By David E. Petzal

Whilst in Kansas, I took a Hail Mary shot—I think the sixth of my career—at just a hell of a whitetail. If you’re not familiar with the term, Hail Mary refers to a shot at a distance in which prayer is required. A friend and I were sitting in a blind with about 15 minutes of shooting light left when we saw a really sensational buck 500 yards-plus away, up on a ridge. There was no chance he was going to feed within shooting range (300 yards and change) before the light ran out, so we decided we’d best try and cover the 200 yards on foot, and fast.

Up the ridge we walked, and when we were what appeared to be 300 yards away, but turned out to be 380, the deer saw us and got ready to sprint. There was no time to do anything but shoot, which I had to do offhand. I missed. The bullet, as nearly as I can calculate, went under him because I misjudged the distance. If I had held on the very top of his back I might have had him.

By David E. Petzal

Back in the 1970s, Uncle Robert Brister told me that one of the most useful things any big-game hunter could own was a binocular in the 15x60 range. He said he never went elk hunting without one, and because I always did everything he said, I rushed right out and bought a Zeiss porro prism glass in 15x60 and it was exactly as he said, a highly specialized but invaluable tool if the circumstances were right.  Of course, like a jerk, I sold them some years later, but recently I traded a lot of stuff and coughed up some cash and got another big glass in the same power range.

By David E. Petzal

I spent the past week in Kansas, a place of very little culture but very many whitetail deer, which is a better reason to go someplace than culture. I was hunting out of elevated blinds with a friend who is a highly experienced hunter and a very good spotter of cloven-hoofed ungulates. Each of us had a laser rangefinder. Mine was in my binocular; his was separate.

What we noticed pretty quickly was that neither rangefinder ever agreed…ever. Sometimes the difference was only a few yards, but sometimes it was 50 yards or more. In addition, my rangefinder also gave Weird Readings. It would say that a deer was 152 yards away when it was perfectly obvious the beast was way over 300. This may have been caused by fog, which we had, or by the beam bouncing off weeds and brush that I couldn’t see but which the laser could. It was, as Richard Pryor used to say, a nerve-shattering experience.