What 50 mature bucks, 20 missed birthdays, and one legend's honesty can teach the rest of us about the trade-offs we're making right now
Published by Eric Clark on Wednesday, August 25th 2026
Dan Infalt didn't spend a single one of his wife's birthdays with her for the first 20 years of their marriage.
Her birthday is October 27th. If you hunt whitetails, you already understand. This date sits right in the sweet spot, when the bucks Dan built his legend on start slipping up in daylight. So of couse it made sense that every year, he was in the woods at that time. She knew who she married.
We had Dan in the studio this week, and we didn't want another bedding episode. The man has given the hunting world more free tactical knowledge than maybe just about anyone. What he hasn't talked much about, or at least not that we've heard much of anywhere, is what all of it cost him. So we asked, and to his credit, he didn't flinch.
Sacrifice is the price. Regret is the receipt
Here's a distinction that snapped into focus during our conversation. Sacrifice is the deal you make going in. Regret is the bill that shows up later, usually decades later, and usually itemized differently than you expected.
Dan made the deal with both eyes open, or so he thought. He skipped Halloweens with his kids. He turned down being best man in his best friend's wedding because they scheduled it on the opener of bow season. Didn't stand up. Didn't even attend. That friend still brings it up to this day as any friend likely would. Dan would sleep, wake up in the middle of the night, scribble down a tactic he dreamt up for a specific buck, and go back to sleep. He picked jobs based on whether they'd tolerate him not showing up in November. His family sacrificed money so he could sacrifice time. That's how obsession compounds. It doesn't take one thing from you. It takes a percentage of everything.
So, here's the part that should stop you cold if you're a hunting dad in the thick of it right now. His family never asked him to stop. His kids never once said "you're a bad dad." His wife barely complained. He provided. He wasn't at the bar. He wasn't running around. By every external measure, he was a good man who just really loved to hunt.
Dan's own verdict, looking back: "They still looked at me as a good dad. But I look back and I don't see myself as a good dad." That hung in the air for a few moments as you'd expect. That's not easy to say out loud as a Dad, and it's a hard pill to swallow.
Nobody sent him that bill. He wrote it himself. That's how regret works for men like us. It's not the people you let down who hold it over you. They forgive you, or worse, they never even noticed the absence because absence was all they knew. You're the one who eventually sees it. If you ever develop the eyes to.
Ego got him there
You can't tell Dan's story honestly without talking about where the drive came from. As a kid, he dragged an eight point buck home by himself, walking backwards, a deer he'd killed on his own with a longbow. He couldn't wait to show his old man. His dad, a rough guy born in the 1920s who worked two jobs and gave praise to no one, looked at it and said, "Guy at work shot two of them in one day." And went back in the house.
Later, when Dan killed a big eight pointer he was proud of, his dad gave the rack away to a coworker whose antlers had been stolen.
Dan will tell you straight up he doesn't know if that put him on the path. But he'll also tell you he spent his whole hunting life trying to beat the last buck. Big enough to be "the man." Then bigger. Then bigger than that. He said it plainly: "I know how bad that sounds, and it is."
Here's what makes Dan worth listening to on this, though. He refuses to make ego the villain, which I find very interested and leaned in as he spoke on this. It's my fervent opinion that ego is the enemy. His take is that you cannot be a good hunter without some ego. Ego is the fuel. If you don't believe you can figure out what nobody else can, you'll never wade into the marsh nobody else will. The drive kills more deer than any tactic in the world. His words, and he's the guy who invented half the tactics.
The problem isn't having an ego. The problem is nobody tells you it needs daily maintenance. You don't humble yourself once and check the box. It's like sweeping a floor that gets dirty every day. You do it again tomorrow, or it gets away from you. We've written before about what happens when your identity gets tied to the externals of hunting, and about whether there's too much ego in hunting altogether. Dan's story is both of those essays with 40 more years of receipts. Left unswept, ego convinces you the cold front matters more than the wife whose back is out while she's taking care of three kids, one of which was a new born in my case... There's a buck on the wall in the studio to prove it, and the memory attached to that mount is not the best one if I'm being sincerely honest about the full story.
Humility isn't thinking less of your bucks. It's remembering when you killed them.
Dan has around 50 mature bucks on the wall. Here's what he admitted: when he looks at one now, he has to stop and think about when he even killed it. Because in the moment, he was still caught up in the drive that resulted in a notched tag. The second one hit the ground, his obsession snapped to the next one. He was only ever obsessed with a deer until it was dead.
He couldn't remember the buck we shot last year, just as we couldn't remember his. That's the point he was making. It stopped mattering. Everyone who actually cares about him already knows what he's done. So let's think about what that means. The thing he traded 20 birthdays and all those Halloweens for can't even hold his attention in memory.
Now by no means is that's not a reason to quit chasing what we love, or feel down in our bones. Dan hasn't quit. He still says the obsession lives in him, and I'm willing to bet it's not something he (or any of us) can just "turn off." But we can all see what he does these days on deer drives, for example, young Dan used to put himself in the good spots and make everybody else push. Today he puts the new hunters and the kids in the good spots and does the pushing himself. He went from killing one or two giants a year to one or two every few years, and he'll tell you the math changed because the values did. When he gave the hunting world the keys with his DVDs and the forum, back when sharing spots got you hated, some of that was a man finding a better use for the same drive. It's the same shift we keep circling on as we beat this topic up with our brand voice: the solo grind for a hitlist buck is part of why hunters quit hunting, and the community and camaraderie is what keeps people in it.
Self-awareness arrives late, and you can't ship it to anyone
Maybe the most honest thing Dan said all night was that regret is a funny thing, because you wouldn't appreciate what you have now without it. You have to do a couple things wrong to understand. It sounds obvious, but you cannot hand that understanding to a young guy going down the same path. As we all know, there's no way he won't listen. He'll hear this episode, think it's for a bunch of wusses, and climb into his stand on his wife's birthday, and maybe, ten years from now, something might crack open and he'll go, "That's what they meant."
We're not pretending we've solved it either. Derek and I are in what I've referred to as a very thick season of life. Little kids, businesses, careers, etc, and of course competing for our attention, or trying to grab it is all the hunting stuff (as a cell cam notification goes off...). Of course we want the big deer and we want to be at the dance recital, and Dan called that out eloquentl but directly: there's a trade-off, and our generation (I'm forty) is trying to have our cake and eat it too. Maybe we are. Maybe that's not the worst thing to attempt, as long as we're honest about the fact that nobody gets all of it.
I've heard that kids spell "love" T-I-M-E, and so even when you're home, your wife can tell when you're not "really" home. The gears don't stop, at least mine don't. The work isn't turning it off. The work is knowing it's running, and choosing, on purpose, more often than your ego wants to, to point it at the people in your house instead of the deer in the marsh.
Dan's proof that people can change is complicated, and of course it's complicated; we're human and we're falable. A few years back he cut an Iowa trip short and drove all the way home to be there for his wife's birthday for once. Good husband stuff. Late is better than never, right? On the way to her birthday dinner, they passed a little property he hunts, saw a suspicious number of trucks in the lot, and, in his words, they ate her birthday meal really fast. He killed a 170 inch buck that night. On her birthday.
He's still Dan. We're still us. The obsession doesn't leave and as you age into your 60s and beyond, the individual deer might start blurring together anyway, no matter how big they were. But the birthdays you showed up for don't blur, especially for the birthday boy or girl you showed up for.
Some lessons have to be learned through our own lived experiences. Maybe reading this or listening to the podcast could help someone get there faster than Dan did.
It's one of the core reasons our brand exists, by the way. Being an Okayest Hunter was never about being bad at hunting. It's about keeping hunting in its right place in a full life. Dan Infalt, of all people, just spent almost stwo hours agreeing with us.
Listen to the full conversation with Dan Infalt on the Okayest Hunter podcast, episode 252.
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