Free Republic Gun Club – Thursday

A little off the wall topic today. Most of us who have hunted over the years have a lot of humorous and interesting stories about adventures we have had.
Time to share them.

One of mine and the one I tell most people is about the time I took a co-worker white-tail hunting in Texas. Now, most of you whitetail hunters out there can attest to how skiddish and supremely paranoid whitetails are. One twig break, and ZOOM, they are gone, and I mean GONE.

My co-worker, who had never been hunting before, was curious about what it was like and asked if he could tag along. I knew he was a good shooter from all the quail and dove we had taken the past season. That year there was a 2 buck/1 doe tag. Texas whitetails aren't very big and you need a couple to fill a freezer, and that year, they were in abundance. Which meant a LOT of meat IF you could get the shots.

We went to a lease area I knew of where the game was plenty and the hunting tough.

I leant my friend a Marlin 30-30 with a fixed 4X scope mounted to it. Driving onto the lease area I parked the truck in the middle of a cornfield that still had stalks. Mesquite was in abundance to the left and the right, and promised some good hunting. I wanted my friend to get the full affect of being in the woods alone hunting a game animal so we split up. I went north of the cornfield and would hunt that way, while he went south and hunted in that direction.

The cornfield was pretty long and it would take 5-10 minutes for me to get where the mesquite was thicker. As I walked along putting rounds into the rifle I heard the tell tale sound of shooting.

My first thought was…”What the hell is he shooting at?” So, I decided to walk back and see if there was trouble of some sort.
Rounding the end of the cornfield, I came upon something I had never seen before in all my years of up and down valleys hunting elk, mulies, blacktails, whitetails.

”I loaded the rifle as I walked like you told me, and when I rounded the corner of the cornfield they were there fighting.” He said. “So I shot both of them.”
A pause.
“Is it always this easy?”

I just unloaded the rifle sat down and cried. NEVER had I seen beginners luck like that.

My 17 year-old stepson and I were staying at my wife’s family property on Toledo Bend Reservoir, where we planned to hunt deer in the adjacent Sabine National Forest. The cabin has all of the amenities - fishing out the front door, and hunting out the back - not to mention running water, heat & a/c, kitchen and bath. It’s rustic, but a far cry from pitching a tent.

Not only is it rustic, but it’s buried as deep into the east Texas piney woods as possible. Any further and we’d be in Louisiana. We’d made the three and half-hour trip from College Station several times since July to stock the feeder with corn, which we hoped helped to hold deer in the area. The feeder is near the cabin on private property - feeders aren’t allowed on public lands. We’d spent hours before the season sighting in our rifles, readying our equipment and supplies, and purchasing both of the required hunting and public lands access permits. It’s not a cheap hobby, but we anticipate every hunting season like a three-year old anticipates Christmas - this time even more so, as it was our first time to hunt the national forest. We’d previously hunted a paid lease on private land without much success, so this year we thought we would try something new and different, with better hopes for a rewarding hunt.

The weather was warm and humid for November, but we were optimistic. Increasing our odds was a new moon, which meant the deer would likely move in the mornings & evenings, instead of foraging at night. We selected promising locations for our ladder stands. My stand was near a small rise, and The Boy’s stand overlooked a heavily traveled creek crossing. Both spots showed good sign of recent deer activity and had good transition - low growth areas opening onto areas clear from undergrowth. There was a good food source, as the ground was covered with acorns the size of my thumb from the towering oak trees competing with the even taller pines. Prospects appeared excellent for harvesting an East Texas Piney Woods Buck.

It was Saturday afternoon, around 3pm. Shooting light would be over by 5:30. It was time to get into the stands before the deer began to move. A hunter who lived nearby had knocked on the door that morning to, in a gentlemanly-like manner, let us know we would all be hunting in the same general area, and that he wanted to be sure we knew he would be hunting down a draw adjacent to where we had set up. He added that he’d seen a group of four does on the way in. We hoped the does would help to attract a buck.

We prepared to leave by donning our scent-free camouflage, specially washed only in baking soda and stored in plastic garbage bags so as to repel any odors. We had bathed thoroughly and sprayed ourselves with scent eliminator. We’d put out doe-in-heat scent that morning around the areas where we noticed activity, hoping to draw a buck within shooting range. We placed apples in our pockets for cover scent. We’d spent a lot of time and money preparing for this hunt, and didn’t want to ruin it with a buck spooked from picking up a stray man-smell. Finally we put on our fluorescent orange caps and vests (required in the national forest), loaded our rifles, and walked silently to our stands, eager, tense, and alert with the anticipation of seeing that first antler tip, gray-brown patch of hide, or silhouette through the evergreens.

We settled in and it wasn’t long before the other hunter we’d met moved through, dressed exactly as we were, silently picking his way through the brush. He hadn’t noticed me yet, and I observed the practiced way that he studied the ground for sign, took a few silent steps, stopped to slowly look around, and then repeated the process - an experienced, and likely successful, hunter. I waved my orange cap to him so he would note my location. He saw the movement immediately, and he returned the salute. He moved out of sight, and we returned to waiting, trying not to give away our position by swatting at the mosquitoes that floated around us in buzzing clouds or landed to remove a little afternoon snack from our veins.

It was about 4pm when I saw it - a flash of white deep in the woods to the southwest - exactly the location where I had anticipated the buck would appear. I readied my .308 Remington for a potential shot. Searching the scope for the deer, hoping for antlers, I instead saw something completely unexpected - a golf cart. It was, of all things, an all-white electric golf cart, complete with a windscreen, and three paunchy occupants - four if you count the golden retriever they had with them. One of the hunters was dressed in camouflage, the others wore white t-shirts. No fluorescent orange for these guys. I lowered my rifle as they approached my hunting area, picking their way around trees, stumps, and downed limbs. It was surreal - the electric golf cart made no sound other than snapping a twig now and then. They traversed my hunting area within 50 yards of my stand, then proceeded to the dirt access road about 200 yards away. They parked there for awhile, standing out like a huge white neon sign in the deep green of the pines - I suppose they thought they were hunting. I hoped they would leave via the access road since surely they had noted me in the stand dressed out in my hunter orange. But, no. A short time later, they slowly drove back, directly the way they had come - straight across my hunting area again, right over the game trail and the spot where I’d found a rub and carefully placed my doe scent earlier. Needless to say, I was incensed. If I hadn’t been so surprised, I might have been angry enough to disable their vehicle with a 180-grain round through its electric motor. They were close enough - I could have done it, and that silly thing would have forever remained in those woods as a monument to their stupidity. Besides, from the look of them it would have done them some good to do a little walking. If I’d had a cell phone with me, I would have called the game warden. It’s against the law to hunt from a vehicle or to drive off-road vehicles in the national forest. Unfortunately, my only recourse was to watch them slowly disappear back through the trees, our chances for a buck gone, at least for that afternoon.

Shortly after they were out of sight, I heard the sharp crack of a rifle - likely the other hunter we’d met, judging from the location. I figured the golf cart might have spooked a buck to him. Or, maybe he decided to put one through their motor. I almost hope next time I’m out there that I find that rusting golf cart, buried in pine needles, with a nice, neat hole through it.

A friend and I went hunting for whitetail when I was about 16. We scouted a great area in a box canyon with a big marsh at the bottom. The canyon had steep walls on all four sides and it was miles from where anyone else hunted. We saw lots of deer sign and wondered why no one ever hunted it.

We went back on the first day of deer season and hiked in about four miles and climbed down the steep sides of the canyon and set up just after dawn. My friend set up on a stand and I walked around the back side of the marsh and started driving his way. I was up to my knees in freezing muck before I went 10 steps. I was thrashing around trying to keep my boots from coming off when I heard him shoot.

I backed out of the marsh and went back the way I came and found him struggling to drag a big whitetail buck out of the swamp. It had run about a hundred yards before dropping. It was then that we realized why no one else hunted this area. We had to get a 150 lb deer out of the thick brushy swamp and up the shear canyon walls with no rope. It started sleeting after about an hour and it took us all day to inch our way up to the top dragging the deer. He finally went and got a farm tractor to drag it the rest of the way and we didn't get out of the woods until well after dark. Our parents were worried sick thinking that we'd been shot by some city hunter.

My BOOM, BOOM - BOOM story is how I learned to hunt pheasants in New Jersey without a dog. I started hunting later in life and a friend taught me how to zig zag a field to make a pheasant fly because it thinks you spotted it. This is really fairly simple. Walk through the field as if you knew exactly where the bird was, stop, stare at a an area, then change direction and do the same thing. Push the bird to a corner and as you force it into a smaller part of the field, it will eventually think you know where it is because you keep coming at it. It will eventually fly.

But there is a much easier way, especially useful in places like Flatbrook Wildlife Management Area in northern N.J. Walk aimlessly around the fields until you hear these sounds: “bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, BOOM, BA-BOOM, BOOM, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark.”

This is the sound of two guys who can’t shoot their guns with a totally undisciplined dog. The dog puts a bird up about sixty yards away from them. They couldn’t hit it if it was tied to a stake, anyway.

Figure out which way they’re going and get there first. They’re like flushers on a driven hunt. When you hear, “bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM,” just wait until you hear wings above you and shoot. Dinner is served, and you’ll never have to clean dog puke off the floor of your truck. :)

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