In Arkansas deer hunting used to mean a two-week stint at a deer camp that wasn’t first-class by any stretch of the imagination—more makeshift than anything, complete with an old bunk house, a cook house where we spent Thanksgiving together, and an outhouse that required us to dig a new hole in the ground every single year, moving the structure over it while filling in the old one from the year before.
Back then, you didn’t have high-end side-by-sides or quiet e-bikes to haul out game. We had old Broncos and Willys jeeps. At one point, we even had a prison trustee staying at camp to do the cooking. A massive part of the whole experience was owning and running hunting dogs, and very few folks ventured extremely deep into the big timber because you didn’t have a smartphone GPS in your pocket to guide you back out. If a big buck hit the dirt, you couldn’t just text for backup. Understanding how to keep the sun in the right spot as you walked served as your compass, and remembering a particular creek bend or a crooked, lightning-scarred tree served as your landmarks.
The Heart of Camp Life
Beyond the timber, camp had its own rhythm. Whole pigs were cooked right in the ground. There was a card game going every single night, and always the stories that caught us all up on what had happened since last year’s camp.
I don’t struggle at all with modern sportsmen using new technology—times change, and people enjoy the sport in their own ways. But there is no denying it is a fundamentally different type of hunting now.
The deer population in Arkansas today is crazy high compared to what it was back then, when you’d practically get put under the jail just for looking sideways at a doe. Back in those days, simply finding a fresh deer track in the mud was genuinely exciting. And you couldn’t pull out a phone to snap a picture of it, because there was no phone and no camera. You just committed it to memory, smiled to yourself, and kept walking. Back then, more than anything else, it was about community and friends.
The Long Season and the Lost Bunkhouse
Today, the season stretches out over five months, and most modern hunting leases don’t have camps at all anymore. My son didn’t get to experience any of that—though looking back at shoveling out that outhouse every year, there are definitely parts of that I’m glad he missed!
What makes it harder is what things cost now. Today, just to join an okay camp runs north of $600. To join a decent camp, you’re looking at $1,200. And a great camp? That can run right around $10,000. It’s crazy. At that point, it’s almost cheaper to just hire a guide and pay their fees to go harvest a 140-inch buck.
The True Hunters of the Timber
In fact, bragging about harvesting an extremely large buck today is usually tied straight to the fact that someone hunts in an expensive camp. Most of the guys that I meet who still hunt public lands are more than happy with harvesting a respectable 115-inch deer—because they worked infinitely harder for it. They know how to read the forest and its floor, they understand deer patterns, feeding habits, moon phases, and breeding cycles. In my eyes, they are the true hunters. And the best part? Most of them never post a single picture of their deer on a high-profile Facebook page.
And that’s the real loss in all of this. When everything becomes commercialized, high-dollar, and wired, it takes away the opportunity to step back, slow down, and teach the next generation true woodsmanship. You can’t buy that experience on a lease, and you can’t download it from an app. You have to earn it, one quiet step at a time.
Conclusion
The deer camp with the annual outhouse duty and the old Willys jeeps might be a relic of the past, and the modern woods might hum with cell signals, high-dollar leases, and the pressure of a five-month season. But the essence of what draws us to the timber hasn’t changed at all.
You don’t need a ten-thousand-dollar club membership or a trophy on the wall to know what it feels like to sit quietly as the woods wake up around you, relying on nothing more than your own instincts and a shift in the wind. At the end of the day, hunting isn’t about what you can buy or what you can broadcast for the world to see. It’s about the quiet moments etched into your memory, the lessons passed down through sweat and patience, and the profound respect for an animal that outsmarted you nine times out of ten.
That’s a tradition worth keeping alive—one quiet, hard-earned step at a time.