End-of-season blues? You're not alone
Everything and anything can go wrong in the deer woods, for anyone, at any time
Hapless, that’s the best description for my most recent 12 hours of deer hunting.
To those sitting out there on this final day of deer rifle season 2020 waiting for one last chance, take heart, you most definitely are not alone.
Deer seasons can hinge on five-minute, heck, five-second windows. You have to get past those eyes, those sensitive noses and make a shot that puts a game animal on the ground that sometimes seems to defy all rules of mortality. Then there are days with just plain bad luck, a careless slip, or a bad choice that snowballs.
A good friend of mine who has killed more trophy bucks than I can count was drilled in this week on an incredible 11-point buck early this week. He had it patterned perfectly until an adjacent landowner gave coyote hunters free range to use the whole area. Post-rut trophy bucks don’t put up with those kinds of shenanigans.
He’s basically back to square one with that old bruiser.
My own situation stemmed from a late start, and maybe a little arrogance, on 40 acres I was offered to hunt back in October. It’s a spot that has not been hunted in years, I’m told. I chose to still-hunt early in the gun season, but was hampered by heavy brush and low visibility. One day I was busted by deer that scented me as they approached from the east and from the south—with a light wind out of the southeast. Oh how the wind swirls in that spot. I felt it on my left cheek, then my right. I thought I might be in trouble , and I never even saw those deer.
All properties have their idiosyncrasies, I believe. You just have to get to know them and adapt.
Three days of northern winds and not a deer in sight followed those days, and words of friend and wildlife property consultant Greg Koch, who helped me scout the area, kept ringing in my ear.
“There is a lot of movement through here but not as many food sources as you would think … When it gets colder they’re going to come back in here and bed when the wind is right but to be honest I think a lot of the time the neighbors’ deer feeders are going to pull them away,” he said.
In following days I put up a tree stand in the bottoms and a pop-up blind on a ridge. I happened to meet a couple neighbors in that time, too. One said he had three deer feeders in place and another said he had five. Much as I prefer to hunt without bait, the more I sat without seeing deer, the more that corn deal crept into my thoughts.
So came 3:30 a.m. the morning following a full moon. I wanted to be in that box blind early and sit the whole day. By the moon, those deer would be moving through to their bedding area possibly early in the morning, maybe mid-day, and if not then surely in the last two hours or so before sunset.
The rumble of a tractor and scraping of rocks about 10 a.m. put an early end to my planned vigil. I hadn’t realized work would be going on at the property that day, but it was OK. After yet another deer-less morning I hopped out of that blind before I really knew it and I was on a mission to get corn and trail cameras set while the work of that front-end loader covered my movements.
I hurried to my truck to change clothes (I keep my outer hunting clothes in a sealed box for scent control) and thoughtlessly left my new iPhone sitting on the rear bumper of my SUV as I motored over to visit with the neighbor doing the tractor work.
After a short visit I was about to hit the road when I realized my phone was missing. I emptied my vehicle, its contents in organized piles on the ground, before I started slowly walking the path I’d driven. Luckily, about 100 yards from where I parked, my Labrador, Whiskey started sniffing and scratching around at a shiny spot in some mud. The phone had fallen off my bumper and I had driven over it on the way back to our parking spot. Luckily, and thanks to its Lifeproof case, it was not damaged.
I still had time to get corn and cameras set at both my stands and race back to be in place for late-afternoon deer movement almost worked. An hour’s driving and a quick 20 minutes in the store had the first corn pile down and the camera mounted on the tree.
Then I got to the last lines of the trail-camera instructions: “First, format the SD card for Windows Media-player.”
Those are not happy words for a hunter with an iPhone and a MacBook Pro. Minutes ticked away in warp speed as I sat on the phone waiting for customer service to pick up. I wondered, should I already just be on my way to replace those cameras? Should I just bag this plan for today and go hunting?
As I learned the only for-sure fix was to buy a card reader for my phone for an additional $40 or a viewer for close to $100 a new determination set in. I was going to get this job done! I raced off to return those cameras but I ended up 40 miles from the property at another store before I had the cameras I really needed.
I raced back knowing I now didn’t have time to put up the cameras but at least I could have that late afternoon hunt if I made it back to the area by 3:30 or so.
As I pulled up the road toward the gate at 3:35 p.m. something popped out on the road 50 yards ahead and just stood there. It was a large doe, perfectly silhouetted, smack in the middle of the road. I stopped and I cussed. I was too late.
She crossed the road and ran through the woods directly down a well-worn path I scouted days earlier. She was headed directly toward the bedding area and would walk right past my blind, followed by eight more deer. Each paused to eye me as they crossed the road. I imagined they each had a good chuckle at my expense.
Why oh why didn’t I just sit in the stand that afternoon as I had originally planned There would be no approaching that spot now and the wind was wrong for hunting the valley.
My ideal hunting day was over with one corn pile in the woods, two bags of corn still in my SUV, two new trail cameras on the seat of my truck, and one slightly dirty iPhone in my hand—on which I was checking weather, moon rise, and wind directions for the next few days.
