Tag soup…we’ve all heard the phrase. While it may not be a hunter’s “worst” nightmare, it ranks pretty high up in one of the top 10 ways to kill your season. It seems like some people have all the luck, and just happen to stumble upon trophy animals every year. My luck seems to be the opposite. No matter how hard I hunt, no matter what methods I use, old or new, I can’t seem to connect with a deer in my own backyard. Scent control, cover scent, attractant, moon phases, rut phases, animal activity, wind, trail camera footage…for the past 5 years, I’ve yet to be able to connect with a white tail in the woods I hunt in my home state. The closest I’ve come was a doe, at 20 yards, 24 hours after rifle season for does closed…that’s my luck.
No hunter likes the taste of tag soup, but it tastes even worse when you travel abroad for a hunt, spend money on expensive tags, and then don’t connect…and not for lack of trying. That happened to be twice this year, as I traveled North to Canada. I went to New Brunswick for my first time for Spring Bear, and while I saw 2 bears, I didn’t shoot them. I could have filled my two tags, but for me, those weren’t the two bears I was after. I was looking for larger, more mature animals, and both of the bears I saw were more than a few years old so I let them walk. Shame on me? Maybe. But I left NB knowing I did the right thing from a conservation stand point. Did it suck? Of course. I kept thinking: “don’t pass on the bear on Monday you’d shoot on Friday”, but, it was a lesson learned, it was an opportunity to watch these animals interact with their environments in a way I’d never seen before, and I got to watch 2 friends harvest their first bears, so all was not lost. I learned about myself as a hunter, and I learned more about bear behavior and hunting strategies for spring bear. Anytime you “mature” as a hunter should go in the win column, even if you don’t take home any meat.
Newfoundland, now that was a different story. The tag soup in Newfie was a lot harder to swallow. When you’re on an island that boasts the richest moose population in North America, and you don’t even SEE a moose, let alone get a shot at one…ya…that was a tough one to deal with. Weather played a huge factor, but I didn’t let it affect my hunt. I woke up every morning, despite freezing temperatures, buckets of rain, pelting hail, etc, etc, and I went out and hunted hard from before sun up to after sun down. The highest hills to the lowest bogs. With one bull tag and 2 bear tags in my pocket, and not so much as seeing a living animal in 6 days, THAT was the worst tasting soup. I blame the weather in part, but also put a lot of the fault on the outfitter, who didn’t seem to really want to work to find the animals, and was hoping the animals would find us, and by day 4 had pretty much given up to prepare for the hunters he’d have once we left. Yes, it was a shitty experience, but it was an experience nonetheless. I learned a lot about the region, and while none of the guide’s tactics worked to produce a moose, I learned a lot about moose hunting in general.
It’s easy to focus on the negative, especially when you’re having tag soup for a party of one, but I look at it as, I had an opportunity to travel to a new region, take myself outside my comfort zone, hunt a different way, and learn about myself and the animals more. Makes the soup a little more palatable.
Black Dirt Diaries 