Real deer hunters don't hunt 3 months a year-- they're hunting every day. The first day of the new season starts the day after the last closed. The year's rubs and scrapes are mapped and tracked. The new locations picked and prepped. The apple and acorn productions are noted. While these skills are useful to the modern hunter, to the ancient hunter they were absolutely mandatory to survive. In the Ancient Hunting Skills course we went out onto the land with our ancestors foremost in our minds.

       The difference between a successful hunt and an empty stomach is all in the attention to detail. Like pruning branches just enough to provide a shot but not so much as to give away your position. Like always knowing the wind in relation to the deer's movements. Where are the deer sleeping? Where are they eating? How do they get between the two? Ancient Hunting Skills taught us to ask these questions, to form theories and guesses, and then to go out and verify our speculations or as we called it - 'ground truth it'.

      Through studying tracks and other signs, as well as evening sits to watch the deer move across the land, we tested our theories and started to form not only a dynamic model of the deer but also a real connection to the woods we were in. It's this connection more than anything else I believe that our distant ancestors relied on to feed themselves and their families. It is with these connections I believe we can today harvest game in a responsible, ethical manner and be a positive influence on the land.

-Garrin Carter