Thursday, November 12, 2009 10:03 PM CST
Good day's hunt: Two 10-pointers
By DAVE SHADOW, JG/T-C Outdoors Columnist
Someone once said that a bad day of fishing was still better than a good day at work, and I believe that scenario holds very true for white-tailed deer hunting as well.
Due to the many crop fields being still filled with corn and beans, the deer have been hard to locate this archery season, and even though I have about 30 stands located across east-central Illinois, my success at locating and patterning big bucks has been less than satisfactory. I seldom ever hunt the same stand twice in succession in an effort to keep the deer from patterning me and also to minimize the buildup of odor in the area.
I always tell those in my bass fishing classes and seminars that, for the most part, the results that you get out of a particular activity are very relative to the effort that you put into it. This also is very true in the hunting world as well as our business and personal lives. The more knowledge that you have of your adversary concerning its lifestyle, habits, behaviors, etc., the more apt you are to be successful if you put all of this to good use.
Having said that, I must also add that success in both the hunting and fishing quests are also directly relative to the amount of hours that you spend in the woods or on the water. It’s not so much that this increases your likelihood to get “lucky” as it is the adage that “You can’t find him if you’re not there.”
I have been hunting very hard this archery season and have enjoyed it more than any season since my 1961 inception of deer hunting. This has been made possible mostly because of an understanding wife and the best business partner anyone ever had. The added challenge of more crops has just increased my zeal. I had located four bucks in a widespread area but had been unable to form any real good patterns of travel, bedding and feeding activities. I knew the areas where they were at some times, but the vast amount of habitat created by the standing corn was making regular travel patterning impossible. I had harvested a couple of does for freezer meat and had passed up several small bucks and other does but just had not been able to see the big guys. I was keeping a “log” and watching the tracks that the big bucks made when I was in some other location. It’s always good to see big tracks, but why are the deer that made them always somewhere other than the spot you chose to hunt today?
All of these hard hunting hours paid of on Saturday, Nov. 7. Joe Fitzpatrick and I headed out to a Shelby County spot before the sun dawned over the eastern horizon and got settled into our chosen spots. By the light of my small “walking light” I could see large tracks along the edge of the field during the half-mile walk to my spot. This was encouraging, but the sun rose and the morning was slipping away without any movement other than several squirrels.
Buck No. 1: There was a small buck coming down the trail in the fencerow, however, I did not realize it at the time. The big 10-pointer that was coming in from the opposite direction saw him and took violent exception to the smaller buck being on his “turf,” possibly courting some of his girlfriends. Out of nowhere the big buck burst through the brush anticipating an encounter with the younger one. This is where some luck entered. Even though I had anticipated the right trail for the big buck, being at the midpoint between him and the enterprising youngster at the right time was sheer wonderful coincidence. The big buck ran up the trail, I grunted to stop him and harvested a beautiful trophy 10-pointer at less than 20 yards.
Buck No. 2: I selected a Coles County spot for the evening hunt and was paying for all of the activities involved in dressing, skinning and getting Buck No. 1 into the cooler. The sun was warm and I was having a terrible time trying to keep from nodding off for an afternoon nap. Again the squirrels provided some activity, and the afternoon was getting very short with only one small doe passing within about 30 yards of my spot.
I slipped quietly out of my stand with only about 15 minutes of shooting light left, having decided that I didn’t really want to bother caring for another deer today anyway. As I walked along the shaded edge of the wood-line, the lighting was even worse and I had slung my crossbow on my shoulder. As I rounded a corner, two does jumped out of the brush in front of me. They stopped and I stopped and I instinctively began to retrieve my bow, even though I had no intention of shooting one with only minutes of light left. Within seconds a big buck leaped out of the brush landing behind the does. He snorted and grunted as if anticipating that they had simply decided to wait on his eminence. He instantly saw me and in the low light conditions may have mistook my bow for a rack of an encroaching opponent. He grunted and came straight at me, covering ground way too quickly. He was about 60 yards away when he started, and I let him come to approximately 30 yards, at which point I shot him “head-on.” This is not the type of shot I prefer or recommend, but sometimes you simply have no choice. He turned slightly and the arrow took out both lungs, making it a very quick end to a good day of hunting.
Rosie cooked up a sizable chunk of the back-strap with carrots and taters accompanied by some corn muffins and gravy for that evening’s meal at the Shadow farmstead. Absolutely wonderful!
Note: (attached photos) The dark-colored rack was the afternoon deer, and the light-colored one was the morning one. These aren’t “world records” or anything, but it’s seldom that you can harvest two 10-pointers in the same day.
Happy hunting!
Dave Shadow is the Journal Gazette/Times-Courier’s hunting and fishing columnist.
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medic57 wrote on Nov 22, 2009 11:12 AM: