of privet or boxwood hedge and fertilize it — walk through with a hundred pounds and throw a handful at the base of each one. Yes, you're fertilizing an invasive species and I catch hate for it. I don't care if it helps me kill a nice buck, take a doe, or put a kid on an easy one. Do it about three or four rains before bow season, so the roots pull that nutrient up into the leaves and make them sweeter almost immediately. Do it too soon and they'll browse it out early. I've made some fine bow spots that way.

Host: [laughing] Somebody's squirming right now — you're going to get texts.

Chuck: If you'd rather kill it, that's on your property — get some Garlon and a pump-up sprayer and hack-and-squirt it. Garlon's available to everybody. Just don't do that on mine, because I like fertilizing mine and shooting deer.

57:37

Host: So you look for tracks, hook trees — rubs, we say in Alabama — scrapes. Anything else?

Chuck: Well, another thing we talked about that I'd like to get into is slip hunting.

58:15

Host: You told me on the phone: pick out a square mile of woods and just slip-hunt it and learn it. What's your approach?

Chuck: At my age I've got plenty of good places, so I'm not looking for new ones — but I love hunting on my feet. I don't like stand hunting. I hate box-stand hunting on the corn pile and the feeder. But that's what we do because it's easiest — the warmth of the box, the quiet. We've devolved out of the still-hunting methods to the easy one, and the easy one produces deer: put out enough corn and good food plots and you'll kill deer. Step back one and you're hunting out of a climber. But then the wind changes or another guy shows up, and you're forced to climb down, make a racket, and burn time finding a new tree. Devolve it one more step and you just walk and hunt with a rifle or shotgun in hand. That is the woodsman skill everybody needs to do more of. It teaches you the woods — all the little things: which of five crossing trails is the biggest, which acorns are dropping, better rub trees, a community scrape with four trails leaving it.

1:01:08

Host: If you're going to ground-hunt somewhere tomorrow, what's your game plan? How do you know where to start?

Chuck: It comes down to the wind. All I need to know when I get there is which way the creek runs and which way the wind's blowing. I want to be outside the creek bottom with my wind blowing off to nothing, so I can slip along and watch the most undisturbed woods. Wind controls which direction I go. I pay attention to the predominant wind for the area — here I know I can get on the southeast side of a creek and walk north to northwest and the wind won't bother me, as a general rule. Creeks don't all run dead north–south, so the wind dictates the direction.

Chuck: Moisture dictates how fast I go, by sound. Sound itself doesn't spook a deer — it's the cadence of a step, or a loud attention-getting sound. The best day to slip hunt is the day after a rain: everything's moist and the leaves are quiet. Two weeks of drought is a terrible time; you can't make headway. As you slip, there's always a little motion — never a full stop, never a hard step. It's a continuous heel-to-toe roll: by the time one foot finishes rolling, the other's touching, a smooth flow of noise instead of a recognizable rhythm. You don't want the cadence a coyote would make hopping along. And you're always hunting for the quietest step — glancing down and putting your foot on a patch of grass, a bare spot, or a big stick instead of curled-up red oak leaves.

1:04:17

Chuck: How you move matters too. Move at the speed of the wind. Look at the oaks — you can see the flutter and motion. As long as your motion matches the wind moving the brush, an animal's less likely to pick you out against the light. If you're moving fast and there's no wind, now you're the object of focus. So wind controls both direction and how fast you go.

Chuck: A lot of it's wisdom you earn by blowing deer out of the area — walking with the wind at your back, or bumping deer that saw or heard you before you ever knew they were there. But the interesting thing about slip hunting — or stalk hunting, as a lot of Northern folks call it — is you put yourself in position to make something happen, versus waiting for something to happen. Sitting and waiting can bore you to death, or you look down at TikTok and miss a big boy sliding through.

1:06:04

Chuck: Here's a challenge: go slip-hunt with a compound bow. You already know it'll be hard, so you'll go slower, more deliberate, and really use the wind. And I'll give you the best tip, because I've taken a bunch of deer slipping with a bow. Put a grunt call right there on your chest, the first thing you can grab. If you bump a deer and it only jumped on sound — it hasn't winded you — freeze, go dead still, and hit that grunt call. About half the time they'll start sneaking back toward where they were, or toward you, to find out what you were.

1:07:16

Chuck: A doe will always challenge a bobcat or coyote. Ever seen a doe when a bobcat comes down? She doesn't bust and run — she stomps, blows, and eases in step by step to figure out what it was; she's ready for that fight. She'll do the same to you if she doesn't know what you are and you just grunted. She'll come sneaking back and give you time to pick your tree and get to full draw.

Chuck: Quick story on that. I jumped a deer one time, hit the grunt, and she bounced out to about 60 yards, then snuck right back to where she'd been. Broadside, I flung an arrow — went right under her chin. She took back out to 65, snuck all the way back to the same spot, and I slung another one under her chin. Ran out to 70, came back again. I looked down and my whole sight bar was bent — I'd been slinging arrows nowhere near where they were supposed to go. So on the next one I said forget the sight, I'll just use the straightness of the arrow — lined it up, and put it through the heart at 30 yards. I shot three or four arrows at the same doe and ran her off twice before I figured out my sight was bent. It can be done. It'll force you to work on all those little things.

1:10:36

Chuck: Start with a rifle. Slip along until you find that perfect spot, sit down, and let patience play its part — watch it all until the wind puffs wrong and ruins that trail, then get up and slip to the next one. Now you're in a fresh spot, no bad wind. Sit that little trail 30 or 40 minutes, hear hogs squeal, get up and sneak on down and put some pork in the freezer. Like I said, I don't mount many deer, but the few I've got, nearly every one I killed standing on my feet — none of them from a stand. All walking.

1:11:46

Chuck: Back in the day we'd walk draws as a team — pick a green head or two, go up one and run the deer out of it into the next, go down that one and run them into the next, and by the time you walked the third it was full of deer. If a draw runs uphill and peters out and the wind's blowing across it, have the guy on the opposite side walk quick and ahead; when the wind hits that green head and the deer smell you, they bust out and try to sneak away — right to the other guy waiting on the far side. Of course green heads don't really exist in these woods anymore, so that's an old plan. But you can still use the wind to your advantage as hard as you avoid a bad wind.

1:13:02

Chuck: Remember those four green heads coming up along a road — say five sets of tracks on each? If it's private woods, or public where you know you won't mess somebody up, poison the first, second, and fourth ones with something that smells bad, and leave the third — the best one — open. Over about two days those deer stop wanting to go up the fouled ones and start passing through that third one.

1:14:29

Chuck: If your neighbor's got a nice 50 acres and he's a real butthole who won't let anybody hunt, there's no reason you can't sprinkle a lot of human hair from the barbershop down that fence line and let the wind push those deer over to you. My mom was a beautician, so we had bags of hair that smelled like permanents — the chemical smell plus the human smell. Go to your local barber and ask for their trash bag; they'll think you're a weirdo, but you already fit the look.

Host: [laughing] I was wondering if you were going to say human hair. My uncles used to do that around food plots to keep deer from eating them before they grew up — and supposedly around the stands of guys they didn't get along with.

Chuck: Or go get some from Eddie Salter — Eddie's cutting people's hair. Now, don't use it mischievous, like throwing it on somebody's stand. That ain't right. But you can use it to block off a trail and focus deer into one area, or push them off a whole side of a creek bottom you don't want them on. Make a couple passes throwing handfuls and you'll scatter that area for a week or two, until the smell wears off. Mothballs or moth crystals do the same thing — everything hates the smell. Just don't throw the white ones where somebody will see them.

1:17:03

Host: Your point about learning to slip-hunt with a bow is a good one — I've killed a few deer on the ground with a bow, and it's exciting just being eye-level and getting one in range. If you want to learn to slip and learn which mistakes not to make, do it with your bow — you'll learn it quick.

Chuck: You'll learn it quick. That reminds me — back when I started, we had slow compound bows and heavy aluminum arrows, so a 20-to-40-yard pin gap was huge. You had to be very good at judging distance; an error of five yards at 35 was a complete miss. Same reason people can't judge distance to turkeys and shoot too fast — nobody practices judging distance. Pick out a stump: how far is that? Say 28 steps — now pace it off and see. Get good estimating out to 50. It's less critical now with fast bows and small pin gaps, but it made me a better bowhunter.

Chuck: To practice long shots, take a Pepsi bottle, put three or four rocks in it, and sling it out to about 50 yards, then shoot it with grasshopper points — the blunts with the wires. We did that all the time for fun, played bow golf. Sling the bottle to hit a limb, watch it fall, and go "how far is that?" — then shoot around and over limbs in the woods where the distance could be anything and you have to step to get an angle. That's where judging distance gets real critical.

1:19:56

Chuck: Another thing: I always shoot at a small target, and I never shot two arrows at the same bullseye — I was too good to ruin a $9 arrow hitting a nock. So I never shot the same spot twice. One of my early TikToks was about picking a small spot. Even a 40-yard pin covers an area bigger than I want to miss by, so I aim at the very top edge of the pin — the 12 o'clock tip. When you concentrate on a smaller target, you miss by less.

1:20:16

Chuck: "Aim small, miss small." We knew that 20 years before the Mel Gibson movie. Here's my proof. I had a bow range behind the house with about 20 carpet and hay-bale targets. The first, at about 35 yards, had a full-size elk painted on it with a heart and lungs about yea big, and a black line for the shoulder bone nobody wanted to hit. Over time you could see on the carpet how big people missed the lung area at 35 — the miss pattern was as big as a softball. The very next target was exactly 35 yards, dead level, but it was a little bunny rabbit with one squirt of red paint. The miss pattern on the rabbit was small — everybody who shot at the rabbit would still have hit the heart of that elk on the target before. That was my psychological play: aim small, miss small, and I just proved you can do it. So stop aiming at a whole whitetail's chest. Aim at the color change right at the corner of his elbow — that little patch where the shade turns from tan to white. Hit that and you'll take that deer.

1:24:02

Host: Same idea with targets — a lot of "dot" targets have dots that are too big. Make your own or find one with a small, precise aiming point, so you get used to concentrating on something the size of a baseball instead of a softball.

Chuck: Right — or force yourself to hit the 12 o'clock or the very edge of the 6 o'clock line. That makes you concentrate and wait for that perfect lull of breath before you engage.

1:24:49

Host: Is slip hunting something you'd do at any point in the season?

Chuck: Any time. After the leaves fall you'll see them better, and the latter half of the season is usually more moist, so you've got a better opportunity — as long as it's not crunchy snow. In Colorado it's all on your feet — mule deer especially is nearly all slipping: pick the best spot and go. For elk in the bugle you're not really stalking so much as working to the best spot and cow-calling and positioning. I used to go to the Colorado wilderness by myself every year for a week or two — that was some kind of adventure. Time and money and kids and jobs don't let me do it like they used to.

1:27:09

Host: You like to work the edge of creeks and creek systems. Does that change through the season — the rut and so on?

Chuck: Not really, because I'm always going to work the area I can best maneuver — the best habitat I can move through quietly and keep the wind in my favor. I wouldn't hunt worse habitat just because the calendar changed. It's those small creek bottoms — the green heads — working up through between the thicker pines, with a rifle in hand.

1:28:03

Host: Pre-rut, do you add calling while you slip, or mostly grunt if you bump one?

Chuck: If I bump a deer I'll grunt. I'll rattle and grunt when it's just perfect. But here we don't have the deer population to rattle effectively the way heavy-population states do. I'd say you get a response one out of ten times rattling. When they come charging in, jumping brush piles, that's high excitement — but that's not the one in ten. The one in ten is the buck that slipped to 100 yards, looped downwind, smelled you, and left without you ever seeing him. I can't count how many times I've rattled and grunted a full series, packed up, stood up — and there he was, standing at a hundred yards watching the whole time.

Chuck: So when I rattle, I position where I can see the whole downwind side, or force him to come out of cover to get downwind of me, and use every manipulation I can to bring him into gun range.

1:30:24

Chuck: One time on a fresh clear-cut — about 200 acres of rolling hills cut down to the dirt, with one big red oak they'd felled and left — I walked up into the top of that downed oak, got comfortable in the forks, and rattled. There was a green head with the wind crossing the hill. I heard a snort, and a buck that had been out in the clear-cut ran up and stopped on the far ridge. I had a .270, spun around in the tree, dropped down and grabbed a limb to steady it, and told myself if he got still I'd take it. Rock solid in the scope — I shot, and he dropped on the spot. I thought I'd lost him, thought it was too far, but I marked the bush and walked over: he'd fallen straight down between his own feet. Rangefinder from the tree to the deer was 320 yards, through the heart. The very next day I went to the same oak and rattled again, and an eight-point walked right into the tree — I shot him at 15 steps, straight down. So I do rattle at the right time and place — but Louisiana is not a rattling state.

1:33:23

Host: What else are you paying attention to while slip hunting — conditions, staying aware of your surroundings? Can you smell a deer? Are you always smelling for one?

Chuck: I'm smelling for a deer any time I'm in the woods. A rutting buck has an obvious musk — hundreds of times I've caught it and thought, that buck was 100 yards over there at some point. I'm smelling for everything — for water, for cottonmouth, for copperhead. You know what a cottonmouth smells like? That old dank musk, like a wet diaper five days after it was tossed. You smell them easy. A copperhead smells a little like cucumber — sweet, but almost a tang in your nose.

Chuck: That sixth sense everybody wants? You've already got it — it's in your nature. You've experienced it and maybe didn't realize it. You're walking along, head up, full speed, and suddenly you go "whoa" — and there's a snake. That wasn't your eyes; it was your nose. The scent in the air triggered your brain to pay attention, and then your eyes focused on what you smelled, right before you stepped on him. Get out and do it more and you'll learn it — you'll smell where hogs have been rooting up a branch, that fresh-tilled ground; you'll smell a cedar that's been rubbed in the last two weeks from 30 or 40 feet off if you learn to recognize it. I'm a smoker, so I can't smell as well as I used to, but scent tells you the actions of other animals.

1:36:50

Chuck: Always pay attention to the other animals. When the birds are tweeting and the crickets chirping, everything's comfortable and you're not disturbing it. But if the frogs suddenly shut up, you're stepping too hard — they felt the vibration. If the crickets quit and the birds go dead silent, what changed? Sometimes it's the barometer — pressure changing, a storm finally coming in. Some mornings you expect the redbirds first thing in the turkey woods, and you hear one and it's fixing to be gobble time; other mornings you're all the way to a crow before you hear a bird. Nothing was different between the two except the pressure — figure out which it was and learn from it.

Chuck: Listen to the cat squirrels barking. You hear one way down, then a little closer, then another right there — what's coming? A coyote, fox, or bobcat slipping through, or a deer they haven't figured out. In one of the best creek bottoms I know, there are so many squirrels that if a hawk or owl flushes, the squirrels tell everybody for a mile up the creek — they all react, and 15 minutes later they'll do it again when the owl moves. Sounds and scents are all part of it.

Host: Man, I love that. That's just woodsmanship — you've got to go out there and learn it.

Chuck: Experience is the only thing that'll teach you. You can't have an old guy with you everywhere you go, so you've got to go learn it yourself.

1:39:15

Host: If you had to give deer hunters one piece of advice from this whole conversation, what would it be?

Chuck: For every day you spend hunting a corn pile or a food plot, force yourself to spend one day walking and looking instead. It will make you a more successful deer hunter — 100%, no doubt about it.

1:40:08

Host: Perfect place to wrap. If people want to follow along with you, where do they find you?

Chuck: Only on TikTok — Old Timer Outdoors. The ones on Facebook are spoofs; don't follow those guys. I'm only on TikTok. I put a little on YouTube, but it's complicated to post the same thing there, and I'm not that technically proficient.

Host: Neither are we — this is all self-taught, mostly by Andrew. He went to school for forestry for a while, ended up with a different degree, and started this podcast. We could barely operate a computer, let alone cameras and editing. Took years and a lot of learning the hard way. For everybody out there — thank you all for watching, thank you all for listening. We'll catch you in the next episode of The Southern Outdoorsmen. And remember, guys — y'all stay Southern.