ARKANSAS SPORTSMAN

Hunter found success by staying in the woods

— A fella I know, one of my favorite editorialists, bagged a really nice buck last week.

He did it the contrarian way, by staying in the woods during the 10-2 window while everyone else was at camp relaxing. All the hunting magazines recommend staying put at that time because hunters leaving the woods often push deer into or out of cover. It’s not easy to do when you haven’t seen anything all morning, but our friend stayed disciplined and employed some skillful woodscraft to bag a buck with a unique rack.

“Everybody else went back to camp to play cards,” he said. “I’m like, ‘I came to go huntin!’”

So he did.

With the wind gusting in his face, the editorialist crept through the woods, taking care to minimize noise and scent.

“When the wind blew, I moved. When it stopped, I stopped,” he said. “It took me 45 minutes to go 50 yards.”

He looked up a ridge and saw the buck walking slowly at an amazingly close range, oblivious to our friend’s presence. Suffice it to say the buck never knew what hit him. We loved our friend’s expression in the photo. Very smug, and deservedly so. He earned it.

In a different part of the state, I spent the 10-2 window at camp eating Mike Romine’s venison stew with Romine’s son Zach Smith, his cousin Larry Romine, P.J. Spaul and Darryl, the club philosopher. Darryl’s observations on life are always deeply insightful, but they’re generally not fit to print.

The stew was outstanding and the mood was light, although Smith got a little perturbed when I kept calling B.S. on the big buck photos he pulled up on the Internet.

“They’ve got to be real if they’re on the Internet,” Mike Romine said, goading him further.

That’s about when I leaned back a little too far in my chair and almost fell over backwards.

“Ohhh, that would have been perfect,” Smith said, pointing his smart phone camera at me. “I was just waiting for you to land on your back. I’d have that all over the Internet. I’d send it in with a letter to the editor! Where do you come up with all this stuff you write, anyway? I’m going to start my own blog about hunting with you. I’ll call it, ‘B.S. with B.H.’ ”

“Hey, I like that,” I said. “I’m going to trademark that. Then you’ll have to pay me to use it.”

And so it went, round and round, until the soup and a warm afternoon cast its spell. Romine and Smith puttered off on their four-wheelers to fill corn feeders while the rest of us retired to our respective trucks for a nap.

In the evening, I returned to the stand I hunted that morning. There was a lot of deer activity around it early, but there was no hint of a deer around there later.

I had a close call with a rutting buck that morning, but couldn’t shoot it because my stand wasn’t high enough to let me see over the small pines between us. Killing a deer in that spot required hunting on the ground in close quarters, so I returned Sunday morning with a small folding seat and a hogleg handgun, a Smith & Wesson 657 in .41 Mag. fitted with a scope. I sat in a cradle of small pines about 35 yards from the edge of a hardwood bottom where the deer appeared the previous morning. High grass and the pine backdrop concealed all but my orange-clad head, shielding me from the eyes of any deer that might emerge from that direction. The wind was in my face, so a deer coming from that direction wouldn’t scent me, either.

With storm clouds boiling, the air was warm, windy and very comfortable, but there was no activity. It was as if deer had utterly abandoned the place. The scent of buck musk, which hung like a curtain in the air Saturday, was only faint Sunday. By Tuesday, it was gone.

Sports, Pages 32 on 11/18/2012

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