Virginia’s opening day was this Saturday and to commemorate the event we had a Statewide monsoon. Radar showed that the whole State and just our State had rain covering it like a blanket of wet sunshine due to a Nor’easter, with highs in the lower 50’s. Fool that I am I went out anyway. I hunted on the ground and was doing ok until about a half hour after sunrise the wind picked up to about 15 MPH. Since I had to come out early anyway, to go to a remembrance service for my son at the hospital, I decided now was early enough.
The afternoon was cloudy, cool, and windy. It felt like fall. I figured the cloud cover may counteract the effects of the full moon and the deer might be moving early. I still had to change clothes so my father volunteered to wait for me, in his stand. As I was making my way up the mountain I checked in with him on our radio. He said he had 4-5 deer run out our piece of the woods when he got to the edge. So they were out early, too early. I figured the coast was clear now but decided to sneak up anyway just in case. I was hunting higher up the mountain than he was and thought there might be a few deer that didn’t run off when he came up. The wet leaves made it easy for me to move quietly up the woods. These woods are some older hardwoods that I had selectively cut this past winter. I left mostly oaks, red, black, and white, and the few beeches that were there. I wanted to cut back on the competition between trees allowing the remaining trees to expand their canopy and produce a better crop, plus allow more light to the forest floor creating more browse. I had all skid trails and the stripping deck (a flat bench half way up my property) fertilized and seeded with a wildlife mix. We were anxious to see how the changes would impact the deer and their movement patterns. My stand was about 50 yards off the deck area on the downhill side near a break in an old barbed wire fence where the skidder had blazed a new trail. The deck area was nice and green and the oaks were dropping acorns bigger than quarters, in fact almost fifty-cent pieces. I reached my stand without incident and started my climb. Halfway up the ladder I notice a doe in the deck “field” and she’s looking my way. I had “tinked” my wedding ring on the way up the ladder and she must have heard it. (It takes me a few hunts to get into full predator mode I guess) The wind was from her to me, and blowing steady, so she couldn’t ID me. I froze with one foot on the rung above the other. She stared for a while and then started walking my way. She came the exact way I had hoped she would, if I was in the stand and ready. She walked within 6 feet of the stand and started feeding. I was trying not to make eye contact with her and not to move as my right calf started to cramp. I eased my foot so the rung was in the arch to alleviate the cramps in my calf. Looking sideways at her I could see she was about 120# long faced doe, just what I would like to shoot. She feed on through the fence gap behind me and I kept waiting wishing her to move on. After a while I couldn’t see her anymore. I slowly looked over my right shoulder. Nothing. I looked over my left shoulder. Nothing. I practically turned around and still didn’t see her. Hmm, I guess she fed downhill. I resume my climb and she jumps from behind a tree and bounds off to the east following the fence. Well we’ve now run off maybe 6 deer. Not a great start. Usually if we bump the deer going in we don’t see any more that day. I start to get set up and let the cramps ease out of my legs. I discover that my bow hook is not in my bag; it was later found on the kitchen floor, so I have to hang all my stuff on a limb several inches below my seat. I also started to realize the difficulty of hunting in a gun ladder stand with a 64” bow. This stand has a gun rest in front and low side-rails even with the seat. I decide I’m going to have to hunt standing on the seat. This changes my shot windows a bit with understory blocking most of my left-hand shots, more first day mishaps. About thirty minutes into the hunt my Dad radios to me that he sees two does in the pasture heading to the woods in front of him. He thinks they are angling up towards me but I never see them. After a while I think I see a doe up the mountain but I lose track of it and start second-guessing my eyes. My Dad radios to tell me he has more deer near him heading towards my general direction. I spot a big doe (?) in a skid lane that leads to the deck field. We decide to go to radio silence since the deer are definitely moving. Slowly a few deer start appearing in the “field” and I decide that if another big doe comes my way I’m going to take her. There’s four deer by now in the “field” and as one feeds closer to me I notice what looks like antler. I take out my binocs and look. Between fogging of the lenses I’m able to see a couple of 4 pointers. The closest one to me is raking the ground with his antlers and flexing his neck muscles. A second four pointer comes over and they get into a friendly shoving match, nothing serious, just some tickling of the antlers and a push now and then. By this time I’ve identified four small bucks, a small doe and a reddish big bodied deer I haven’t been able to see clearly yet. After a while I’m able to see the big red’s head and it has a nice 8 point rack on it, he’s probably a 100”-110” deer, plenty big for a candidate for my first trad kill. He’s further uphill from the smaller bucks and pays their playful antics no mind. Soon after spotting him the first buck starts heading my way. He’s following the same path the doe did earlier. I’m watching him thinking this will be a good trial run for the big buck. The early shots I have of him are all head on. This isn’t good. He gets straight off my port side and is blocked by the understory. He turns his backside to me and starts rake a tree. He then slowly raises his tail and shows me what he thinks of me. I’m close enough to smell it. A second buck comes along the same way and then a third. Instead of cutting in front of my stand and going through the break in the fence they move along the fence away from me and duck through a small opening then walk back in front of me on the other side of the fence, occasionally stopping to mistreat a small sapling. None of this offered a good shot if the big buck follows the same path. I’m starting to second-guess my position now. Should I sit down and commit to a single opening on my left? Too limiting. I stay standing. The last four pointer moves on and then the small doe comes down, only as “she” gets closer I notice two three inch spikes with a fork on each end, that makes five four pointers in a row. He follows the others but lingers around my area longer, and while I watch him a REAL doe walks up from below and crosses the fence and heads to the “field”. She’s safe now with that buck out there within eyesight. The diminutive buck moves on and I’m able to concentrate on the “field”. The doe is entering it and big red gives her an aggressive mock charge and she scampers to a corner far from him. She is feeding and then starts looking uphill. I see a grey big body buck coming down the skid trail. He could be the red buck’s twin rack-wise except he’s slightly thicker and slightly taller. He comes down the hill stiff legged and aggressive like he’s the boss. He comes down to the red buck and they commence to stare each other down. They start to push each other, again not real aggressively but just preliminary contests. I’m ear-to-ear grins by now.
At some point the doe fades into the woods like deer are able to do. A third buck soon joins the two bucks, a nice sized buck with wide racks that end in some odd crab claws, a big six. About 7 o’clock Big Red starts to make his move. Instead of walking down the same path the other bucks did, Big Red decides to take the road down which makes him pass off to my left (as I’m facing the tree). So I have to do a ballet turn with my bow and arrow to put them on the correct side of the tree. He slowly walks down the road and stops broadside inside a large open shooting lane and starts nibbling the clover. Unfortunately he’s close to 30 yards off and my practice tells me that my skill isn’t up to this shot yet. I have to watch him walk. This starts a race of panicked thoughts through my head. If the grey buck goes the same route I will not have a shot on either buck. Options fly through my head, I change my mind several times. I had a grunt tube but I didn’t want to use it. These bucks were oblivious of my existence and I didn’t want to draw attention to me. With light fading fast something starts to get the attention of the last two bucks. They started looking along the hillside, staring hard. I decided I was running out of time and this was my chance to make my move while they were distracted. The “field” edge offered no cover, not even a fat tree, and even if I could reach the edge the shot would be too long. So I decided the best course to me would be to either sit tight and hope he moves and in the right direction, or climb down and sneak to an adjacent tree which would put me closer to the road and also open a better shot along the route the four-pointers took. The points that made me chose this course of action are: that the deer were distracted by something looking another way, my stand is on the backside of the tree and my movement would be screened, once I’m on the ground I would be below the rise so out of sight, the wind was quartering from them to me and steady, the leaves were wet and soft, and I had a few good trees to cover my movement if they started their move. I made it down ok with them still looking away and crouching low I slowly work to my destination. I made it to the tree without much noise and took a kneeling position facing the road and waited……and waited….nothing. Soon it was last light and I hazard a peek into the field from around the tree. Nothing…empty. I move a little closer to look some more and still can’t see anything. At this point I think that as long as I haven’t been spotted it would be best to sneak back out then finding out they were just on the edge of the “field”. I worked my way back to my stand and gathered my stuff and left. I didn’t get “blown at” the whole evening and didn’t jump anything on the way out. I’m sorry for the long read with it’s anti-climactic ending but it was great to see the kind of action I did and a positive reinforcement for the changes we’ve made on my property. I have never seen more than two bucks at a time and certainly not two “shooters”. All in all I saw nine bucks, three were at least 2 ½ years old, during a full moon. It was a good day and if trad hunting brings me these kind of results I’m in for a lifetime love affair.
Topic: Daily Hunt pics and Stories 2006 (Read 49531 times)
