Whitetail365: The Deer Hunting Blog From Field & Stream

I’ve nearly had about three heart attacks in the past weeks. The cause: beech leaves. The 3- to 6-inch long leaves of Fagus grandifolia, which grows in fertile woods in the eastern U.S., turn ivory-yellow when dry and have a maddening tendency to curl in tightly upon themselves. Such a leaf, standing perpendicular among the leaves of the forest floor, looks exactly like an antler tine. The guy treading the woods in search of antlers or any part of an antler is at the mercy of these nasty little guys.

This week’s tip: If you use a CamelBak or other backpack with a bladder, be extremely careful about how you stow sheds. Nature designed antlers to puncture. That’s really all I care to share at this time about that one.

I found two 5-pointers yesterday, both left sides, on the same hill where I found two 5-pointers last year. The bigger of the two was in the same exact spot – give or take 10 feet – of where I found a big one last year. I raced home, compared the two antlers, and confirmed to the extent that I can say they are both from the same deer. This year’s is just like last year’s, down to the wave in certain tines, only a little bigger around, with slightly longer tines, and the G4 that was part of a crab claw last year is now an independent tine.

The pleasure this find gave me, of confirming the survival and something of the habits of a buck I have yet to see, is enormous. And very hard to explain. 

The votes are in, the decision is final, and the winner of the shed hunting contest is Jack. He didn’t win because he came up with a good name, but because any guy who needs a Gerber folding knife bad enough to write poetry for it is embarrassingly desperate. (Also - and this is the painful part - it was actually a pretty good poem.) Jack, send your snail mail address to [email protected] and he'll forward to me. I’ll get you the knife - eventually.

Sore losers, repeat after me: "You get what you get and you don't get upset."

I have neglected every responsibility under the sun to go out four times this week. What I have to show for it is a single fresh shed, barely a 5-pointer, right side, that could belong to what will be a nice buck next fall.

In the same area, I came across a long-dead buck with antlers, four on one side and a single 10-inch spike on the other. This was significant because it indicated that either nobody was hunting antlers in the area or at least nobody was desperate enough to cut horns off a rotting carcass. The absence of competition made my heart soar.

I've been finding a disconcerting number of small buck skulls and sheds that are at least a year old: bleached white and porous by the sun, chewed ragged by rodents. It got me wondering if I simply can't see the new, darker antlers all around me or if better hunters are just leaving the old stuff.

On public land surrounding the Beltway in Maryland, I found three hang-on stands and a Moutltrie broadcast feeder (legal in Maryland). They must have been there for years, because the trees involved had all grown over the screw-in steps, effectively making them permanent. Talk about audacity.

Late yesterday afternoon, I was walking south-facing slopes and hilltops in a stream-valley park near mega-mansions in Potomac, Maryland. There were trails so highly used I expected to find "HOV Only" signs along the route. And there wasn't a shed to be found. As the afternoon wore on, I neared the crest of a rise and heard a sound like fast applause. Turned out to be dozens of hooves tearing through very dry leaves. I sprinted to the top and saw the host of white flags departing. Being unpressured suburban deer, the herd stopped after 60 yards. And there, real as an envelope from the IRS in your mailbox, was a big, fat buck. I could tell it was a buck because of his large body. The other giveaway was antlers firmly affixed to his skull. He was a tall-and-outside-the-ears 7-pointer. I watched him for five minutes before he ambled out of sight. This was at 5:32 P.M. on March 2.

At least now I've got an excuse for why I'm not finding more.

To paraphrase from the movie “Fight Club,” the first rule of Shed Club is – you do not talk about Shed Club.

Shed hunters are even more secretive about their haunts than deer hunters. (Incidentally, I think we need to coin a noun by which shed hunters describe those who pursue the whole animal. Neither “live deer hunters," "whole deer hunters," or "regular hunters" quite cuts it. Let the competition begin. First prize, to be judged by an independent panel of me, wins a Gerber Freeman Folder knife in nearly new condition, my sole freebie from the recent SHOT Show.)

My shed hunting pal, Paula, has to be prodded to divulge even the name of the state where she has found her latest. The reason, of course, is that there is no upside to revealing your honey hole. In fact, it’s even less advantageous with sheds than “regular” hunting (see what I mean about the need for a better word?) because access is so much easier. A “No Hunting” sign will keep most deer hunters out. It will not deter a shed man, who, after all, is not hunting in the traditional sense. Since shed hunters usually carry no weapon more significant than a knife and/or a pruning shears, they can go pretty much anywhere. (Small pruning shears, incidentally, are much more effective for getting through briers than a machete). 

I’ve found a grand total of zip antlers in the past week. I take some comfort in the fact that bucks still wearing their antlers have been seen within the past few days. Meanwhile, Paula has found several singles and two sets in the same time. “Good ones but not trophies. Jeez, I’m startin’ to feel sorry for you,” she said. I asked where she’d found hers.  She erupted into her smoker’s hacking laugh, finally managing to croak, “Not that sorry, honey,” and hung up on me.

If you look closely at the expression of my child, you may find yourself asking the same question I did, namely: Does she look crazy all by herself or because her Daddy is making her that way with his deer and shed obsessions ?

I knew I was in trouble this year when I got lucky shed hunting in the first two hours of my first day.  I was walking an old fence line – dating from the days that cows grazed inside the Beltway -  in a steep area of a public park along the river. I looked down and there it was: just a three-pointer, but heavy (18 ounces on my office postal scale) and palmated. It was right where it was supposed to be, at a place where jumping the fence had dislodged it. A feeling of elation swept over me, quickly followed by an intuition of bad juju to come. I’ve never felt comfortable when I got lucky right off the bat, whether it was in hunting, fishing, athletics, or with women of the opposite sex. In my experience, easy initial  success is an indicator that disaster is in the immediate area and will descend just as soon as it finds a place to park.

And so it has been. I have been out at least part of each of the last six days, from two to four hours a day. I’ve walked public land and private, seen deer that would bolt at the first shuffle of my feet in the leaves and others that approached so boldly it was clear that somebody has been hand feeding them. I have seen sticks on the ground that initially stopped my heart, Pope & Young-caliber sticks. Sticks that looked so much like antlers I nearly kept them with the intention of posting photos of them here and starting a contest devoted entirely to antler-like sticks. That’s when I decided my preoccupation was getting a little out of hand.

My plan is to stay out of the woods today. It’s now 9:11 a.m. So far, so good.

There is an old joke I love for how economically it conveys the reality of deer hunting.

A city guy wanders into the only bar in a small town and asks, “Can any of you guys tell me a good spot to put up a tree stand and shoot a deer? I’ve never done it before.”

The guys in the bar roll their eyes at one another and one decides to have a little fun with him. “Sure thing,” he says. “It’s simple. You know those big yellow highway signs you see with a deer on’em?”

“Sure,” the dude says.

“Well, we put those out just to help guys like you. Drive around until you see one, park, go into the woods right there, and set up in the first tree you find.” 

The guy thanks him and leaves, whereupon everybody in the bar pounds the trickster on the back and laughs until beer sprays out their noses.

Two hours later, the hunter comes back. “Could any of you guys show me how to clean this thing?” 

I've just returned from Las Vegas and the SHOT show, the hunting industry's annual beer-and-gear-fest, where a new scent-elimination product caught my eye. It will probably turn out to be another gimmick. On the other hand, it could mean the end of ScentLok, Scent Shield, and all the other companies that seek to muffle odor with burnt coconut carbon, silver ions, and the secretions of the Eastern Spadefoot Toad.

It's called the MOXY Generation Unit, and looks decidedly un-sexy, rather like a portable vacuum cleaner with a hose that hooks up to a garment bag like you use when forced to buy a new suit. My grasp of science is slim, but here's what little I understand of it. An oxygen molecule -- O2 --is nothing more than two oxygen atoms stuck together. Okay, pay attention. More oxygen atoms can be added to the existing molecule. Ozone, for example, is O3. "Oxidizing" cleaners, which include chloride and Oxi-Clean (the one with the bearded guy yelling at you on TV), are quite popular these days. The more oxygen atoms you add, the more "powerful" the oxidizing molecule. Problem is, the more oxygen atoms you add, the more they repel each other. They're about as stable as Britney Spears.

Anyway, MOXY claims to have found a "super oxidizing" metal ion which they've somehow kidnapped, imprisoned in the vacuum cleaner, and made go to work for them cranking out molecules with up to 14 oxygen atoms stuck to them. The machine, as I understand it, sucks in O2 and spits out the super-charged oxygen molecules, which get blown into the garment bag. The bag holds 4-to-6 hunting garments AND up to two pairs of boots you can stick in the bottom.

These are some badass molecules. The company says that in less than 20 minutes, these suckers not only neutralize odors on your stuff, they STAY in there for hours. This means your duds continue to pull odor away from your body and nuke it.

The unit can plug into any wall outlet, or even the 12-volt connection in your car. It will be available next spring and retail for $399. See moxyproducts.com if you want to get even more confused.

It's easy to knock this idea, even (or especially) if you don't understand it. On the other hand, if it works, it would certainly rock my world.

Change is a flighty creature. Sometimes she moves like a glacier. Sometimes she strikes like lightning. The only thing for certain is that she's always in motion.

I've just returned from a hunting trip to Alabama, which has greatly reduced my life expectancy, mostly because of what I ate. At home, I stick to a balanced diet of pizza, cheeseburgers, beer, Doritos, chocolate bars, and one dessert a day: a single serving of ice cream consisting of however much is left in the carton.

Alabama hunters consider this a vegan diet. We rolled out of our bags each morning and immediately nuked two or three Jimmy Dean sausage-egg-cheese-and-more-sausage biscuits apiece. We washed this down with Dr. Thunder, an off-brand carbonated beverage that lives up to its name. As sitting in a shooting house burns untold calories, we loaded our pockets with more Dr. Thunder and peanut butter crackers before heading out.

Lunch began with grilled homemade sausages (plain, jalapeno, or jalapeno-and-cheese) made by Jimmy, who excels at fixing trucks, reloading bullets, and cooking. We ate these hot and dripping fat with our fingers while he deep-fried bass filets, deer medallions, and breaded chicken bits. Halfway through the meal, which we ate standing around a fire in a 55-gallon drum, someone produced a loaf of white bread. The slices served as plates for food too hot to touch, as napkins when you tired of wiping your hands on your pants leg, and had the added benefit that you could eat them.

Dinner was at a restaurant that served fried dill pickle slices as an appetizer. Most of us went for the 17-oz. ribeye with hush puppies and, for the vegetable, french fries. We washed this down with beer. Then, because it is impossible to eat while you are asleep, we had slivers of cheesecake with a molecular density similar to that of uranium to tide us over until dawn.

The guys invited me to come back next year for the annual barbecue on the last weekend of the season. "We get serious about it then," one said. "Damn near stop your heart up like a rusty watch."

If I'm alive, I'll be there.

I got a letter from a Mr. R. L. Fischer of Pittsburgh the other day, passing on the transcript of an interview in which the subject delivered  “the best justification for hunting” that Fischer had ever heard. The person being interviewed was a non-hunter, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning Food Column editor of the L.A. Weekly, Jonathan Gold. And it aired on every hunter’s favorite radio outlet, National Public Radio. 

That’s right, a food writer from La-La Land on the liberal elite’s favorite radio. Gold, an adventuresome eater, described both his extreme discomfort and a kind of epiphany he had while eating a live prawn in a Korean restaurant in Los Angeles.

“...it was not dead, this prawn, it was extremely alive and it was wiggling its legs and it was wiggling is antennae. And its eyes were like swiveling madly in its eye sockets, and it was looking back at me, seeing me as actually the predator, the creature that was going to eat it.

“It was getting too close to the actual nature of consumption, which is killing a living creature with our teeth...(but) the taste of the prawn, the taste of the meat of it, was extraordinary. It was sweet, it was like there was life pushing through it.”

The interviewer then asks the million dollar question. Was Gold of the opinion that it mattered, that it was morally better to eat an animal if the eater was more awake to the fact of the animal’s life and that it had had to be killed to end up on his dinner plate?

He responded: “I think it matters a great deal. I mean, one of the greatest metaphors in western civilization was that of Christ who gave his life so that others might live. And I don’t want to be sacrilegious and I don’t want to belittle that myth in any way, but a pig is giving his life so that we might eat, a chicken is giving its life so that we might eat. And I think the least we can do is to think about that chicken, to think about that calf we are eating. Not necessarily to be sad for it, but to celebrate it, to be aware of it being that what it was, that it wasn’t just this bioengineered protein that somehow managed to find its way onto our plates.”

I was thinking about this all day yesterday while butchering my deer, which took me and a friend about five hours. It was something I hadn’t done in a long time. It brought home to me once again the strange miracle of our lives: of the fleeting now-ness of them, of the violence of existence, of the vividness of any given moment as it flies. And of how all living things are part of a mystery far beyond our ability to comprehend.

Hunting success and I meet up so seldom that I hardly know what to do when he stops to shake my hand.

The fact is, there was nothing particularly dramatic about the encounter in which I killed my buck. (Incidentally, I cannot abide the word “harvest.” A whitetail is not a tomato. Taking the life of a game animal is no small thing, and I fail to see the merit in glossing over that fact.)

I was 22 feet up in a tree and looking down a ridge at about 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning. It was mid-December, a notoriously difficult time to see bucks, and I had no higher hope than a shot at a doe. Then came the shuffling in the leaves behind me. I turned to see, 20 yards out and closing, a buck: big shoulders and curved tines.

There was no time for counting points or guessing his spread. The binary switch in my head just flipped to “shoot” and I clipped release to string. I’d never seen him before, but he was obviously familiar with the area and knew exactly where he wanted to go. And his path would take him right behind me. Five seconds later, he passed within 10 feet of my tree. Five seconds more and he was quartering away at 15 yards. I drew, let him make it to an opening in the brush, and gave him my best bleat.

You should understand that my best bleat sounds like a goat choking to death on a fan belt. But it did the trick. He stopped. I shot. The divot from his leap was a shovel’s worth of black dirt lying atop the wet leaves. The blood trail was continuous, six inches wide, and a full 120 yards long. I have no idea how he made it that far missing that much blood, but he did. I am incapable of aging deer once they appear to have reached the age of 3 1/2, but he looked every bit of that and maybe more. That’s a trophy in my book.

Now that I’ve tagged a good buck, I feel entitled to offer my expert advice on hunting wily old bucks:

1. Spend more hours on stand than you can possibly justify; and
2. Hope that he offers a clean shot before you have time to fully realize exactly what’s going on.