At 76, Ron Poole has been shooting bows for 70 years. He grew up running wild on a game management area along the White River in southeast Arkansas. He has 5 Boone and Crockett bucks and about 27 Pope and Young bucks, and he's never run a trail camera for deer. We drove to his place and sat down in his trophy room to talk about how he finds big bucks: hot feed trees, fresh sign that only lasts a week, open-woods bedding, and leaving a target buck alone until it's time to kill him.

In this episode:

- Shooting bows since age 4

- How he met Richard Fought, after passing nine bucks before 9 AM

- Why every feed tree tastes different and the sign only lasts 6–7 days

- Why bucks skirt feed trees downwind, and where to set up

- Grunt calls that sound like a deer, not a hog

- Rattling: tangle the antlers, don't bang them

- The 233-inch Iowa buck, runaway mules, and a blowing doe

- Why big bucks bed in open woods, not thickets

- How a river can split the rut

- Leaving your target buck alone until the pre-rut

- Finding acorns in the mountains by elevation

- Red oaks vs. white oaks in a dry year

- Persimmons, locusts, mimosas, and other overlooked deer food

- Fertilizing a white oak to make deer pick it first

- The doe figure-eight: where to hang during the rut

- Reading bottomland timber on an aerial map

- Why killing big deer consistently isn't luck

- The only scrapes worth hunting

- Walking in like a squirrel hunter

- Waiting for daylight to walk in, then hunting all day

- Carrying a climber and walking until it feels right

- Finding one tree in the dark with no GPS

- Trapping as a kid and the $27 possums

- Hunting with knapped chert heads

- Self bows, bamboo bows, Osage, and hickory

- Tuning arrows to a stick bow, arrow weight, and broadheads

- The 85-pound recurve that outran the compounds

- Shooting compounds with no sights at the world championships

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