The hunting season has begun that’s for sure and so many American hunters head out to the wilderness in search of Whitetail deer. Lost in this season’s noise of rut tactics, essential hunting gear, and antler scoring is the reality that, to generations of outdoorsmen across America, deer were once more fiction than fact. For many of these hunters, their first encounter with a whitetail changed their lives.

Here's a perspective from Andrew McKean, Editor in Chief of Outdoor Life Magazine. "The comeback of the whitetail deer. We wanted to look back over our shoulders a little bit. The whitetail is so abundant it has almost become a nuisance species. So much of our coverage has been on being a better hunter, the latest tips and tactics and gear, what we wanted to do was actually look back at the memories of the comeback of the Whitetail after years and years of being gone from most of the landscape. This whole piece was a composite view of different people's accounts of seeing their first deer. It's an native American animal, born and bred really in the Eastern Woodlands although there are 20 different sub species of the Whitetail. They ranges far South as Mountains of New Mexico and the Southwest and all the way up to Canada, the big bodied northern Whitetail, but really they are a resident of the Eastern Woodlands. The problem is they are awful good to eat.