Skip to main content

Thanks for the company

It was definitely not the best day of hunting we have ever had.  We had planned to skip Friday afternoon so that Hubby could come up with me, but thanks to an illness, he didn't come and I missed the opportunity to catch the last couple of hours with Dad in the woods.

With the moon almost full, Dad and I figured that we would walk in extra early on Saturday and get set up before the deer started moving.  My 4 am wake up call (Mom coming to wake me up so an alarm does not wake the baby up) came at 4:26.  I have never jumped out of bed and dressed so fast!  The problem is that I sit when I hunt, so I dress in many, many... many! layers.  It also means that it takes me more than 30 minutes to get dressed so that I dont get over heated and sweaty before I leave the house.  Not that Saturday.  I was sweating and rushed.  A bad combo.

The moon had disappeared behind thick clouds by the time we started along the roadway.  We got the flashlight out and rounded the corner.

Snap! 

Leaves crunched off to our right.  My mind raced.  If we could get to the Sky Condo, then we could get ahead of this deer. Dad stopped. We listed and heard more steps.  We continued on our path towards the Sky Condo then stopped again.  More steps in the leaves to our right.  It was as though this deer was walking with us to the Sky Condo.  We continued on and as quietly as we could, climbed into the Sky Condo and waited to see if the deer would appear.

Dad walking from one stand to another
He never did.  The rest of the day was spent dealing with some surprising guests and looking for a good buck.   We found a lot!! of scrapes and some rubs. It is very clear that there are a handful of bucks around and marking their scent in as many locations as possible.

Three trees with varying levels of rub marks

A scrape and rub probably belonging to the spike





Saturday was a perfect day to be out in the woods because it was so quiet.  A deer could have stepped out at any moment, but none did.  We ended the weekend without seeing any meat to bring home.  We know there are plenty of deer around, we just need to figure out how to be in the right place at the right time.



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Healthy Coyote coming through

I still have a few trail cameras out to see what the deer are up to.  I have gotten pictures of the big buck that is around and most recently, I got these pictures.  Normally, I wouldn't be too freaked out but now that we have a dog, it is a little unnerving.  Add that this camera is about 50 feet from our lawn and less than 100 feet from our front door... I hope that this one is just passing through. (Sidenote: I put new batteries in this camera so the date and time are wrong BUT  I walked in front of it so it would take my picture and I could figure out what the actual time and date were: 7am Saturday morning.)
Post a Comment
Read more

Where are the women?

This week, my interview with Steve at The Maine Outdoorsman went live. Steve said yesterday 200 people hit his site viewing over 500 pages. That is a lot of people reading about little ole me and hunting. Why? When I think of women who are in the general public's eye and hunt, I can think of 2 - Country singer Miranda Lambert and Sarah Palin. Why only two? Why is the female hunter such a fascinating thing? (I should probably note that I do not have cable so any and all female hunters on the hunting stations are lost to me. I'll keep it to the general public because that's what I am familiar with.) People/media were fascinated by the fact that they could get footage of Palin and her gun, shooting (and gutting) animals but I feel like the nostalgia would be lost if they had the same footage of McCain. Lambert and her hubby Blake Shelton tweet photos of their kills, and comment on what/where they are hunting. I only know this because I follow both. That's it....
15 comments
Read more

Utilizing technology to make you more aware

Staci and I were roaming around the woods on a piece of property that she knew. It was snowing and we were chasing deer tracks to see if we could find some early sheds. It was a perfect day to be out in the woods and we were relaxed and not really paying attention to where we were going. We knew the border of the property and we knew that if we walked long enough we would hit roads or the bog and find our way back. We got to a point where we thought we knew where we were but we were not sure. Staci got out her compass to take a waypoint to make sure we were going in the right direction to get back to the truck. I took out my phone and turned on OnX. Within seconds we knew where we were, where the property borders were in relation to us and we could watch the dot (that represented us) on the map move as we walked out of the woods and got closer to the truck. In another adventure, my son and I headed out on a shed hunting mission.  When we got into the woods, I turned on the trac...
Post a Comment
Read more