This has been a frustrating deer season for me.
For the first time in forever, I have not seen a deer to shoot during the modern gun deer season. I suspected it would be this way when I killed deer with a muzzleloader and a crossbow. Bagging a deer with a modern firearm should be nearly automatic, and usually it is, but cosmic forces align against me when I am one step away from earning a Triple Trophy Award. It's a distinction that the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission recognizes hunters who kill a deer in a single season with archery or crossbow, muzzleloader and modern gun.
I can't help but laugh when I put that in perspective. When I started deer hunting in the 1980s, I was lucky to kill one deer in a season. In many zones, it was illegal to kill does. Now I am complaining about being unable to kill a third deer in a season.
From late 1988-90, Miss Laura and I lived on 120 acres in Faulkner County without electricity or running water. We heated our modest little cabin with wood we cut on the property, and Coleman lanterns provided light. The winters of 1988-90 were extremely cold, and we stuffed newspapers in the chasms between the doors, floors and jambs to keep out the bitter winds. Hunting was not recreational for us. We depended on wild game for food.
Now Miss Laura owns that 120 acres, and I make my living writing about hunting and fishing. We eat a lot of game, but we don't depend on it. Taking a third deer this year is an ego thing more than anything else, and I keep that in perspective, too.
That aside, deer just aren't acting right this year. Where I hunt in Grant County, I have seen most of them in the last moments of dusk. About 170 yards away, I cannot determine with binoculars if they are does, button bucks or bucks with fewer than three points on an antler. The only deer that showed up in sufficient light was a spike buck. I saw the spindly antlers only briefly, when the buck turned its head at an angle that allowed its spikes to catch light.
I have seen one deer in the morning, and I have seen it twice. The first time was on opening morning of the modern gun season. A lone deer strolled across the side of the hill across from my stand, but it meandered in and out of brush and was gone so quickly that I couldn't determine its sex.
I saw it again Tuesday morning. It walked the same path, but this time I saw it early enough to get my rifle scope on it. It was a 4-point buck, not legal. It had the stiff-legged gait of a rutting buck, but I have not smelled the scent of rutting buck this year. The one good day of hunting we've had was Nov. 22, when a cold front made deer active. It seems like everyone I know killed a good buck that day. I knew it would be a good day, but sat out because my family celebrated Thanksgiving early.
On Tuesday evening I hunted in Arkansas County. The landowner asked me not to shoot a doe because he said there has been a big deer die-off in his area, and he wants to protect his does. Fields that used to attract many deer now only attract a few, if any.
The landowner said mature bucks have been scarce. Aren't they always? Not on this place. The heads on the wall of the lodge, including a couple with Boone and Crockett typical racks, were killed on the property.
The landowner encountered one big buck recently that acted strangely. Disoriented and listless, it staggered into the side of the landowner's pickup truck and collapsed. The buck tested negative for chronic wasting disease, but the landowner is disgruntled that the Game and Fish Commission didn't test it for other diseases.
Deer die from a lot of natural causes in Arkansas. Epizootic hemorrhagic disease and blue tongue kill a lot of deer locally, as do buffalo gnats in the springtime, but the Game and Fish Commission seems to be concerned about only chronic wasting disease. It reminds me of covid-19. They seem to be the only diseases that matter.
If there is an upside to this story, it's that the landowner reports having seen a lot of spike bucks, 4-points and button bucks. May they live long and prosper.