I had been drifting on the river for hours, watching for a drake mallard to complete my duck limit, when I heard a sound like two sticks being whacked together. Then I heard heavy snorts and grunts.
I landed the canoe, crawled up the riverbank, and peered over the top. There in the middle of a small, boggy marsh, an eight-point whitetail buck was doing his best to push a six-pointer backward. Plumes of vapor shot from their nostrils and their eyes were wide, giving them a crazed look. Their hair was standing on end like that of dueling tomcats, and they grunted and wheezed as they pushed at each other.
It was a dramatic sight, but my attention was drawn past the fighting deer to a splendid 10-pointer and a forkhorn that were watching the fray. The deer all seemed to spot me at the same time and galloped off in three directions. As they ran off, I counted five tails. All of the deer had horns. Five bucks together makes a place well worth investigating.
I usually take my topographic maps with me when I’m floating an unknown stretch of river. When I got back to the canoe, I located the place on the maps. It was a very remote triangular section walled off by three rivers. No roads came within one-half dozen miles of the area where I saw the deer.
The following week I was back, with my bow and camping gear, at the mouth of a little stream that lead into the river.
I paddled up the stream until I came to a beaver dam, crossed that, and set up camp on an oak ridge at the head end of the pond. I hunted for five days. I saw bucks every day and finally scored on an eight-pointer. I saw no other humans nor any sign that any had ever been in that territory. But that was not too surprising. Such overlooked sections are found on most large watercourses and can offer excellent, uncrowded hunting opportunities for deer.
I have been float hunting for deer for decades, but the way I bagged this one illustrates only one of the advantages of this method. My wife and I commonly bow-bag our deer every year by drifting downstream, hunting as we go. One year, we got two in one day.
On that trip, we put our canoe in the east fork of the Black River, which flows through Jackson County, Wisconsin. We expected to float from the town of City Point to the main Black River at an impoundment called Lake Arbutus. We left our car at the lake as a pickup vehicle and took the canoe and gear with a pickup truck to City Point.
It was nearly a one-day trip, and we got on the water before daylight so that we would be well away from town by the time daylight arrived. The early morning and late afternoon are the best times to see deer along the river.
My wife was kneeling in front with her bow. I paddled the canoe with long, careful strokes that minimized splashing noises. I had covered the paddles with rubber to help make them as noiseless as possible in case I accidentally scraped them against the gunnels. The canoe floor was carpeted.
The wind blew directly in our faces, and at every bend of the river we quietly beached the canoe and glassed the stretch of river ahead. Deer standing along the edge of a river can be hard to spot with the naked eye. At the first bend, I saw a forkhorn feeding on riverside vegetation about one-quarter mile ahead.
Joan nocked an arrow, and I pushed the canoe into the water, keeping it as close to the bank as possible. The deer had his rear end toward us, and we were careful not to move when he looked at us. Once, he turned and looked directly at us, put his head down again, and resumed feeding.
A large uprooted tree lay partially in the river, and I kept the canoe behind it as much as possible. In fact, we were within 75 feet of the deer before Joan could see it. By the time she had drawn, aimed, and released, we were within 50 feet and still the deer hadn’t noticed us. We found the dead buck one-quarter mile away, and were on the river again within an hour.
We saw about a dozen deer that day, but I didn’t get a chance to shoot until the late afternoon, when we rounded a bend and saw a doe, her twin fawns, and a fat spike buck standing in the water. The deer hadn’t spotted us yet, so we lay down as much as possible in the canoe and let it drift downstream.
The distance closed slowly, and finally the doe and fawns became uneasy and drifted up over the bank. The forkhorn crossed to the opposite side of the river and hid behind a clump of elderberry brush. When we were adjacent to the deer, I sat up to shoot, but the current caught the craft and turned it sideways. As quietly and slowly as possible, I hopped out of the canoe and into the shallow water. The buck, apparently mesmerized by the strange sight, stepped out from behind the brush, and I zipped an arrow into his boiler room.
When we got back to the lake, an unshaven rustic who was cutting pulpwood eyed us suspiciously as we unloaded the deer. “How’d you get the venison?” he asked.
“With the canoe,” I told him. A crafty smile crossed his face.
“OK,” he said, “but you’d better hurry and get out of here. The game warden comes by every now and again.” I thanked him, and we left.
The way we were hunting is perfectly legal, of course, but it is so seldom used that many people think there must be something wrong with it. Not so. In every state, a canoe can be used for hunting deer, although laws vary somewhat; the hunter should check his regulations carefully. In most states, it is illegal to shoot from a boat under power, and in some states, you can’t shoot at deer that are in the water.
But shooting directly from the boat is only one of the ways that the float hunter can score. Deer that are pushed hard by other hunters often seek refuge in the thick bottomlands along the rivers, and nearly every region has what I call “river deer.” They seem to prefer to stay along the river and almost never stray far from it. I believe that they are the deer that make the heavy trails crossing the river because they wander back and forth several times a night.
Hunt these bottomland whitetails by making short drives. One way to do this is to drop the driver(s) off on the upstream end of the thicket and use the canoe to take the standers to the opposite end. Drive through the thicket, load up again, and drift downstream until you come to the next drive. If you get a deer, it can be easily transported.
I have developed a method of hunting riverside thickets that could be successful for one man as well. I paddle to the upper end of the thicket and hang wind chimes from a tree limb. I make these by stringing aluminum pie plates on a rope so that when the wind blows, they bang against each other and against tree trunks and limbs. In a brisk wind, they make enough noise to chase almost any nearby deer out of his bed. Then I paddle as fast as I can to get into position to ambush any deer that this arrangement chases out of the thicket. I go back later to remove the wind chimes.
Even if the river is too fast and rough to shoot from the boat, float hunting can be effective. I was working near Bearmouth, Montana, one year along the banks of the Clark Fork River. We had to cross a rickety swinging bridge to get to our bunkhouse. Some of the workers didn’t like the bridge, and they used a wooden rowboat to get across the river. Even that was a precarious venture because the Clark is a speedy little river.
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But when the deer season opened, my cousin and I took our rifles, climbed into the rowboat, and let the current carry us downstream. We quickly found out that it took both of us to keep the boat straight. Shooting from the craft was out of the question, even though we saw plenty of deer.
When a 10-point buck jumped up from the shoreline and ran over a little hill, we landed the boat and followed. Peeking over the hill, we saw the buck standing about 100 yards away and looking back over his shoulder. Skip nailed him with a single shot.
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