He was close. I hadn’t heard or seen anything, yet I knew he was there. Every nerve in my body was tingling with anticipation. Slowly easing my .270 to the ready position, I waited. I didn’t want to get caught off guard, but that’s exactly what happened. The unmistakable sound of antlers rattling against branches told me that the deer that had just spooked was definitely a buck. Silently cursing myself, I remained as still as a statue, hoping for the best.
The buck had run only a short distance before stopping. There was no way he could have winded me, and I felt confident that he’d try to continue on his route by making a slight detour. I was right. A small twig snapped off to my left in the direction in which the deer had run, and seconds later a big-bodied buck stepped into a small clearing about 75 yards away. I hurriedly brought my gun to my shoulder, lined up the crosshairs and touched off a shot. The solid “thwack” of a bullet hitting home drifted back to me on the heels of the rifle’s roar. The buck had vanished, but I could hear him crashing through the brush for a few seconds. Then all was silent.
I immediately climbed down from my tree stand and made my way to where the buck had been when I shot. There was a fair amount of hair but no blood. A little farther on, however, I found the start of a good blood trail. My hunting partners and I recovered the eight-pointer later that night with the aid of a lantern. I was extremely proud of this particular animal, even though I have taken larger bucks. I had taken him on, one on one, in his own environment and I came out the victor.
I first located this buck just a few days before the start of the nine-day gun season in Wisconsin. I was scouting an area that had produced for me in the past when I came across the big deer’s hoof prints in the fresh snow. The size of his track was enough to take my breath away! There was no doubt that this was a mature whitetail buck. There was also no doubt where I’d be concentrating my hunting efforts come opening day. There was one drawback, however, and I was fully aware of it. The tract of land the big buck called home was one of the biggest, roadless pieces of real estate in the vicinity. A true wilderness area. Yet, I went into the season with complete confidence that I could eventually figure out the buck’s travel pattern and get a chance at him. As indicated at the beginning of this article, I did, indeed, get my chance on the third day of the season, and I made the most of it.
Hunting for wilderness whitetails holds a special mystique for more than just a few deer hunters. Most hunts don’t have as happy an ending as mine did. Still, for some unknown reason, wilderness hunting seems to cast a spell on almost everyone who tries it. Even unsuccessful hunters understand the special fascination of trekking through huge, roadless tracts of land for whitetail bucks. Although they fully understand that their chances of connecting on a big buck are slim at best, they return year after year to give it their best shot.
Part of the reason why wilderness deer hunters are attracted to the big country is the lack of hunting pressure, which makes for a quality hunt as far as I’m concerned. I may not see a lot of deer, but I can also go days without seeing another hunter. And if I do, it is usually a member of my own hunting group.
In 1984, seven hunters in my hunting group took six bucks during the gun deer season. In 1985, we went nine for nine. In 1986, we ended up with four bucks. We only had five hunters in camp that year. In 1987, we filled up on bucks—five for five. These are not all spikes and forkhorns, either. A lot of bucks are deer that most hunters would be proud to put their tag on. Our success rate during the bow season for deer is impressive as well.
Our system for success is not complicated, nor is it a secret. It simply entails really knowing the country we hunt and paying strict attention to some very obvious details pertinent to whitetail deer and deer behavior.
Just what do I consider a wilderness area? Well, to be truthful, my definition contrasts sharply with Mr. Webster’s. According to the dictionary, wilderness means “an absence of humans.” Let’s face it, there are few if any places left on earth where there is a complete absence of human presence. But it’s as close as you can get.
Northern Minnesota, northern Wisconsin, northern Michigan and parts of Maine are all well-known as wilderness areas. Parts of the Adirondack Mountains in the East, the Ozarks in the South and the Rocky Mountains in the West could also be considered wilderness areas. Of course, much of the area where whitetails are found in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta is also wilderness. The tricks I’ve learned during 24 years of hunting wilderness bucks will work anywhere you have big woods.
I once had a long conversation with a fellow deer hunter who was at wit’s end after trying for weeks to connect on a big wilderness buck.
“There’s just too much country for that big buck to hide in,” he complained. “I spend as much time as I can trying to get to know his stomping grounds a little better, but it seems fruitless. There’s fresh sign throughout a two-mile radius. How am I supposed to pick the one tree the buck will walk by when I’m there waiting?”
This is probably the number-one complaint I hear from hunters who have had their fill of attempting to figure out a wilderness buck. I have to admit that it is a complex problem, but it’s one that definitely can be solved. Of the utmost importance is getting to know the exact lay of the land in the areas you plan on hunting. First of all, purchase some topographic maps of the areas you are going to hunt. These little beauties are as valuable as any other piece of your hunting equipment. Then get out and do some legwork. Carry the maps with you while you’re walking in the woods. You’d be surprised at how fast you’ll be able to familiarize yourself with a big block of land by walking and studying your map. Normally, we’ll locate a likely looking spot on our map and then walk into that spot. Nine times out of ten, we find something worthwhile.
Hunting a particular buck in a 20-square-mile roadless tract of land really can be very special. The previously mentioned hunter asked me, “How am I supposed to pick that one certain tree out of the thousands out there?” It can be done, believe me.
First of all, even though there may be fresh deer sign throughout the entire four or five miles of the buck’s range, there will be one core area in which the buck will spend the most time. How do you find it? Here’s where the legwork begins. Hopefully, you can do most of the scouting you need to do in the spring. There are two very important reasons for this. First, you don’t want to be messing around scouting for sign during the open season. Never take a chance on alerting a big buck that you’re fooling around in his home town while you’re trying to hunt him. Secondly, sign is much easier to read in the spring. Rubs, scrapes and an occasional shed antler can tell you a lot about a certain buck or bucks. These things are much easier to find in the spring immediately after the snow melts. Plus, if you run a big wilderness buck out of his bedding area in the spring, he’ll eventually return and forget about the whole incident by the time hunting season opens in the fall.
Though you may find rubs and scrapes scattered all throughout the buck’s home range, you will usually find a real concentration in his core area. Concentrate your scouting efforts there. Hopefully, you’ll find the buck’s prime bedding area. Most times, this bedding area will be found in the thickest, most impenetrable part of the core area. If the terrain is swampy, look for the bucks to bed on small “islands” or high spots where they can evade hunters but stay dry while bedded down. Again, you might be able to use your topo maps to locate these high spots.
If you plan on hunting in or near a bedding area, remember that you must take every precaution to keep the buck from detecting your presence. I’ll not argue that this is the best spot to try and waylay a big buck. However, most bowhunters don’t realize just how careful you have to be when hunting near a buck’s bedroom. Keep wind direction in mind at all times when selecting stand sites.
I prefer to hunt rub lines during the pre-rut for big bucks. A whitetail buck of any size just cannot resist rubbing his antlers on something every single day once the velvet has been shed. Because bucks are spending most of their time in the core area then, you’ll find a lot more antler rubs there. Once the real rut begins, the bucks will start ranging out more, hence the reason for finding rubs made by a particular buck for miles in all directions away from the core area.
Hunting during the pre-rut is the best time to try and kill a big wilderness buck. At this time of the year, they are still using the travel patterns and runways that they’ve felt secure using during the late summer and early fall months. Consequently, this is where you’ll find most of the rub lines established by a buck. Usually, the rub line will originate in or very near the buck’s preferred bedding area. It will probably end up at a food or water source. If you can get away with it, try and locate your stand as close to the bedding area as possible. That way, the buck may show himself while there is still plenty of good shooting light left.
Just last year, I watched a huge buck as he nosed through an area. The big deer was well out of my effective bow range, so I was subjected to being a spectator. I learned a lot from the buck. First of all, he would never take more than three or four steps at any one time without stopping, looking and sniffing for danger. He would sometimes stand motionless for up to 20 minutes. Eventually, he’d flick his tail and take a few more steps, only to repeat the whole ritual again. The real rut was still a couple of weeks away, so although he was probably feeling the first stirrings of the breeding season, he wasn’t showing the devil-may-care attitude oftentimes displayed by a buck caught up in the throes of an estrus-induced stupor. The buck was the epitome of caution and alertness. It took him more than an hour to go 100 yards.
Food plays a major role in dictating deer movement. Out of the 365 days of the year, the rut is a very short-lived thing. It may last only three weeks, give or take a few days. On the other hand, a whitetail deer has got to try and get something in its belly every single day. It’s the survival of the fittest, and the fittest animals are those that are able to eat something on a daily basis. And if you don’t think that a whitetail is keen on knowing where the best food sources are located in his range, guess again. That’s why it’s imperative to know the whereabouts of such things as stands of oak, fresh cuttings, re-growth after a fire, any type of agriculture and so on. Within a huge block of land, this may be just a small piece of the overall picture, but believe me, it will be a real magnet to almost all of the deer in the vicinity.
During a recent bow season for deer in Wisconsin, I located an alfalfa field in the northern part of the state. Now let me tell you, this type of thing is usually very rare in wilderness areas. You can just about imagine the sort of deer activity around that hay field. The great thing about this is the fact that I was the only person hunting the area. To make a long story short, on the very first night I stood near the alfalfa, I shot a 10-point buck with my bow. He was the fifth buck to walk by me at a range of 12 yards in less than five minutes. After loading the buck into my vehicle, I happened to look out into the field. It was full of deer! At least six of them were bucks! A year later, my brother Jeff and I hunted an area that had been logged off the previous spring. We never saw fewer than 10 deer between us. During another bow season, I shot a hog of a buck in a preferred feeding area. This 214-pound eight-pointer teased me for three straight days before I finally got the exact shot I wanted.
Once the frenzy of the true rut begins, it becomes really tough to kill a big wilderness buck. There is absolutely no rhyme or reason for the behavior or travel patterns of bucks at this time. When they get with a hot doe, you can throw all of the information and data you’ve collected on deer right out the window. I have seen areas go from red hot to ice cold in a matter of 12 hours. A big buck may herd an estrous doe away from all of the other deer in an effort to get her alone. That may mean going to some isolated patch of brush or grass that only the buck knows about. Consequently, a lot of other, smaller bucks will follow at a safe distance, hoping to get in on the action. If you don’t know where these breeding areas are, you can be out of the ball game during the peak of the rut. It’s happened to me more times than I care to remember. In a really huge piece of real estate, finding one of these breeding areas can be quite a task.
Because wilderness deer are in contact with humans much less than with their farmland relatives, it is imperative that a hunter be much more careful about such things as noise and human odor. Though you may be able to get away with just a little more when hunting deer in agricultural areas, you’ll find just the opposite to be true in the wilderness. It only takes one mistake to send a big-woods buck into a nocturnal pattern. He then becomes virtually impossible to kill.
I’m very careful about washing all of my hunting clothes in baking soda and then storing them in plastic bags. I wear knee-high rubber boots on all of my hunting excursions. And, I use no scent of any kind. That’s right, I said that I use no scent of any kind. No cover scents, no sex scents and no food scents. For some reason, a lot of hunters think that using a cover or attractant-type scent is the cure-all for hunting whitetails. My train of thought would suggest that maybe a commercially made scent might alarm a big buck more than it will relax him or pique his curiosity. As a rule of thumb, I try to remain odor free.
When entering and departing my hunting sites, I’m very careful not to make any unnecessary noise. The clang of a tree stand or, worse yet, the sound of a human voice can have disastrous results. Breaking a few small branches or twigs is sometimes unavoidable. But this is a sound that deer are used to hearing, so don’t get shook up if it happens. Be more concerned with unnatural noises, such as the sound that a nylon backpack makes as it zips through the brush, for example.
Wisconsin’s gun deer season usually opens after the peak of the rut. Hunting for wilderness whitetails at this time can be challenging, to say the least. The biggest mistake most gun hunters make is that they hunt breeding or rut areas for bucks when, for the most part, the breeding is over.
A guy who hunts out of our gun-hunting camp shot a tremendous whitetail buck during the 1983 gun season. The season opened very near November 15 that year, and the bucks were still actively pursuing does. He shot his buck as it came charging into view, obviously absorbed by the feeling of peak rut. From 1984-86, this fellow hunted that same stand and never saw as much as a fawn, let alone a deer with antlers. The reason? My buddy was hunting a breeding area in years when the rut was over. Like I said, the bucks were still pretty sexually active during the opening weekend of gun season in 1983. In the next three years, Wisconsin’s firearms deer season opened a full week later, on a date closer to November 23. By then, the rut is about over and the bucks are back using the haunts they frequent during the pre-rut. Hunting travel routes going to and from known food sources would be much more productive than hunting breeding areas. Rub lines once again become a very good place to set up an ambush, as these are the routes that the bucks feel secure and comfortable using.
Gang-driving deer effectively is just about a lost cause in the big country. But getting deer, especially bucks, to move in a direction you want them to is not impossible. Once again, this entails knowing the exact lay of the land and, more importantly, how the deer in a specific area will react to human intrusion. Our hunting group and a couple of others I know have become proficient at pushing bucks past waiting hunters. Ideally, we like to have no more than six hunters involved in this type of a hunt. We have even made these pushes with as few as two people. Remember, the more hunters you have, the more human scent and noise you have.
How The Hunting Public MASTERED Deer Drives
First of all, we like to know where a certain buck or bucks may be bedding. We then send our standers into certain pre-arranged ambush points. At a designated time, one or two drivers start into the bedding area. Moving slowly and letting the wind blow directly from them to the deer, the pushers attempt to get the bucks to sneak out of the bedding area and past one of the standers. We like to make the bucks think that we’re not trying to drive or herd them in any way. If they suspect a setup, they’re more likely to remain hidden.
A few years back, five of us made two different pushes on the sixth day of the gun season. We killed three deer on those two pushes. Big deal, you might say. To us, it certainly was. You see, those three deer were taken in a block of land that was 18 miles square and without a through road. One of my hunting partners on that day, Paul Gumness, knows that piece of land as well or better than I do. Putting our heads together the night before we made those pushes, we came up with an effective plan of attack. It worked to perfection. On the second push, I shot a big, thick-necked eight-point buck with an 18½-inch spread. He was sneaking out the side of the push and heading for an alder-choked creek bottom when I ambushed him. Paul and I figured out exactly what that buck would do even before he did it.
We don’t always win. During the 1987 gun season, three of us played hide-and-seek with a monster buck for five days. It seemed that the buck always managed to do the right thing at the right time. On two separate occasions, I heard him walk by me on one of these pushes. Both times, he was in brush too thick to attempt a shot. I strongly suspect that the buck somehow knew exactly where I was positioned each time. Even though I was walking almost a mile out of my way to get into the area without being detected, that big fella knew the game plan. He was a perfect 10-pointer about 18 or 19 inches wide, with extremely long tines and good mass. I originally found this buck during the bow season and watched him tend a doe in a open beaver marsh on an early November evening. I was perched in a tree stand only 50 yards away, so you might say I got a real good look at him. He’ll be there again next year.
If we get a fresh snowfall, we can do much better at figuring out where a big buck may be holding. Although tracking down a big wilderness buck is tough business, it can be done. Once again, you must know the country intimately, if for no other reason than to just keep from getting hopelessly lost. (It’s no real pleasure to spend a night in the woods.) The bucks we’ve tracked definitely like to make a circle to get back to where we started them, but that circle may be five or six miles around. Attempting to get your standers ahead of the buck can be difficult at best. I’d say that you’re much better off tracking the deer alone or with one other person walking off to one side and slightly behind you. Sneak along and try to pick the buck off if and when he relaxes his guard.
Read Next: Tips and Tactics for Hunting Big Woods Bucks, with Brett Joy
Tracking a wilderness buck is not a method of deer hunting I would recommend to everyone. More times than not, the buck wins. And unless you actually see the deer that made the track you’re following, you could be taking an awful chance. I’ve seen very few deer hunters who could tell a buck track from a big doe track just by looking at them. There’s nothing more frustrating than tracking a big deer all day and then finding out that your “buck” is really a big, slick-headed doe. I’ve heard of it happening almost every year.
I have to admit, though, that we have taken up a rack simply by looking at it. But we hunt these same bucks all during the bow season. You might say that we get to know our deer intimately. And, some of the bucks are so large that there’s no doubt when you see their hoof print in the snow. Even if I run a buck such as this through a herd of other deer, I can still keep on his track at a trot. These bucks often have a track almost as large as a calf elk, so I can separate their print from another deer’s simply by glancing at it.
Wilderness whitetail hunting may not be even close to a sure thing, but that’s the way it is. It isn’t easy. The wilderness deer hunters I know who are consistently successful have gotten that way because of a lot of hard work and dedication. There’s no other explanation. Luck plays such a small role that it’s not even worth mentioning.
This story was originally published in the January 1989 issue of Outdoor Life.
Read the full article here
