Bryce M Towsley - Big Bucks The Benoit Way: Secrets From Americas First Family of Whitetail Hunting

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2008 Bryce M. Towsley, & Benoit Brothers Ltd.

Published by

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All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio, television, or the Internet.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008924244

ISBN-13: 978-0-89689-676-5
ISBN-10: 0-89689-676-5
eISBN: 978-1-44022-402-7

Designed by Kara Grundman
Edited by Derrek Sigler

Printed in China

Dedication

For my wife Robin.
Without you I wouldnt be a writer.
Actually, without you I wouldnt be much of anything.

From the Benoit family:
For Dick Duffy, a good friend whose final season came too soon.

From Lanny, Lane, and Shane:
To our mother, Iris Benoit, for all of her support and dedication through the years.

Foreword

A n east-coast liberal arts college is an unlikely meeting place for hunters, so it came as a stroke of luck when Chuck and I were assigned as partners in astronomy lab. Though neither of us proved much good at astronomical physics, we soon discovered a mutual interest in hunting. As a local, I bragged that our school was situated smack in the midst of the best pheasant hunting east of the Corn Belt. Chuck countered with tales of tracking deer where he grew up in New England, and his stories helped to enflame a raging case of whitetail fever I had recently contracted.

My deer-hunting buddies had convinced me that my best chance for a buck was to nail a homemade platform into a forked tree, and then wait for the deer to happen by. Perhaps so, but even a rookie like me soon realized the odds were slim. Our seasons lasted only a week or two, and with the intense hunting pressure it was pretty rare to see a buck at all outside the first couple hours of opening day. After that, the waiting was all but futile.

What Chuck described was much different and more appealing. Hotshots in his region would locate a buck track in snow, and because they were free to hunt vast public areas, would then skillfully follow for as long as it took to close on the deer. You have to move like an Indian and think like a deer, Chuck said, and when the buck jumps--you shoot!

So instead of paying attention to instructions on calculating Doppler shift, I daydreamed of roaming unfenced forests hot on the spoor of big 10-pointers. Around home, however, it was unlikely that would ever happen because the land was divided into small parcels, most of them loaded with hunters, and besides that, we rarely had snow during deer season.

When Chuck returned to school after Christmas break he brought me a mimeographed article about a Vermont man named Larry Benoit, who it said was the best deer tracker of them all and perhaps Americas finest deer hunter. The article briefly described Benoits methods and announced a new book that would reveal all his secrets. Though I never bought How to Bag the Biggest Buck of Your Life, my daydreams about hunting bucks Benoit-style recurred often, especially when I sat a deer stand.

Prompted by the legend of Larry Benoit and his deer-tracking sons, I eventually tried their strategy on national forest lands in the mountains west of home, where its sometimes possible to find tracking snow during late muzzleloader seasons. The first time it came together for me was in a steep West Virginia hollow, and while the buck I killed that day didnt measure up to the ones that made the Benoits famous, I like to think the thrills he gave me were in that ballpark.

Even though I had followed in their boot tracks, so to speak, my knowledge of the Benoits and their hunting strategies was actually pretty sketchy. Certainly their name came up in conversation and in print, but except for that article back in my college days, I never saw anything in-depth until Bryce Towsley really pulled back the wizards curtain with his comprehensive 1998 work, Big Bucks the Benoit Way.

Bryces book came along at a time when whitetail fervor was hitting its peak, and for legions of deer hunters hungry for know-how it was a treasure. In Chapter 1 Bryce stated, even more important [the Benoits] are woodsmen. They have a profound understanding of the trophy whitetail buck. They know how he thinks and how he will act. For the enthusiastic reader, that amounted to a tacit promise that he stood to gain such understanding, as least insofar as possible by reading about it. What followed were practical, real-world lessons on how the Benoits do what they do, including-most interesting for me and others who live where snow is infrequent--a chapter devoted to bare-ground tracking. It added up to a virtual deer-tracking textbook, and yet was loaded with tips and insights that could be applied to all kinds of whitetail strategies.

Because Big Bucks the Benoit Way so successfully delivered on its promise to help readers become better deer hunters, we now have this expanded second edition. It will succeed on its own merits just as the original did, and while theres no need for a detailed preview here, its certainly worth noting what a remarkable achievement this book is.

The graduating class of the first Benoit Hunting school.Benoit Photo.

If campfire deliberations could be applied to world problems, we hunters just might get the mess cleaned up pretty neatly. Trouble is, in the morning we mostly forget who said what and even what the heck was said to begin with. Producing the wealth of useful hunting and woods lore herein took far more effort than simply recording fireside chit-chat. It is difficult enough to write about ones own viewpoints let alone to distill the lifelong experiences of an entire family into a cohesive unit readily comprehensible to a wide range of readers. And so it is a tribute to both Bryce and the Benoits for having the wherewithal to share this expertise and to ensure that this ages -old form of hunting is passed on to another generation.

Because of the work he does for us here at NRA, I know Bryce first and foremost as a gunwriter. Certainly he is just as accomplished authoring hunting stories, and in this case I feel he adeptly drew on his skill in the first genre to create a masterpiece in the other. Gun-writers must be able to translate technical complexities in a manner that will engage and motivate huge, diverse audiences, more than 1.5 million readers in the case of our American Rifleman magazine. A hunting book of the nature and magnitude of Big Bucks required equally skillful translation, and there arent many writers who could have done it right. Perhaps only one.