This is an I-Heart podcast.

This season on Blood Trails, each story begins with a hunter stepping into the wild, but not all of them come back.

I'm Jordan Sillers, a journalist with over a decade of experience investigating stories about hunting, fishing, guns, and crime.

Join me as we track the truth through

tangled cover and cold case files, where every trail tells a story, and every story leaves its own

trail of blood. Blood trails. Listen now on Spotify. This episode is brought to you by FHF gear,

American-made gear that's built to take a beating.

I've used their bino harnesses and chest rigs from the swamps of Florida to the mountains of Alaska,

and they've held up every step of the way.

When you're in a rough country, wet, cold, dusty, and hot, you don't have to wonder if your gear can hang.

And with FHF gear, I don't have to.

It's tough, practical, and it's built by folks who understand the demands of the wild.

Check it out at FHFgear.com. To the deer hunter, the ebbs and flows of nature's calendar,

become built into our lives.

We become fixated on small temperature changes, length of day, the changing visuals as

summer shadows shift to the long shadows of autumn.

Leaf color.

The date is November the 5th, which is undoubtedly one of the top 10 days for encountering a big buck on his feet in the daytime on a calendar with 355 other options.

One of the first big bucks I kill with my bow was on November 5th, and the date will never

leave me.

We're about to listen to five storytellers, and three are thematic, in that it's a buddy

telling a story about his other buddies mishaps, which is one of my favorite genres.

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