DECOYING DEER

Back in the Dark Ages of whitetail hunting, before food plots and sophisticated trail cameras and quality deer management and YouTube videos and a plethora of hunting TV shows on cable and all of that, I learned a lot about deer hunting from friends who spent more time in the woods than most sane folks would consider healthy.

One of those guys was Gary Clancy, an outdoor writer and deer hunter extraordinaire from Minnesota who was taken from us far too early in 2016 by a cancer caused from Agent Orange when he served as an Army point man in Vietnam in 1969–70.

Clancy was a soft-spoken, down-to-earth guy that loved to laugh and never spent any time talking about himself. But when he talked about whitetail hunting I listened, because this guy new his stuff. He was one of the first men I know of to seriously start using decoys for deer hunting. His classic 200-plus page