After a long battle with cancer, F&S whitetails columnist, Scott Bestul, passed away Saturday morning, surrounded by family. Bestul sold his first story to Field & Stream in 1993. He became a contributing editor in 1995 and whitetails editor in 2009, anchoring the brand’s deer coverage for more than two decades. He co-authored two books under the F&S brand, The Total Deer Hunter Manual and The Total Bowhunter Manual.
As Scott’s longtime editor and his close friend for almost 30 years, I used to travel to Minnesota to hunt deer with him in the fall, and we’d talk on the phone at least a couple times a week. Long before he got sick, Scott said something on one of those calls that sticks with me today. We were talking about hunters who take themselves too seriously—who think that success in the field makes them some sort of big shots. Scott said: “When the time comes to lay me down, I hope people can think of something better to say than, “He was a good hunter.”
Well (I’m sorry Scott, but…) he was a good hunter. In an age when anyone can be an expert, Bestul was the real deal. At the beginning of the whitetail boom, when the deer world shifted its attention to the giant bucks of the Midwest, he was already there, in southeastern Minnesota, shooting Booners with a recurve. He had a room full of trophy bucks to prove his bona fides, but what drove him was an innate and burning obsession with deer. He used to tell a little story that got the heart of this: On long family road trips, whenever Scott and his sister Jo would start squabbling in the back seat, Scott’s mom would sigh and say: “Scott! Look for deer.” And that would shut him up for hours at a time. In a lot of ways, he was always looking for deer.
Bestul was also a gifted writer. In the media world, it’s sometimes said that writers aren’t experts and expert aren’t writers. But Bestul was both. He’d give you the nuts and bolts of the latest cutting-edge big-buck tactic in one story and then warm your heart—or tear it out—in the next. You don’t expect the deer expert to do that. I remember a friend of mine reading one of Scott’s more heart-wrenching narratives. He finished it and said, “Damn, that was so good. Who wrote this?” Then, thumbing back to the byline, he said, “No way. The deer guy?”
To anyone who knew him, however, it wasn’t his deer expertise or his writing ability that makes us so sad to lose him. Scott Bestul was just the kindest person you could ever hope to meet.
When I first travelled to Scott’s to hunt, he was so generous and accommodating, with so many “Oh sures” and “You betchas” that I wondered if it wasn’t a little put on. But it never was. He was just that nice. I could give a hundred examples of Scott’s big-hearted nature, but I’ll offer just one. When I tagged my first buck with Scott, he caught me utterly by surprise. He marched over, pulled me into a bear hug, and burst into tears. He was happier for me than I was for myself, and I was pretty darn happy. I admit that my first thought was, Well, this is awkward. But I kept going back every year, and over time, I found myself going to Minnesota hoping to, yes, fill a deer tag, but even moreso to get a big, blubbering bear hug from Scott.
That was the essence of him—sweet, sincere, vulnerable, utterly egoless, and all about you.
So, now that the time to say goodby to Scott has come—and far too soon—we can say that he was, in fact, a good hunter. (A really good one.) And he was a true expert in his field. And a fearless reporter. And a gifted writer, a wonderful human being, and an irreplaceable friend. In memory of him, we will be publishing some of Bestul’s best stories all this week, starting with one of our all-time favorites, “The Norwegian Mafia."
