Big Bucks the Benoit Way: Secrets from America's First Family of Whitetail Hunting

Introduction

I can relate to Al’s way of thinking and Big Bucks the Benoit Way is a good example. It was my first book, and let me assure you that opening the shipping box and removing the first copy of your first book is a pivotal moment in any writer’s life. But, it seems like just yesterday. Part of that relativity of time thing is due, I think, to this book being a good luck talisman for me and a lot of good things have happened in the past decade.

The book was a success by any measure, and it was decided that the book needed an upgrade and a facelift, the result of which you are now holding in your hands.

Time sure does fly by. But, to me, I compare it to my high school years and how they dragged on eternally, and I don’t need pretty girls or hot stoves to fully understand the concept of relativity of time.

When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That is relativity.

Albert Einstein

My writing career was taking off as this first book hit print and in that ten years I have realized a lot of lifelong dreams. I have been to Africa and hunted Cape buffalo, multiple times and always by tracking of course. Back when I wrote this book the desperate thought that I would never hunt mbogo would keep me awake and staring at the ceiling long into the lonely nights. But, it hardly ended there. I have also hunted elephants and a wide variety of the other African game that haunted my dreams for decades.

I have camped in a small tent above the Arctic Circle in the winter while hunting for musk ox, and have chased red stag on the southern tip of South America. In fact, I have been lucky enough to have traveled the earth from top to bottom and side to side, most of it while hunting a lot of critters that I thought I would never see outside of a zoo. While there are still many places I want to see and animals I want to hunt, the list is amazingly shorter than it was a decade ago when Big Bucks the Benoit Way was still a work in progress. I truly believe the book was the good luck charm that helped make it all happen.

Psychologists say that their work defines most modern men and if that’s true, I have enjoyed success as I am one of those rare outdoor writers who enjoys writing. While I was clawing my way up in 1997, today I am writing for magazines that I could only dream of back then. In those ten years I have written four other books, including another with the Benoits and I have contributed to several more. They even dragged me kicking and screaming into a semi-regular gig on outdoor television. In the end, I am living my dream, but it is flashing by at a disturbingly fast rate of speed, and this book is an enduring reminder of that.

Still, I have never strayed far from my roots. As I type these words the Vermont deer season is several days old and there is a loud, nagging sound in my head from the unused buck tag in my pocket. While I have been fortunate enough to hunt most of the best places in the whitetail’s domain, I still can’t get New England out of my system. They are predicting snow this weekend and if it happens, this book project is going to be late. We only have a few deer seasons in our lifetime and I don’t want to squander even one. I hope my editor understands, as he is a hunter as well.

Ten years! How did this happen? It seems such a short time ago that I was in Maine, shivering in that cold school bus the Benoits used for a camp and wondering what the hell I had gotten myself into. Write a book? About the Benoits? Whatever possessed me to think I could pull that one off?

The Benoit phenomenon was launched in 1970 when Sports Afield magazine put Larry on the cover and asked the question, Larry Benoit - is he the best deer hunter in America? That claim, if not backed up with facts, could have been fighting words in the ego driven and competitive world of whitetail deer hunting. But nobody ever raised a serious dispute and Larry became the first whitetail hunting celebrity. As a result, he helped to launch the whitetail boom that would consume the hunting world for the next several decades. Just a few weeks back I was in Georgia for a major gun company’s writer’s seminar and new product introduction. The Vice President made the simple statement, Whitetail hunters dominate the hunting rifle industry and any successful new product introduction must understand that. But it didn’t raise an eyebrow because everybody in the room had known that for years. Larry Benoit helped to launch that phenomenon.

Prior to that 1970 article, hunting magazines would have a few scattered whitetail hunting stories throughout the year. Now the general hunting magazines will always have at least one whitetail hunting story in every issue, and several successful magazines are devoted entirely to whitetail hunting. It is an accepted fact that a whitetail deer on the cover will sell more magazines off the newsstands than any other animal on earth. Whitetails rule and the Benoit legacy has played a significant role in advancing that wonderful critter to that status.

That point was never lost on me. It had been twenty-two years since Larry’s first book How to Bag the Biggest Buck of Your Life had been published. A second book had been rumored for years, but after disappointment after disappointment was thought to be mostly a pipe dream. Other writers had tried and failed, and the sequel Benoit Book had begun to take on mythical proportions. Often promised, but never delivered, it lived on as a fantasy in the deer hunting world. How did I think I could bring a legend, a myth, to life?

Like any writer I had my doubts, and they were never stronger than during those long nights in that drafty bus the Benoits used as a hunting camp. Before then it was a concept, but there in that bus it was reality, and like Kipling’s east and west I feared that never the twain shall meet.

Here the Benoits pose with a buck pole that would make any group of hunter’s proud. As the family gets older, they get better at hunting. Benoit Photo.

But, I just did what any writer must do; I buried the doubts and kept slogging ahead. I can remember sitting in my truck at the end of some forgotten logging road, deep in the Maine wilderness, with the heater running and the computer plugged into the cigarette lighter, typing fast and furious before I forgot something that I had just witnessed on the trail with one or the other of the Benoits, No matter how hard I worked, it just seemed like treading water. There was so much to cover and so little time to extract it from the Benoits and turn it into a manuscript. With a deadline looming I felt like Sisyphus endlessly pushing the boulder up the hill.

There were some problems that I alluded to in the original introduction for this book, but never explained. I was 42 years old when I started the book, active, strong and healthy. Then, out of nowhere, I had a heart attack. This sort of thing is common in my family and it has claimed several members, including my mother, in their forties. I survived mine (obviously) and have not let it slow me down. Last year at fifty-one I hunted sheep for the first time. We backpacked into a remote section of the Yukon and hunted in some of the steepest sheep country on earth. Just a couple of months ago, and only a few weeks past the tenth anniversary of my heart attack, I hunted mountain goats in northern British Columbia. That made sheep hunting look like work for sissies. That heart attack changed my life and influenced many things, including my decision to live life on my own terms, but the delays and problems it introduced into writing the original book were legion.

Shane Benoit was having a personal crisis as well. I arrived in Maine with instructions from his wife, Donna, for him to get to a hospital. He had contacted a virus back in high school that had destroyed his kidneys. The test he took before leaving for Maine indicated that he needed to be on dialysis as soon as possible, but he refused until hunting season ended and we had the info needed for the book in the can. In fact, Shane later reviewed the manuscript while hooked to a dialysis machine. The next year Donna would donate a kidney and save his life.

I mention these things for two reasons. I have always believed that readers best understand the writer and the subjects if they will open up a little and let them into their personal lives. I also wanted to show you a little about the Benoit mindset when it comes to deer hunting. Shane knew he was in serious trouble and that he should by any sane and sensible reasoning be at the hospital. But, he also knew that going to the doctor would end his deer hunting for the year and any prospects for finishing the book. I don’t think that one carried more weight than the other, but if I had to pick, I think he simply could not grasp the concept of forfeiting the rest of his deer season. It might seem foolish to endanger your health for a couple of weeks of hunting, but to Shane it made perfect sense. It’s that level of focus and dedication that keeps the Benoits dragging huge whitetail bucks out of the woods year after year. If you, the reader, take nothing else out of this book I hope that you understand that focus, dedication, drive and a willingness to keep going no matter what are the catalysts that lead to success in shooting big bucks. It is one thing to learn the techniques, but quite another to shake it off and keep hunting when every fiber in your being wants to stop. The only thing assured by quitting is that you will fail.

The Benoits are all ten years older too. Larry is in his eighties, Lanny in his sixties and even the baby Shane is in his fifties. This is a time in life when most deer hunters are slowing down. Their energy levels are dropping off, their knees and hips are wearing out and the fire in the belly is burning down to warm embers. But that’s not the Benoit way and, if anything, the fire is raging harder and hotter.

The Benoits are shooting more big bucks in recent years than probably any time in their lives. They have had to change tactics to address their aging bodies and the changing climate but that’s what makes them truly great at this deer hunting thing. They can and do adapt to changes in factors they can’t control. I coined the phrase hunt smarter, not harder when we were working on the second book, Benoit Bucks and they have grabbed on to that, even using it for the name of a video. In the many years that I have been closely associated with them I have seen changes I never thought I would witness. Some, particularly equipment changes, are things I have been trying to get them to do for years. They dismissed me ten years back when I suggested that putting a scope on their rifle would put a lot more bucks on the game pole. Today, every single one of the Benoits hunts with a scope on his Remington pump action deer rifle. During a recent bull session around Shane’s kitchen table, one or the other of them started spouting off on how good these scopes were and how they hardly ever missed a deer these days. When I reminded them that I suggested they use a scope ten years ago, they politely chuckled and changed the subject.

But again, it proves a simple fact, even the most stubborn deer hunter, (and trust me, the Benoits give new meaning to the word stubborn,) must evolve and adapt to the changing conditions if they want to continue to be successful at deer hunting. The bonus chapter looks at some of those changes and adaptations that the Benoits have incorporated into their hunting over the years. It also adds to the data base of information that we are trying to convey to you in this book.

Everything in this book is just as true as it was ten years ago. What has changed for some of us is how we can adapt the information to our own hunting. We as hunters are all burdened by things we cannot control, such as loss of land to hunt, changing weather or aging bodies, and they all mean we can’t hunt the way we did ten years ago. But what should have evolved and gotten stronger is our brain, for that organ is the single most important tool we hunters have to use. While this book can instruct you about deer sign, identifying and tracking big bucks, or even how to find the best place to hang your treestand, it cannot predict every deer hunting situation. It is up to you to use this information and adapt it to your own unique whitetail deer hunting circumstance. If you are able to do that, then you are well on the road to joining the Benoits in shooting big bucks year after, and isn’t that the goal we as deer hunters are all seeking?

Bryce M. Towsley

North Clarendon, Vermont

This is some classic big buck land in the north country. The moss and lichens on the rocks will show a track very well and the brush and low land by the water will hold bucks. Jay Kennedy.

Larry and Shane with Larry’s 2006 10-point, 225 lb buck. Photo by Steve Kennedy.

CHAPTER ONE

The First Family of Deer Hunting

I have a rather modest collection of sporting magazines that starts back in the early years of this century and continues through the years of my youth, which arguably ended in the early seventies. (My wife and a few others contend that I never grew up, but that’s not to debate here.) In comparing those classic publications with today’s hook and bullet journals, the most glaring difference is in the almost total lack of whitetail hunting articles in those older publications.

We hunters and readers of the time always knew what the editors did not, that even back then the premier big game animal in America was the whitetail deer. It was hunted in more places and by more people than any other North American big game species. How could there not be a widespread interest lurking deep and waiting release? It was, of course, a gut feeling; we didn’t have the benefit of the demographic studies that the magazines used, but there was never any doubt that the whitetail explosion was somewhere in our future.

As far as I am concerned there is nothing like a whitetail buck, a big dominant buck. A buck like that is majestic and proud. He is his own boss and he answers to no one.

-Larry Benoit

So when the September 1970 issue of Sports Afield magazine carried an ominous and vaguely frightening cover photo of a man in a green plaid hat staring through a peep sight and down a rifle barrel directly into your eyes, it commanded attention. The line below the magazine title read Larry Benoit—is he the best deer hunter in America? Many who read that story and the books and articles that followed concluded that perhaps he was.

It might be argued that this magazine cover and article helped to launch one of the first whitetail hunting superstars and to release upon us the beginnings of the whitetail boom. Larry’s star shone brightly for many years, but it likely reached its crescendo with the release of his book How to Bag the Biggest Buck of Your Life in 1975. Even today, with the last copy sold years ago and no reprint imminent, Larry continues to receive calls requesting the book. And why not? Who among us can look at that cover photo of Larry dressed in his trademark green plaid wool, holding his Remington 760 carbine in one hand and the massive antler of a huge, hog-nosed, bull-shouldered northern whitetail buck in the other and not want a copy of our own?

The influence of the Benoits on a generation of hunters is seen throughout the Northeastern woods in the many hunters dressed in green checkered wool and rubber boots with Remington pump-action rifles in their hands. I too can trace my love of these rifles to Larry. Long before I ever met the man, I bought my beloved .30-06, mostly because he used one. Like so much else from Larry, I found that he was right. He was right about the wool and right about the gun. They are simply the best choices for hunting in the thick, cold, and wet woods of the Northeast. As a benefit of being a gun writer, it would seem that these days I have some of the finest rifles on the market in my gun room, but when I am hunting the thick woods of home and it is getting time to finish the job, it is that worn old 760 that travels with me into the gray cold of a November dawn.

Drive out with a buck like this on your roof and next year, hunters will be following your truck. Benoit Photo.

The way the Benoits hunt is often considered regional, and to some extent it is. They are trackers. But even more important is that they are woodsmen. They have a profound understanding of the trophy whitetail buck. They know how he thinks and how he will act. While many think that they simply get on the track of a big buck and run him down, nothing could be further from the truth. It takes an overall woodsman with a profound understanding of whitetail behavior, particularly big buck behavior, because they do indeed act differently than all of the other deer in the woods, to succeed at hunting deer this way. The fact that they take lots of their bucks on bare-ground will attest to that. Sure they are trackers, but more than that, they are deer hunters, the truest form of deer hunters. They will enter the whitetail’s woods and hunt him on his terms. They disdain tree stands and watching trails. They don’t rattle horns, make drives, or blow calls. The only scent they will admit to using is common sense. Instead, they move through the woods on the deer’s turf and in his domain. It is one on one, man against deer, arguably the purest form of deer hunting. Most agree it is also the most difficult.

Larry and Shane hot on the track. Benoit Photo.

A few of the Benoit deer mounts from the 2003 season. Benoit Photo.

I have been blessed with the opportunity to have hunted whitetails throughout much of North America. I have visited most of the well-known areas and I have tried just about every method invented to hunt whitetails. If there is a tougher style or place to hunt trophy bucks than how and where the Benoits hunt, I have yet to encounter it. Yet they would have it no other way. They have opportunities to hunt in other places, but they like the freedom and challenge of the north woods and hunt there by choice. They still identify a trophy buck by the traditional northeastern measure of 200 pounds or more dressed weight, and it is a rare season when each and every one of the Benoits doesn’t take a buck exceeding that standard.

A collection of trophies from the home of Larry Benoit. Benoit Photo.

Larry is just about as well known for his knives as he is for his deer. The two go hand in hand. Benoit Photo.

They hunt in the big country of northern Maine where deer densities are low and there are often miles and miles of empty country between trophy bucks. For many hunters this is perhaps the most frustrating and difficult place in the whitetail’s domain to hunt for trophy bucks. While Maine’s reputation for big-bodied bucks is well deserved, they are still as rare there as an honest politician. Success rates are in the single digits and it is not uncommon for many hunters to spend the entire month-long season without seeing a buck of any kind. Yet the Benoit family will find and take the best of the best from these vast woods with apparent ease. But, apparent only to the outside observer, those who have hunted here know the difficulty of taking big bucks, and those who know the Benoit family will recognize how much of themselves they put into this sport.

While these days it seems that everybody who ever shot a decent buck is now a bona fide expert and on the seminar trail, Larry has been pretty quiet. I am honored to now call him my friend and I have spent hours and hours talking with him and his family about what deer hunting has become and where they think it is going.

Larry still lives in the same north-central Vermont home where he and Iris, his wife of 56 years, raised nine children. It is not big and certainly not fancy, but it states the obvious—that Larry places his values in things less tangible than the materialistic pursuit that so many of us find ourselves caught up in each day. Having come of age in the great depression and grown to manhood in the CCC camps of that time, he knows about the value of things in life. It wasn’t easy raising this large of a family on a working man’s income; it took hard work and long hours. That Yankee work ethic was instilled in his offspring and it has insured that each grew to adulthood and has prospered in their own way. But, the one thing that remained even more sacred than work to much of the family was deer hunting.

Stepping into this house will stagger most hunters—it’s like a whitetail shrine. One wall of the living room is completely covered with big racks that are packed so tightly that it is hard to define a single set of antlers from the whole. It is nothing but a wall of tines that is easy to imagine stretching on to infinity. The opposing wall is filled with mounted heads of more Jurassic whitetails. Between are rifles along the beams in the ceiling, Native American art (reflecting Larry’s pride in his Iroquois heritage), and a room that has obviously seen a lot of family, love, and life. Everywhere you look there are more hunting treasures, photos of the great days and the great bucks, Larry’s handmade knives, and antlers, always antlers. The house alone helps you to understand that the success of the Benoits starts with the fact that they as a family are defined by and aligned with the whitetail deer. Seeing this house and knowing this family is to understand that to separate the Benoits from deer hunting would sever their souls.

This was defined well to me as I sat at the kitchen table (every home I have ever felt welcome and comfortable in used the kitchen table as its social gathering place) with Shane and Larry. We were talking about tactics, and they were explaining about the final minutes of the hunt—the time when you know you are close to the buck and everything depends on the next few moves. It’s the most dangerous point in any hunt, the time when the senses of both the hunter and the hunted are tuned to their finest, the time that determines who wins and who loses. It’s also the time when things go wrong. It’s when most hunters get antsy and blow it. But they have a way to deal with it.

One thing to keep in mind while tracking is that a larger track may not be a buck, but it will be a larger deer.

They call it the death creep, not so much for the expected demise of the buck, but because the hunter must move so slowly as to almost appear to be a corpse. It’s when the hunter is moving in for the kill, when the buck has all of the aces and the hunter is most likely to make a mistake.

Shane and Larry both were describing to me the necessity of maintaining complete focus.

Your thoughts must be only and totally on the task at hand, one of them said. You must think of nothing else but seeing that buck before he knows you have.

They explained how you must draw yourself in and approach a Zen (my word) state of total concentration.

Larry and Shane talk strategy while taking a rest from hunting. Benoit Photo.

How do you maintain this, particularly when it must continue sometimes for hours? I asked.

Lanny and Steve dragging out a nice buck. Not a bad way to end a