By Russell Thornberry

-- His name was Dave. We hunted together back in the '70s in eastern Alberta before the western Canada whitetail boom. Dave was as happy as a clam just to get a deer.

I guess I never met a more enthusiastic hunter. He had never taken what we might call a real trophy buck -- mostly just little ones -- but he didn't give a hoot. He was hunting, and that was all that mattered.

Then one fall before the hunting season opened, Dave declared that would be his year for a trophy. "A monster buck or nothing," he vowed. And so the quest began.

Dave hunted harder than he had ever hunted and saw less deer than he'd ever seen. And no big bucks! By the end of the season, he was a nervous wreck. It was as if his manhood was somehow threatened if he didn't succeed. And he didn't. After that, Dave lost interest in hunting altogether. He had burdened himself with priorities that weren't really his. He was hunting with imposed expectations that were not his own.

Too bad. I hated to see it happen and tried to tell him to go back and hunt for himself, but it was not to be. He doesn't hunt anymore, having concluded that he just wasn't lucky enough to bag his dream buck.

Another friend of mine named Ian had only been deer hunting a couple of times and, frankly, was as green as grass. As he was walking through a pasture in Alberta, he stumbled into a buck and managed to make the shot. He called and asked me to come over and look at his first deer.

The head of his record book buck had been sawed off just below the jaw line. By his own admission, he did not know one buck from another. He was astounded to know his buck was something special. However, within a week I was hearing stories of how he stalked the buck, calling on his lifetime of expertise, which he employed to make the perfect shot, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

I use these examples to illustrate the part that luck plays in taking mega bucks. I believe that luck is the most important ingredient in being successful. That said, I also believe that luck favors the prepared mind.

Good hunting and God bless,
Russell Thornberry
BTR Executive Director