Hunter's travels span wilds of U.S., Canada

On a cloudy November afternoon with rain in the forecast, Pete Burroughs sat inside his tidy and warm Oglethorpe County home. Through the glass window of his front door, he could see a vast field neatly mowed from a recent harvest of its hay.

Occasionally, Burroughs has looked across this same meadow and watched as a dozen deer foraged for food.

While he is insulated from the elements of nature in his home, he is the type who seeks to venture into the environment of the deer, stealthily walking the deep forests on frost-bitten mornings or crouching near a remote pasture on cold windy evenings.

He is a hunter.

Secured on the walls of the living room are the heads of two large elk, a moose and several whitetail deer. Most of them, including the elk, were taken with bow and arrow. Just days earlier, he had returned from a deer-hunting trip to Illinois, a state that produces some of the nation's largest whitetails.

But big game wasn't always in his sights.

"I grew up in the first house outside the city limits of Colbert. I was a country boy by 200 feet," he said with a laugh. But it was in Colbert that the son of Jack and Betty Burroughs began to hone his skills in hunting.

"Growing up in those years, it was BB guns, especially during the summer while we were out of school. If a rabbit came out in the yard, he had seen a bad day," said Burroughs, who began hunting with a firearm at about age 13 or 14.

There were few deer in those days. In fact, Burroughs didn't know of any, until an uncle who lived in Comer mentioned deer hunting. The season then lasted only three weeks.

"As a young boy, I did quite a bit of quail hunting where the Colbert school is now," Burroughs, 51, said. "Daddy had a single-shot 12-gauge shotgun he'd let me use. It'd kick pretty good, but I didn't care."

In the intervening years, Burroughs married Bridgett Paul, and the couple moved from Colbert to Athens, then to Hull before relocating to the Oglethorpe County farm. After graduating Madison County High School in 1976, he attended Athens Tech for about a year before he went to work at Certainteed, where he has remained for 26 years.

And during these years, he studied ways to hunt whitetail deer.

"Hunting is something I enjoy doing, probably too much," he said while surrounded by his trophy mounts. "I know the areas I hunt now, and I know that most of the trips I take to the woods I won't see anything, but I still get up and go. I tell you, you sit in a tree for four hours and nothing is going on, you've got a lot of time to think about things that might never cross your mind."

He said the largest deer he has taken locally weighed 230 pounds, and three of his 10-pointers - identified by the number of points on its antlers - came from the same area.

"All from the same 40 acres in Oglethorpe County - it was probably the best deer hunting I'll ever do in my life on that tract of land," he said. Burroughs no longer hunts on that property.

Burroughs focused on deer hunting until about 1996, when he decided to go on his first hunt for elk in Colorado. He took one, a five-pointer, which didn't impress him and wasn't mounted.

Then in 2001, he joined with U.S. Outfitters for a hunt in Arizona, a state noted for its large elk, and soon he was hunting elk again.

"I didn't tag anything, but I did have a pretty good hunt," Burroughs said. He decided to arrange his next hunt without using a hunting guide business.

He applied for a hunt in New Mexico. Only those lucky enough to win a lottery drawing among applicants are issued hunting permits for particular pieces of land, called units. After winning a permit, Burroughs, who said he didn't have the money to hire a guide, called a hotel and told the clerk he wanted a place to stay. He asked if there was anyone he could contact for help in getting an elk out of the woods, were he to shoot one. Adult elk weigh 700 pounds or more, and he knew he'd need help moving a carcass out for butchering.

The man he called happened also to be a guide, and he offered the Georgian a deal.

"He said, 'I'd hate for you to come out here - 1,700 or 1,800 miles - and be a mile short of getting an elk.' He said, 'that's an awesome unit.'

"I hunted with him and his brother-in-law. It was the best thing that ever happened to me for elk hunting by far," Burroughs recalled.

During an archery hunt, the hunter always hunts during rutting season, which gives a better chance of getting an elk at close range. The elk call or bugle for mates during this time, and the hunter can mimic a bugle to draw the elk closer.

Burroughs said he had been practicing his shooting at 60 yards, but an elk walked up on his party by surprise at 25 feet.

"It was so early in the morning I couldn't see my sight, but I didn't think I could miss him. I didn't see where my arrow hit," he recalled.

Burroughs' son and the guide had

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