A national, 127-year-old outdoors-life publication says a Jackman woodsman “might be the most patient and persistent hunter on the planet.”
Stephen White Sr. didn’t only spend 36 long years, one year at a time, praying he’d get a deer – and finally killing one.
In fact, a group of his friends threw him an unexpected party last month at Lake Parlin Lodge in the North Woods to honor the culmination of his decades-long dream.
“It was like a surprise birthday party,” White told OutdoorLife.com. “Everybody was pulling for me.”
White, 61, has been chasing one big buck or another since 1989 – when he was 25 years old.
Hunting can be an unforgiving heart-breaker for those who never seem to get a break.
It’s literally a hit-or-miss sport and, if you don’t get a deer this year, you have to wait another twelve months for the chance to give it another shot.
For White it’s been twelve… long… months… after… another. For… 36… years.
While one hunter can get a deer on his first try as a kid, another can wait nearly 40 years or, sometimes, forever.
The sport is just that unpredictable. But in its own way, that helps man sense the constant, lifelong survival fight that his wild brethren face every waking moment in the woods.
When White suddenly sighted a big buck on November 14, he steadily, slowly lifted his rifle, scoped its cross hairs on its chest, and squeezed the trigger on his Remington 760, which was loaded with .30/06.
But that was only the beginning.
“The buck tore off into the woods, seemingly uninjured,” Outdoor Life author Natalie Krebs writes in her piece.
White started trailing the animal, first its tracks, then seeing fur and blood in the snow.
Before the kill, White had started tracking it after first spotting a deer’s footprints in the snow before he even got a shot.
By the time it was over he had trudged two miles stalking the deer.
“It’s grueling and it’s not for the faint-hearted,” says White. “If you think you’re in shape, it’s a whole different world.”
As soon as he found a six-point buck lying lifeless on the ground in front of him with “busted tines,” White says his emotions took over.
“I cried and I laughed,” he recalled. “And I pumped my fist. It was an amazing feeling being there with this animal by myself in the middle of nowhere. I can’t explain it. People said to me that they can’t explain it, and now I know why. It was exhilarating. I don’t know how long I stood there.”
White also won mention for his long-awaited prize by the “BigWoodsBucks” account on Instagram, which posted that the hunter from Maine “finally got his first deer ever, tracking it on snow.”
“Tracking deer in the North Woods of Maine is notoriously difficult,” Krebs says. “Deer densities there are low.”
In that area of Maine, she said, hunters can’t just sit and wait for a deer.
To have even a fighting chance of finding one, “they must set out on foot,” she explained.
Outdoor Life, of which Krebs is executive editor, calls itself “the go-to publication of America’s diehard hunters, shooters, and anglers since 1898.”
Beginning as a magazine and going digital in 2021, it says its stories “are written by hunters, for hunters.”
