Editor’s Note: Josh Wade from Charlestown, New Hampshire, has been a Mossy Oak Pro for 7 years and been hunting whitetail for 18 years with a bow, a rifle and a blackpowder gun. “Here in New Hampshire we don’t have many deer, so we primarily have to hunt states like Missouri, where we can hunt in all three seasons.”
Coming from New Hampshire, I always wanted to believe that other states had more deer than we did in New Hampshire. On many of the outdoor shows on TV, the host might see three or four bucks in a day or maybe five or six does. I wanted to see if there was that type of deer hunting available in other states, because I could hunt hard and not see a deer in 2 weeks here in New Hampshire. As I mentioned, we live close to the Vermont border. So, I knew I could take more deer for my family to eat if I hunted New Hampshire and Vermont. Most of the times when I went to Vermont I could at least see a doe very day or two and would hunt with my mom, my dad and my brother for 3-4 days. My dad and I started hunting deer in Maine when I was 13-years old. We’d stay with an outfitter, but we’d do an unguided hunt.We took some really-nice bucks up there and could see beautiful country.Those days were like vacations for my dad and me.I hunted a lot in Maine because I went to school there to learn to become a game warden.
Today I’m a police officer, but I hope to one day become a game warden. I really enjoyed hunting the big country in Maine and liked the laws and regulations that governed the hunting in Maine. For instance: Maine requires that all deer hunters wear hunter orange as a safety precaution. Maine also harvests many more deer and more big deer than we do in New Hampshire. In New Hampshire, deer hunters don’t have to wear hunter orange -even on deer drives. New Hampshire’s motto is, “Live Free or Die,” and that translates into “If you don’t want to wear hunter orange, you don’t have to.”
I was able to see a lot more deer when I was going to college in Maine because any time I wasn’t in class I was hunting deer or turkeys. I had been known to skip class and go hunting. I’d also hunt between classes and arrange my schedule in the spring semester not to have morning classes, so I could turkey hunt. I’d schedule my classes in the afternoons in the fall and winter, so I could deer hunt. I felt like since I was a conservation law-enforcement major that hunting should be a major course in my college curriculum, even though it wasn’t required for my academic career. My 4 years in college were basically a glorified expensive hunting-camp experience.
Day 1: Hunting Deer in One of the Toughest States to Find Deer
Tomorrow: Why Josh Wade Hunted Midwestern Deer
