ARKANSAS SPORTSMAN

Stand needed to be bit higher

— Opening day of modern gun deer season was a strikeout for me, but I can’t complain for lack of opportunities.

Deer moved well early, but I made one simple miscalculation. I didn’t hang my stand quite high enough.

I awoke early as I always do on opening day of modern gun season, alert and excited, and without the assistance of an alarm. The iPhone has a great alarm feature, by the way. I use chirping crickets as my ringtone. It’s an unobtrusive sound that wakes you gently. My wife says she hears it, but she falls right back to sleep.

Anyway, I didn’t need it Saturday. Also missing was my annual opening day panic attack. Every year, I write a preview that runs opening day, and every year I enter the woods worrying, “What if I misread the date? What if it really opens next Saturday?” That would be just the worst thing ever, and I am always so grateful when I hear the opening salvo of gunfire.

The fleet of pickups on the roads towing 4-wheelers into the country put those fears to rest early, so I entered the woods with a clear mind and conscience.

My destination was a remote intersection between a mature pine plantation and two young pine thickets that are separated by a thin hardwood strip along a draw. Another hardwood strip is about 200 yards to the south. Two trails connect them. I hung a stand 20 feet high in a mature pine on a rise that gives me a good view of all directions.

Best of all, the scent of buck musk hung in the air like smoke. I don’t know how big, but a buck was certainly in the area.

A slight breeze blew from the southeast, so I hung two Scent Drifters to cover my scent and to blow scent into the cutover in front. Chip Housley of Searcy makes the Scent Drifter, a small box with a heater and a very quiet fan inside. Screw in a bottle of scent to the bottom. The machine heats it and blows it out. Since it hangs from a tree branch, it twists in the wind and compensates when the wind changes direction. On the southeast corner of the thicket I hung one Scent Drifter with a bottle of doe estrous. To my left I hung another with a bottle of vanilla extract to mask my own scent.

At 7 a.m., this part of the world sounded like the Fourth of July. Gunshots of all descriptions filled the air. Boomers and crackers and everything in between. About half were misses, but the other half carried the distinctive second note of target impact. That was about the time a young 4-point buck crept out of the pine thicket, and nosed the Scent Drifter with the doe estrous. It found the source of that smell unsatisfactory and poked around for quite some time looking for something more fun. Finally, it turned abruptly and left the way it came. I soon found out why.

Somewhere in that time frame I saw a deer slipping through the short pines about 120 yards away. The pines are about 8 feet tall, so you have to train your eyes to look below the treetops for movement close to the ground. It was a big deer, but I saw only glimpses. I couldn’t tell if it was a buck, and it moved too fast to shoot even if I could.

The real excitement started shortly after. A deer “blew” well behind me. I knew it couldn’t see me or smell me, so something else had to have agitated it. Then I heard leaves and limbs cracking in the hardwood strip. It sounded like several deer, and they piled up at the edge, just out of sight. The low grunts of a buck made my heart race. It got really noisy, climaxed by the distinctive sound of deer copulating. I shouldered my rifle, and sure enough, four deer filtered out of the strip and turned north.

Problem was, the pines on the corner blocked my view. It looked clear when I hung the stand, but only now did I realize I didn’t have a clear view of the ground. The deer were only about 75 yards away, but I saw only flashes of gray as they turned up the trail and veered back into the next pine thicket.

I was disgusted. I found this place last year and scouted it throughly from summer to the start of muzzleloader season.

Sports, Pages 23 on 11/15/2012

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