There's something that happens when you step into the bush with a bow in your hands and the intention to hunt. Everything sharpens. Your senses crank up to a frequency you didn't know you had. The way the light moves through the canopy. The direction the wind is breathing. The angle of a shadow. The crack of a twig forty metres away that you feel in your chest before you hear it with your ears. It's a primal experience, raw, instinctive, ancient. And I believe that drive, that hunger for it, lives somewhere deep inside all of us. Not just me. All of us.

I don't necessarily understand it. I'm not sure I want to. What I know is that a part of my DNA belongs in the wilderness. Part of me was made for this, for creeping through tall grass at first light, for reading the land, for earning a meal the hard way. Whether it's casting a fly for barramundi, spearing fish off the reef with a spear gun, or driving a traditional spear into a stingray in the shallows, it's all hunting. Using a bow is no different. The connection is the same. The process is the same.

""It's not so much the fact that you're killing an animal. It's that whole process, and the killing is part of that process."" - Shaun Lynch, Dog & Gun Coffee.

The rut is the mating season, and for a bow hunter, it is the most exciting time of the year. The stags roar to assert dominance and stake their territory. The hinds move along the boundaries, rubbing their noses on rub trees, trees the stags have worked over, leaving their scent, marking their patch. Around Easter, Chris watched a hind walk the entire back fence line, stopping at every single rub tree, pressing her nose to the bark. She was on the move, coming into season, searching for the dominant stag.

The stags, meanwhile, are a spectacle. They roar and posture and clash antlers, brutally, sometimes savagely, to claim females from less dominant rivals. They find their positions, claim their patch, and hold it. The whole bush crackles with energy. If you were walking through the scrub and heard a stag roaring for the first time in your life, you'd stop dead in your tracks. You'd have no idea what you were hearing.

We bow hunters get to hear it up close. We get to be inside it. But as breathtaking as the rut is to witness, it has its drawbacks for the serious meat hunter. By the end of it, a stag is wrecked. All he's done for four, five, six weeks is roar, mate, and fight. He's skin and bone. When you cape one out at the end of the rut, you find the evidence, gnarly wounds in the flesh, festering holes from antler points, bruises deep in the muscle. The meat suffers for it.

Despite days of effort on Chris's block, early rises, careful stalking, working the wind, the big stag we were after eventually slipped away into the firebreak timber and didn't come back out. That's hunting. You can do everything right and still walk home empty-handed. But a call from my mate Shaun from Dog & Gun Coffee changed the trajectory of the whole story.

Before anything else happened, before a single stalk was planned or a boot was laced, we met an Elder. He was an old man, deeply connected to this land, and what he shared with us that afternoon sits with me still. He spoke about asking permission, not just from the landowner, not just from the gate at the end of the driveway, but from the Country itself. From the grass underfoot. From the trees. From everything.

""Any time I take something from the bush,"" he said, ""even grass, I ask permission. Because that's the right thing to do."" - Donny Fermor, Anaiwan Aboriginal Elder.

He spoke about respect. Not in a soft or abstract way, but as a practical, urgent, necessary thing. We need to respect this country more than we are doing now, he said. We need to bring it back.

He talked about the old ways of managing country, the totem system. Each clan group had a totem animal: kangaroo, snag, eel, fish, possum, bird. That totem was your ancestor. You did not kill your ancestor. But the system wasn't just spiritual, it was ecological. If the possum clan would not kill possums, and the fish clan would not kill fish, and the kangaroo clan would not kill kangaroos, then every species in Country had a group of people whose responsibility it was to protect it. Harvesting was shared. Nothing was taken to excess. The land was managed not through restriction but through relationship.

He carried water with him from his father's Country, water from another place, from ancestral land, and he performed a small ceremony there in the fading light. He asked the old spirits to recognise us, to know we were there with good intentions. To let us walk. I watched all of this and said nothing. There wasn't anything to say. Some things you just receive. When it was done, he looked at us and said: he's happy. He come visit. That's good.

Shaun explained it perfectly. Imagine you're at home alone, awake, and someone tries to sneak through your house. You just know. You know what your house sounds like. You'd hear the slightest shuffle and think: that's not right. Deer live their entire lives in that heightened state. Their whole job, their only job, is to stay alive. And they're extraordinary at it.

There's always a matriarch. An older doe who's been around long enough to read everything. The young ones might spook at shadows and the rest of the mob will ignore it, just the young one being silly. But when the matriarch moves, they all move. No questions asked. If she barks and runs, the whole group evaporates.

The wind was the other constant enemy. This was mountain country, all valleys and ridges, and the thermals shifted constantly. You'd have a good breeze in your face, feel confident, close the gap to fifty yards, and then feel it on the back of your neck. Just the faintest change. And at fifty yards, one whiff is all it takes. They're gone before you can blink.

We put in stalk after stalk over four days. We walked hill after hill, ridge after ridge, learning the country under our boots. The ground was covered in ice some mornings. We crawled through blackberry scrub. We froze in exposed positions, willing our bodies not to move. We came close, agonisingly close, and every time, something gave us away.

One afternoon the two of us were sitting completely exposed in the middle of an open clearing, no cover, full afternoon sun on our backs. Two does appeared on the ridge above us and started coming down, straight towards us. We froze. Absolutely froze. Didn't breathe. Shaun waited for them to drop into the gully so he could move, close the gap, get within range. They were so close I could see their eyes. And then the wind shifted. They were gone in an instant, white tails vanishing into the timber.

That's hunting. That's bow hunting. You get used to the heartbreak or you go home.

And she was still there. Feeding on the slope, completely unaware. We were, by the end of it, only about 500 metres from the homestead. All that country walked, all those ridges behind us, and the deer was practically in the backyard. I could hear Shaun's heartbeat from where I was standing. I could hear my own. The adrenaline doesn't care how many times you've been here. Every single time it hits the same. Everything gets amplified. Your vision narrows. Time goes strange.

I've watched Shaun stalk deer dozens of times. We've been in the bush together for years. But watching him draw that bow back, the slow, controlled draw, the anchor, the stillness, I couldn't believe what I was seeing. After two years of trying to film this. After all the stalks, all the misses, all the days of coming home empty. To actually see him draw back. He took the shot at twenty yards.

The doe ran. She didn't go far. Shaun put a second arrow into her quickly, cleanly. He wanted her out of it as fast as possible. He wanted her gone before she knew much more of fear or pain. That's what I've seen in every bow hunter I've spent time with. No one enjoys the kill. The moment of the shot is the moment the weight comes down, the responsibility of it, the gravity of taking a life. You get it done as fast and as cleanly as you can, and then it's done.

What people on the outside sometimes misread as celebration in that moment is actually something else entirely. It's relief. Pure relief. The pressure of days of hunting, of all that effort, of the freezer back home getting low, it lifts all at once. You feel grateful. Deeply, genuinely grateful.

""No one seems to enjoy the kill. It's fun being in the bush, stalking, being connected to Country, but to actually kill an animal is never enjoyable. It just gets to that point where this is why we're here."" - Nate, Wild Reaches.

We buy as little meat as possible from the store. We live off what we harvest, venison, barra, reef fish, whatever the season gives us. The taste of wild game, properly handled, is on another level to anything that comes shrink-wrapped in a supermarket tray. But beyond the taste, it's the relationship with the food. You were there. You know exactly what that animal ate, how it lived, how it died. There is no disconnect.

People crack open a plastic container of chicken breast and throw it in a pan and bin it if they don't finish it without a second thought. We don't do that. We can't do that. Not when you've put in four days of cold mornings and aching legs and heartbreak for a single animal. You use everything you can. You waste nothing. That's respect, not just for the animal, but for the whole process.

Two years. That's how long it took to film this story from the first frame to the last. Two years of chasing Red Deer through Gubbi Gubbi Country, of driving south on a whim, of waking up before dark and walking until the light died. Two years of empty-handed returns and one extraordinary moment on a cold hill in New South Wales.

People ask me why I do it. Why bow hunting specifically, when a rifle is easier, when the supermarket is twenty minutes away, when the margin for error with a bow is so narrow and the heartbreak so frequent. Bow hunting has lessons to teach: patience, persistence, the ability to find joy in the journey rather than the destination. It demands that you slow down. It demands that you earn your place in the ecosystem rather than simply passing through it.

And there is something about the act of walking ancient country, of asking permission before you take, of understanding that the land was managed here for tens of thousands of years before you arrived, something that puts your own small life into a very long perspective. The Elder's words come back to me: we need to respect this country more than we are doing now. Bow hunting, at its best, is a form of that respect. A choice to be present, to earn your place, to give back in attention and gratitude what you take in meat and experience.

""Hunting is less about killing an animal and more about being connected to an ecosystem, being a part of something so much bigger than us."" - Nate.