How did people hunt back in the day
In the early 5os though the 60s i hunted with my Uncles who used the same game trails/traces and land features as our Native American Maternal Ancestors in the Cumberland Mtns and valleys from almost Ky to deep in Alabama and west in the still wooded lands near to Fayeteville and so on.
We walked up game, sat on overlooks of springs and salt licks, and grassy knolls. Not many people went there after the big timbering of the southeast in the early 1900s.
There were still and hopefully still are stands of forest not seen by an axe down to the walls of Jerico and beyond
Not many deer as the early Settlers couldn't stand to see any wild game that might eat their gardens and they needed the meat. Many many cemeteries the average age at death was in the twenties. They had to eat.
Walking in little rocky streams, crowded by Laurel and Holly etc,if you were patient would find what deer there were. Still, in the 70s and early 80s, when deer wee abundant they were not use to being hunted. They would follow you. In open knolls they would peer at you and go back to feeding.
Accounts, from the time, game was really abundant in the Elk Valley. They didn't farm because there was no need. Everything was provided except for corn, squash, and a hundred kinds of beans and some other things.
In the teens through the early thirties there were clouds of gees, so much that Dad said they had to race to get the crops in. He was a Sharecropper.
You didn't have to go to far afield unless you wanted to, for game.
As it is now to a degree many Landowners have abundant game but they are wary of noise of guns and men and machinery many times.
If you can hunt wild areas do just like Native Americans did. You will find traces of where they were. Anyplace you are likely to stop, they did. Overlooks, in the mountains of salt and springs are real nice.
Go at a slower pace. Game doesn't do a 40 hour workweek hurry up and hunt Saturday. The experience is the thing unless you need meat.
Lots of times it was just to "hunt" or more accurately be out in the real world. Ancestors were the "Indians."
Great Grand Ma, Swedish, on Grand Ma's side died Sept 1933, had her back broken and sister stomped to death when some Ancestors raided their cabin, around the time of the Trail of Tears.