Season ends with bang, sort of

LITTLE ROCK — If it hadn’t been so perfect, I might have been disgusted with the way my deer season ended.

Let’s back up a month or so to an ideal hunting day in Arkansas County, when I passed on a chip shot at the biggest buck I’ve seen in years.

It was a giant to me, but I held off the trigger not knowing if it met the landowner’s requirements. It did, but deep down I knew I’d be lucky to ever see that buck again, let alone get so close to it again.

I saw him again nearly 24 hours later, in the fading light of a gray, misty afternoon.He was about 400 yards away, hugging the far side of a wheat field, slowly but steadily moving my direction. Suddenly he wheeled around and dashed across a narrow part of the field into the woods. “Dash” is overstating it. He kind of lurched through the thick, soupy mud as if he were trying to keep from stepping out of his boots. He disappeared into the thicket, either to chase a doe or fight another buck.

Meanwhile, the clock ticked. It got darker, and the air got wetter. The buck finally emerged from thewoods again and resumed his earlier path. The closest he got was about 330 yards, as best as I could determine with my rangefinder. I had my scope on him for a long time, but on 12x it seemed that every heartbeat made the crosshairs jump over his back.

Better not to shoot at all than take a marginal shot that might send him wounded into the nearby swamp. That happened with another buck in this same place a few years ago. That deer’s remains weren’t recovered for days. I felt terrible about it and vowed not to repeat the experience.

I hunted that stand several more times but did not see that buck again. As many as 20 does came into the field almost every evening, but the only buck that appeared thereafter was a big cowhornspike.

Then came the last day of the three-day Christmas holiday deer hunt. I arrived at my usual time, about 3 p.m., but opted to hunt a different stand on a more secluded part of the farm. It’s a metal stand in a thin treeline that separates two fields. One field is in wheat. Beyond it is a swamp. The other is fallow. Beyond it is a big rice field.

I hadn’t been there long when a group of hunters in the rice field opened fire on ducks and geese. The shooting was more or less constant, and I was close enough to hear someone bark commands to his retrieving dog. Even so, I saw three does approach the field from the swamp. As soon as they hit dry ground, they turned right and hugged the treeline as they skirted the field.

With all that gunfire so near, a deer was unlikely to enter open ground until dark, so I left that stand and walked back to the other field.

Again it drizzled, with a stiff wind in my face. In the distance I saw a small antlerless deer walking across a sliver of open ground to the safety of a wooded edge. I shadowed it, keeping as muchcover as possible between it and me. With the wind damping my footfalls and carrying my scent away, the deer never knew I was there. Just as it was about to enter its refuge, I put the scope on its vitals, checked one last time to make sure there were no spikes on its head and closed the modern gun portion of 2012 with one shot from my Model 70 Winchester, the one I call the BOSS. The range was about 60 yards.

The late muzzleloader season opened the next day, and I followed the same routine. It was clear, but the wind was even stronger. There was a lot less shooting in the rice field, but still enough to discourage deer. I returned to the good field, and there he was, the big boy.

Again, he was about 350 yards off and moving slowly away. He turned broadside, and I must admit I thought about it. It would be a lowpercentage lob shot, an unsporting and greedy thing to do. There was nothing but acres of open ground between us, so getting closer was out of the question.

I hid behind a couple of small trees and watched him until the sun went down.