Hunting Supplies
Part confession, part cultural autopsy, and entirely too honest, Deer Hunting for The Buck Of It is the ultimate companion for the optimistic outdoorsman—or anyone who enjoys watching them suffer with dignity.
Packing as Personality Test
There’s a particular sound to optimism—the rip of Velcro, the hiss of a zipper being forced shut over too many ambitions. Every hunter packs like they’re auditioning for a documentary about survival, and every duffel bag is really just a portable autobiography. You can tell who someone is by what they think they’ll need when the woods stop pretending to care.
Anthropologists have identified four dominant subspecies of packer:
The Overpacker, who brings enough provisions to colonize a small moon. Their backpacks resemble moving vans and weigh roughly the same. You can hear them approaching through the forest by the soft percussion of clinking metal and self-doubt. Studies show this species reaches exhaustion thirty minutes after sunrise, at which point they sit, unzip, and begin apologizing to trail maps.
The Borrower, who believes other people’s preparedness constitutes community property. Their pack is suspiciously light, their confidence disturbingly high. They’ll ask to “borrow” a knife, a lighter, and—eventually—your dignity. Every group has one; they contribute stories and existential weight.
The Tech Prophet carries enough gadgets to reroute satellites. They speak in acronyms no one understands—GPS, OBD, AI something—and measure success in battery life. These are the pilgrims of the lithium faith. They treat the woods as a firmware update waiting to fail.
And finally, The Snack-Based Life Form—the most relatable subspecies, driven by caloric anticipation. They spend the pre-dawn hours organizing trail mix with the intensity of a surgeon arranging organs. Their bags jingle like vending machines during migration season.
Naturally, I’m a hybrid. I once packed three knives, two thermoses, and no sleeping bag. My priorities were clear: hydration, overkill, and denial. The bag felt heavy with foresight but light on sense. Somewhere between the caffeine tablets and the spare socks, I’d managed to forget comfort entirely.
A recent study—conducted by people with clipboards and no friends—found that pack weight inversely correlates with hunting success. The less you carry, the more likely you are to actually see something worth shooting. Those who haul entire REI storefronts into the wild come home with nothing but lower back pain and the haunting scent of performance fleece. The math tracks: if efficiency equaled outcome, Larry would own a venison empire by now.
Still, I get it. Packing is superstition dressed as logistics. Every item is a charm against failure. Extra gloves mean I might not be enough. Another flashlight whispers I’ve been lost before. The bag itself isn’t storage—it’s nylon optimism, the physical manifestation of This year will be different.
By the time you’re done, the floor smells like synthetic fabric and hubris. The pile of camo doesn’t look prepared; it looks like denial with adjustable straps. Coffee hisses from the thermos cap, Velcro snaps like punctuation on an overconfident prayer.
From a financial perspective, the ROI is catastrophic—hundreds of dollars per ounce of gear that will die a virgin. But emotional accounting runs on a different ledger. Out here, you don’t measure success in meat or miles, but in the comforting illusion of readiness.
If survival hinged on snacks, we’d all be apex predators.