Terry and decided we'd avoid any heavy scouting at first and go with the information Kenny had given us. That plan had a couple of things going for it.
First of all the timber patches are small compared to other areas of the state with lots of agriculture. It would be easy to blow the deer out by over pressuring them.
The other thing, and most important in my book, is that this is Kenny's home turf and he knows it well. What's that old saying about not guiding the guide?
As on most hunts the first day was one getting our legs under us and taking care of incidentals. We'd have to stock the larder with food to avoid eating fast food all week... there was a small restaurant
in Linneus and we hit that for breakfast that first morning as we had in years past. Other than that we'd have had to travel to Brookfield each day for the fast food variety of the bigger town.
Once in a while is OK, but daily is a drag.
We'd gone to our stands that first day with just verbal directions to guide us. We'd hunted here two years in a row now so we had a good sense of where Kenny was sending us as he pointed out the locations on the maps.
I chose a ladder stand which covered a travel corridor between a neighboring tree farm and the acorn bearing oaks on our farm.
Tracks pocked the ground along the trail from the property fence to the soy bean field and up and down along the hedge row that formed that same boundary.
An equipment road passed in front of the stand and through a gap in the brush to another bean field to my right and the east.