Wolf Pack Hunting: How Wes Moye Kills Pressured Public-Land Bucks

This is a lightly cleaned transcript of the full conversation with Wes Moye. Timestamps are approximate. Hosts are labeled “Host”; the guest is “Wes.”

[00:00]

Host: All right, Wes Moye. How you been?

Wes: Just fine. How are you doing?

Host: Doing pretty good. Glad to have you in the studio — first time you've been to this one.

Wes: I like this setup. It's a lot better than them crayons we used to use.

Host: So we've been getting tons of questions about the first episode we ever had you on, back in 2019, when Andrew was still living in Auburn and we talked about what you call wolf pack hunting. We still get questions about it all the time, so we want to rehash it for all the new audience members, because it's effective. Six or seven years later, we've experienced it — I've killed a couple of bucks doing it with you. Andrew still hasn't killed one.

Wes: He's bad luck. We're going to tie him to a tree.

[01:51]

Host: As a recap for people who don't know you, how did you get introduced to deer hunting? It's a funny and interesting story.

Wes: I'd always been a kid who liked the woods — BB-gun warrior, stayed in the woods all the time. I got into college and a buddy took me hunting for the first time. I was 17. First day, first ten minutes in the woods, I already had a deer down. It scared me as much as it did the deer, and I just kept hunting after that. It took us four or five years before we got to a point in our lives where we could hunt a lot, and once that kicked in, man, it was addictive. I was worse than I am now. On a dare I ran a 5K race and won second place — still got the trophy. I played the football game that night and was in the tree before daylight the next morning down in Coosa County. I was hyperactive, and I just loved hunting that much. It didn't even matter if I killed a deer, I just wanted to be in the woods.

I went through the normal growing pains. Second time in the woods I killed an 11-point and thought it was easy — then it was like six years before I saw another good one. So you'll never hear me crack on the guys shooting little deer, because you go through a progression in deer hunting. You want a bigger challenge, then a bigger challenge.

And like my buddy Scott says, he's cost me a couple of wives and a million dollars. I've been divorced three times — and all three were in January, which is the rut. That's a true story. But it was the right decision. I look at them now and think, man, I dodged a bullet.

[05:07]

Host: When it comes to deer hunting, what about it is so addicting for you?

Wes: The puzzle. It's the challenge — the chess game you play trying to figure them out. Our DNA is imprinted with the hunting mechanism. All through history there were hunters and there were firewood-getters; I was the hunter. I've killed deer all over the state of Alabama — I'm a big WMA hunter, north to south — and every single place is a little different. You've got to figure out how they use the land there.

Plus, about the third hunt, I relax. I don't even know I'm stressed, but I relax. For 30 years I've said I'll be glad when deer season gets here so I can reset my brain and my body. Back before phones it was even better — no distractions. You're out there in nature. A great deer doesn't come? Okay, that's fine, it still energizes you. You've got all these things invading your brain from life and work and family, and in that deer stand everything just gets clarity. A lot of my life decisions I figured out in a tree.

The only thing I don't like is that I'm getting older and can't do it the way I used to. Other than that, it's 100% obsession. When I'm not doing it, I'm thinking about it.

[08:00]

Wes: And it's not about the harvest. Especially now that I'm older, I go for the challenge. If I've got two deer and one of them does stupid stuff, I'll go after the other one, because I want that mental chess game. I'll play that game with a deer I know I'm not going to harvest. I beat one and he walked right under my stand, and I said, yeah, I'd have got you — but he needed another couple years.

I absolutely believe deer pattern hunters, and nobody's going to change my mind. I've seen too much. Last year, every time I hunted and knew the wind would be wrong the next time, I set up a game camera about 50 yards from where I hunted. Every single time, within 15 or 20 minutes after I left, the deer would come to check where I'd been. So I said, okay, I've got something for you. For three days I showed up at 3:00 for evening hunts. The fourth day I parked different, came in a whole different way, walked way down the railroad tracks and cut back, and came in at 1:00. And I got him.

[10:26]

Wes: It's just a good time. If it starts feeling like a job, you need to take a break. It's not about, oh God, I've got to get this deer on the wall or so many in the record books. It's about camaraderie, friendships, the experience. That's the reason I like to hunt the river — it's not normal, you get up early, run boats up dark, foggy rivers. It's more engaging. If you have to feed your family with it, I get it — but if you've got money to go to the grocery store, there's no reason except to have fun. You've seen me come in with no deer, hadn't seen a thing, and still had a good day. A good day in the woods beats 90% of my other days.

And a lot of it is the camp talk. You talk to a guy in the morning, then that afternoon after a whole day of clarity, they're two different people — more relaxed, more laughing. It does the soul good.

[12:33]

Host: What are some of your core beliefs when it comes to deer hunting?

Wes: They change. Your first four or five or ten years, you believe certain things because you read it in a book or saw it on video. The second ten years is usually your most productive — you can hardly go wrong. Then as you get older you pick the path you like. Mine is thick. I don't hunt pretty woods; I get in the thick. It started in Alabama on the first day of bow season. A lot of people think first day the deer aren't alert — but those gates open September 1st. You've got squirrel hunters, people scouting, people shooting. Those deer are already pressured and already moved back to the thicker stuff.

Core values: be very proficient with your weapon — do not wound an animal. That tears me up; the deer that stick in my brain are the ones I shot, found blood, and never found. You want to do it humanely. Next, you've got to work at it and be smart. And here's where I differ: I believe deception is a huge factor in deer hunting. One of the best books you could read about deer hunting is The Art of War by Sun Tzu. It's about deception and feints. You're locked in a chess game with what you're after, and you're going to fail 99% of the time. I've seen people put together a perfect plan, execute it, and give up too early. Have enough confidence to know when you're right. Don't burn the place up, but don't abandon what works just because you had a bad year.

[17:15]

Host: When you say hunting thick, what do you mean, and what does it look like?

Wes: It changes with the geography of Alabama. It can be so thick you literally can't walk through it — I'll hunt the edge of that. Or, like river hunting, it may be just a little bit of cover, but they'll use it. For me the thick is better because I do the empathetic approach: if I were a deer with Jacob and Andrew after me with high-powered rifles, where would I go where they cannot shoot me? How would I know when they're coming? When you get in that mind frame, you start honing in on the big boys — they're a whole different animal. You go to the place a hunter doesn't want to walk to, the place that's not easy access.

The last few years I've even used a ground blind when there weren't trees. I'm a tree-stand hunter, but I adjust to what the deer show me. That's a constant through your whole career — you've got to keep changing, and the deer will tell you how.

[20:44]

Wes: You take off on a management area, walk two and a half miles, and think nobody's been back there — then you look down and find a spent shotgun shell. Nowhere in Alabama is truly untouched. So you have to treat every deer like it's pressured. Every pressured deer does not want to die. What's he going to do, where's he going to go? Now, we're talking outside the rut — the rut's a different category. But that formation of thought is exactly what got me doing this. It didn't take many years hunting management areas by myself to figure out that all the deer are pressured, and I treat them that way. I was a firefighter-paramedic, so I wasn't wealthy — management-area license was cheap, and you've got a million acres. So I was in.

[22:29]

Wes: I started hunting in the '80s, when it was a war zone. I'm telling the truth — you'd hear 200 shots in a morning. You'd hear the progression: this guy shoots, that guy shoots, and finally that last shot, and you'd think, well, I guess they got him. There were so many people in the management area that they kept the deer up and moving. So I got to thinking: I remember those deer over in the thick stuff, that's where I'd be. But I can't get in it, so how do I get them out of it?

People were doing man drives. Once the deer were up and moving, that's when folks got on them. And it clicked one time when I pulled into a management area in central Alabama — they used to hand out little paper maps. There was a big road on one side, a little road up through the middle, a green field, some water. The deer had everything they needed. I figured hunters came in from the big road, so if I came up the little road and got behind it, they'd push deer to me as they walked in. It worked. So I started doing the same thing at management areas all over Alabama, and my numbers kept going up. Hunters were doing man drives without doing a man drive.

Then what made it all clear — I was watching National Geographic, the painted wolves of Africa. I watched how they did it: a couple of dogs pushing, others positioned up ahead. The dog that started the chase never got it, but he wore the animal down and ran it right into the others it didn't know were there. I thought, we can do that — but with scent, because deer will move off when they smell a hunter. I told Avon Stapleton about it, and he named it Wolf Pack. The first couple of times we did it, both guys came out with big bucks — the deer smelled us and tried to sneak out the back, right over my son and his buddy.

[28:00]

Wes: Basically, we pick an area we think deer are staying in — usually a large area, not small. We stretch out maybe three-quarters of a mile. We scout it really well. It's usually thick stuff transitioning to something else. We try to find the exit trails, but to me the geography around them matters more. If you can find the low place coming out of it, or a finger of thick running up the side of a hill, that's it — because deer, like humans, take the path of least resistance, and they still don't want to get shot. You want low places, drainages, cover coming out of the thick, the shortest distance to the next cover.

It all came together around 2018–2019 when I got the group together. I'll be sitting there and know: these deer will come down this way, they'll come out this way. The wolf pack uses our wind off the hunters to move the deer. Usually nobody kills a deer until about 9:00 — except Jacob, who shoots his about 7-something. I think the buck sits out there a couple of hours, knows the hunters are there, smells them, loses his nerve, and tries to sneak out the back. We've got hunters coming in from every direction, a mile apart. And the key: you all drop in at the same time. If one side drops in ten minutes before the other, you blow all the deer out. Once you're in, you've got them between you, and your scent drives the deer toward another hunter. You don't need a lot of people.

[31:23]

Wes: I did the same thing solo. I used the hunters coming off the main road, and I'd come up the secondary road behind them. One time there was 50 acres with a big open field on one end — that field is a dead-zone boundary, because a pressured buck won't walk out in the open in the middle of hunting season. There were two narrow places on the end of that land, and I got on them. By 9:00 a buck came howling right toward me. He probably didn't smell me. The wolf pack just uses scent instead of leg power to move the deer — it's a slower process. Some of them won't get up till 9 or 10:00. Don't lose faith. And I don't care what you wear or what scent-killer you put on — they know you're there. People don't understand how molecules work. It only takes one molecule and they know.

[33:46]

Wes: When it's not the rut, the inside is the best place to be — they'll travel with their nose. During the rut it seems weird, but the downwind side works better, because bucks run the length of a thicket so they can smell everything in it. That was the scenario the morning you cut that buck — he was running the downwind side during the rut. Both sides are good during the rut, though. My son brought up another point: rabbits run to the thick to get away, and deer will do it too. They'll go to the thickest stuff there is; it slows a buck up just a little. So during the rut you sit the exit trails and wait. You know the area bucks are in — could be a quarter or half a mile — and you're not sitting on top of each other. We're 300 to 400 yards apart at least.

[36:00]

Host: Let's dive into those low exit trails.

Wes: Every time I've done this, the deer come up through a little low spot, down through a little low spot — they aren't coming up a point or down a point. They sit the low spots, and typically that's where the cover extends out of the thick and trickles into the pretty woods. Last year we carried a young man to a state management area and put him right where you'd been. First day he saw 22 deer coming up out of a drainage out of the thick. It's just how the deer's brain works — you make better time going up a gradual low place than up a hill, so they hit the drainages coming out of the thick spots. It's the path of least resistance. If there's cover leading from one thicket to another, that's a real good place — I've done more damage in that scenario than any other. Those thickets might be a quarter mile apart, even 400 or 500 yards. If you were a deer that didn't want to get shot going from one to the other, how would you get there? Sit that spot. These deer are already hardened veterans.

[38:31]

Host: You mentioned the questions we've been getting. We put a post up on our Circle community, and a lot of guys asked about wolf packing. The first was from Lane Simmons, asking about using other hunters to wolf pack solo — how do you predict where the pressure will come from?

Wes: From being familiar with the area — driving around, seeing where trucks park. It might not happen the first time, but you pick up a lot of information you don't even realize you're picking up. I heard a bunch of shots that way today, guys killed a deer over there, trucks came in from this way. You pattern the hunters. I love the brutally cold days — best in the world, because guys are cold and walking. And a big mistake people make: on a slow morning with few shots, everybody thinks the deer aren't moving and gives up, so someone gets up and walks and pushes them right over you. Now with maps and apps you can see the pull-offs. Jerry and Wesley looked at a map, saw two big pull-offs on a main road, so we came in seven miles around from another highway, set up about a thousand yards from where those guys would walk in, did a little semicircle — and all three of us came out with rack bucks.

Since 2019, I stopped counting at 114 rack bucks with this group — 114 in seven years. Last year I took no shots myself and still, everybody together, we had 26 racked bucks killed in one season among the people who hunted with us. Seven guys did that. So it works. And the more you do it on government land, the better you know the land and what the hunters do.

[43:00]

Wes: That nine-point you killed a couple years ago — you know why I sent you there? Based off gunshots and memory. I hunted that ridge in '97 before they clear-cut it. The trees you sat in have grown up since. In '97 I saw a lot of deer move through there, so I sent you in on 25-year-old information, and it worked. The forest grew back and I hadn't been over there because I had it in my brain as a clear-cut. I put Michael on another spot I'd hunted since the mid-'80s — we call it Nine-Point Holler, so many nine-points killed in there. He shot an eight the first time, then got redemption the next week and shot a nine. It goes back to remembering the terrain. A lot of younger hunters are so fired up for a big deer, but sometimes it just takes time. Wisdom takes time — learn how the deer use the land, and how the hunters use the land. The biggest word in deer hunting is why. Knock out some of those whys and you're real good.

[50:11]

Wes: Deer change two or three times during the season. You have early-season bucks, pressured bucks, the pre-rut, the rut, the post-rut, and then the ones just trying to survive the winter. You have to know what phase you're in on that land the whole season — it changes where you set up and everything else.

[51:09]

Host: A question from Chris Jones in South Carolina about access — do you ever send guys in from around the clock, north, south, east, west, or pinch down to a spot?

Wes: We like to surround the place all at once, come in from every direction at the same time. How much you can do depends on how many people you've got. The optimum is everybody drops in at once, so you've got maybe 100 acres surrounded and you're sitting on every exit trail. It causes a little panic and the deer start coming out — the older they are, the later in the morning. Around 11:00 or noon, if guys want to move, we grab a spot to eat and strategize: someone had to leave, we need to fill that hole, tighten this side, move a guy up in the wind so more scent drifts to where we think the bucks are. You make adjustments on the fly. If they've been laying there all morning, they're still there. Now over 50 or 60 acres, every deer is going to come by somebody — you just wait him out.

[54:57]

Host: Clay Harper asked about escape routes and, going into a new area, what makes one thicket better than another to set up on.

Wes: Access — can you get to it from two or three directions without making all the noise in the world? Maybe a road here, a road a mile up there. You build yourself a little square. As for the thicket itself, if it's in Alabama and it's thick, it's probably got a deer in it. I'm talking about five acres or bigger — there's going to be a buck in it every time. The thicker the better. Whether he gets up and moves is a different world, but he's in there. In a new area we just pull out the paper topo map — not even fancy apps — and talk it out: hunters come in this side, wind's blowing this way, they'll turn into the wind to get away, here's a big thicket, let's get between the hunters and that thicket. When I was completely solo, that was my number-one tactic — find a thicket maybe half a mile away, get off their wind, and catch the deer moving toward it.

One season — probably the '90s — I harvested 14 deer, and 11 were bucks, and I'd bet 10 of those 11 were done exactly that way. Back then you didn't have pictures; you had to walk and find the thicket. Mostly northwest winds, so when the hunters came in I'd go find a thicket northwest of them where the deer could travel straight into the wind to safety and smell everything in front of them. You don't sit right on it — set off it a little, give those deer a free nose heading toward the thicket, and pick them off.

[1:02:00]

Wes: The barrier doesn't have to be a road. It can be water, or a big open harvested field with nothing planted — they don't like walking out in broad open daylight, especially pressured deer. If you've got two of those with land between them, you've made a corridor, a funnel. Sit each end. And always keep it in your head: where would I go if I was a big buck and didn't want to get shot? They know they're being hunted — they're not stupid. Good nose, decent eyes, great ears. And the most important thing: you're going into their house. Could a deer come into your house and hide without you noticing? Their whole life has been in those woods — every smell, every memory — so they know something's different real quick. As soon as the big bucks find that out, they get to cover.

[1:03:23]

Host: Cody asked a great one — have you used this tactic to target a specific buck? They cut an 11-acre section in the middle of a buck's core area he was hunting. Kill him in the one-year-old cut, or use it like a funnel around the outside?

Wes: If he's two and a half, he's a little easier. But a four-and-a-half or five-and-a-half-year-old won't walk out into a clear-cut in daylight unless it's a full-blown rut — he'll walk five miles out of the way to avoid a hundred yards of open. So I'd hunt the edges of it. Find where the trees narrow, or where one side is thicker than the other. If he's traveling north to south, is the east or west side thinner or thicker? That's where you need to be, because he's thinking the same thing: how do I not die? I hunted a county in Alabama where we smoked them the first couple weeks of the season because they used the same trails — then after a few got truck rides, they quit those trails completely. But none of those were mature bucks. A pressured mature buck won't cross that open ground at 7:30 in the morning.

[1:06:00]

Wes: Every year I target a specific buck. Last year I set one up with a feint and made him go the direction I wanted — didn't shoot him, just moved him. Here's how occupied my brain is by deer hunting: I found some cheap trail cameras at a store with a big W, about 30 bucks, and I found out they scared deer — I knew because I had a good camera watching the cheap one. So I used that. I put those cameras on one side of a mountain because I wanted the deer to come around the other, easier side. I set them on three trails — high, middle, and low — and within two weeks I was getting pictures of the deer on the other side of the mountain. Your bag of tricks is limited only by your willingness to think differently. Diversions, feints, trickery. I'd rather do that than go home empty-handed having learned nothing.

[1:10:38]

Host: Cody also asked — is the wolf pack something you use on the best weather and moon days, or on hot, tough days to improve your odds?

Wes: There's no difference. The wolf pack is more successful timed with the rut, simply because you've got more deer movement and everybody's got a chance. Before the rut you might push one or two. But the weather doesn't affect your scent much, and it certainly doesn't affect a deer's ability to know he'll die if he doesn't move. It could be pouring rain — we're using scent to move deer. We've never called one off because it was going to be hot. We do it because, okay, we're going to be in the rut, this is when we do it. Every time I've carried you guys, it's been full-blown rut or right on the edge, because that's when the monster bucks move on these management areas.

[1:13:30]

Wes: If I'd had all these electronics when I was younger, I'd have saved so many miles of walking. Take Facebook — pull up a management area, scroll back through the pictures. Okay, they started killing bucks right here, six or seven of them that week — there's your rut. It took me years to figure out timing that you can now learn in ten minutes. Don't limit your ways of figuring things out.

And remember: you are a predator. Your eyes are in front of your head for telescoping distances. You can go to all the fancy dinners you want, but you're a primitive predator at heart. You have the genetics, the senses, everything you need to become a hunter. How hard it is to access is knowledge. That's why I do your show — I was the kid who had nobody. My dad didn't hunt, nobody in my family did. Those first six or seven years I didn't see deer because I was clueless. You could rent a VHS tape of guys hunting Kansas in two feet of snow — what's that going to teach me about Alabama? So I figured I'd learn it myself, and it took years. If somebody picks up on something today that took me 20 years to learn, it's completely worth my time.

[1:17:24]

Host: Knowledge you can learn quickly from a podcast, but applying it is where you build wisdom.

Wes: Right. I could be full of BS — you don't know. But I've got a couple hundred dead deer that say I'm not. Until you get out there and apply it, it's not wisdom. And you learn just as much from failure as from success. Sometimes the only thing you learn on a hunt is what not to do, and that's still valuable. Your mind frame matters. If your only idea of a good hunt is a harvest, you'll be disappointed 90% of the time. But if you go for the enjoyment, the camaraderie, the learning, you can't lose. There was a guy sitting in a spot I'd sent him, playing on his phone, thinking, this Wes Moye guy doesn't know Jack — and then a nine-point stepped out 30 yards behind him. He was down on himself one minute, and it changed in an instant.

[1:23:14]

Wes: My son went to Kentucky, never been there, saw guys sitting where you could see them from the road. So he went way back, about a mile and a half, came up behind, used the same philosophy — people's scent pushing the deer — and shot a 140-inch buck. Same principle: when hunters come in, they push deer toward you.

[1:24:00]

Host: Cody asked how everybody gets picked for upwind versus downwind, and how it rotates.

Wes: The older guys are more likely to take the harder spots. The young guys still have something to prove and want to kill. I'll pick a spot inside every time — I don't care if I'm the one who kills something, I'm happy if anybody does. Honestly there's not a bad seat, because a lot of bucks travel into the wind, so the upwind side is good too. A buck in the middle can break either way. The ones that sneak out the back give that hunter a better chance, but the bucks that don't smell the two guys 400 yards apart will walk right up to them. Before the rut, most guys on the upwind side kill the most. During the rut it flips — bucks travel down one side, crosswind, so they can scent-check the thicket. Overall the downwind guys kill a few more, but it's close.

[1:26:38]

Host: You mentioned being efficient with your weapon. On these hunts you're close to the cover — 40 to 60 yards off the edge — and sometimes a buck won't fully exit.

Wes: You'd better learn to shoot quick. That's cost me a lot. Some of them pop out, look around, and pop right back in — half their body, three seconds or less. I warned you the day you killed your first deer: you won't have long. Generally when that happens there's a doe involved and he's going back and forth trying to pick her scent back up. The first time we carried Jacob, he killed a deer but he had a buck at seven yards, only a neck shot, and it was only there a couple minutes — he still gets ribbed for that. Sometimes you truly can't get a shot. But sometimes you've already made your assumption — I can hit that neck at 70 yards, he'll be on the ground — and there are seven or eight of us to help track. You've got to be quick, and you can't doze off, because you can sit three hours and then one steps out halfway, standing there looking around, and a lot of times you don't even hear them. The thicker the cover, the more it muffles the sound.

[1:31:00]

Wes: If people want to try the wolf pack, I've given enough of the basics to get you started — then mold it to how you hunt. If you're a saddle hunter, set it up for that; a climber like me, set it up for that. If you've got three people, figure out the best way for three; ten people, the best way for ten. Mold it to what works.

[1:33:26]

Host: When you're hunting thick cover with a climber, how high do you like to get?

Wes: I like to get up high for thermals, and to see — I'm a smoker, so height helps. But plenty of times I'm only ten or twelve feet up because I can't get high enough to see over the foliage, so I stay low enough to see under it. If you can't get above the branches, drop below them. Jerry hunts a ten-year-old cut-over and only gets five or six feet off the ground — that's as high as he can go and still see — and he's killed three or four hangers in there. The last couple seasons I used a ground blind, not because I was lazy but because a seven-year-old cut-over that goes for miles called for it. Adapt to whatever's in front of you.

[1:36:16]

Host: Gabe Heft asked — how do you know when a buck has patterned you?

Wes: I'm a big believer that deer pattern hunters — they have to; it's their life. Last year on private land I'd put a camera 50 or 60 yards downwind of where I hunted every time I knew a front was coming, to see if the deer came to check. Every single time, I'd be gone ten minutes and there'd be four or five deer out there. You can put a cell camera on the very tree you sat in — you think you sneak in and out, but you don't. They know you're there. In that little area I was trying to get them to pattern me: truck parks there, he walks in, gets here at a certain time, leaves at a certain time, two or three days in a row. One day I came in at noon instead of 2:00 and stayed till almost dark. He walked right up, nose in the leaves, checking. The bigger bucks won't come all the way to your tree, but they'll get close enough to smell you.

So I used it against him. Come in a certain time a couple days, be normal; then leave a couple days; then come in before daylight from a different direction, quiet, park somewhere different, and sit where he's been coming to check you. I moved back 85 yards from where I usually hunt, gave him his nose, and he walked right up. I'd have taken him, but he'd broken off a rack — looked like he got hit by a car — so I said I'll get him next year. That's another trick in the bag. And that's how these 14-year-old boys walk in and kill the biggest deer on the place — they sit close to the road, somewhere nobody would sit, and they're not doing what the deer have the hunters patterned to do.

[1:42:35]

Host: Two years ago we had a bad drought and no mast; last year a great mast year. Did the lack of mast affect antler growth or body size?

Wes: I actually do better on the lean years, because they have to travel more for food. On heavy-mast years they hit the green fields a little less and browse heavier. The heavy mast this past year — the bodies were definitely bigger. Two years running I killed a 212 and then a 242-pound deer, and for everybody listening, that's a giant in Alabama. I'd rather shoot a big rack, but a big body is a close second because they're so rare here — they look like cows walking through the woods. I can't imagine the 300-pounders up north. And down here we weigh them with everything in — guts and all — so when a guy up north says 240 dressed, that's a different animal.

[1:48:00]

Wes: I always tell a story about something stupid I've done. We went hunting with Scott and his dad down in Dallas County. They'd seen three or four deer run out to a little island of trees a quarter mile out in the middle of a mud field. They sent us out to run them back toward the trucks. A deer ran the wrong way and Scott shot one. Me, Scott, and a man named Frankie Gaither — we were all college football players, in shape — had to go get it. Every step, the mud came up three or four inches over your boot. We were pouring sweat, about to have a heat stroke in the cold, and we still had half a mile to drag it back. Scott's dad and him were up in the truck, already done hunting, broke out the Jack Daniels, just laughing at us idiots. One of them literally rolled off the back of the truck laughing. I lost my right shoe in the mud; Frankie lost both of his — and we were not going back in for them. Then Scott walks up and says, you want this deer? He gave it away after all that. It took us over an hour to drag it down that field. You've got to earn that wisdom. But I ain't getting fooled again when it's wet.

[1:55:00]

Wes: And the peacock story — my very first time in the woods, I saw some wild turkeys and thought they were peacocks. I was wearing penny loafers, blue jeans, and a Members Only jacket, because we'd left straight from college and I didn't have anything else. And that evening I killed a deer. Penny loafers and a Members Only jacket, boys. But that's what makes it fun. I've done some stupid stuff, and those are some of my best memories. Deer hunting will humble you in ways nothing else will. Nobody has it all figured out — nobody. If you think you're the best and you know everything, you're wrong. If you're not trying to learn every single year, you're an idiot. I've done this for a lot of years and I still have a lot to learn.

[1:57:50]

Wes: So the wolf pack — we call it that because I watched the painted wolves. Instead of chasing the deer, we use our scent. We let the scent push the deer. That's all it is: letting people push deer to you. People online say we're doing man drives. I've been doing this 40 years — I ain't out here on a man drive with a high-powered rifle on a management area full of other high-powered rifles. Don't let the smack-talkers get to you. Stay on the positive side. Be happy for somebody who shoots a deer — it doesn't have to be a big one. You all have helped more hunters in Alabama and the Southeast than anybody. When you take a guy with 52 days a season of experience and he still learns something from your show, you're doing a great job. You're saving people years of walking and learning.

[2:02:00]

Wes: Always be evolving as a deer hunter and you can't go wrong. I'm not against saddles — they get a lot of people in the woods who can't lug a portable, and that's a good thing. I hope everybody finds the serenity, the success, and even the bad days, because the bad days are what teach you.

The show is only what it is because of guys like you. And I've never hunted outside Alabama, and never wanted to — I haven't learned Alabama yet. I like going home at night.

Host: We appreciate you coming down, Wes. Hopefully the newer audience got a lot out of this, and the folks who've been around a while — you explained some of this even better than the previous times we've had you on.

Wes: The first time we did it over the phone and I was nervous — you could tell. The nerves are gone now.

Host: Thank you all for watching and listening to the podcast. We'll catch you on the next episode from The Southern Outdoorsmen. And remember, y'all stay southern.