The last day of the 2008 rifle season, for deer, set me up with a brief encounter with a buck who would be king. It could have been my nemesis buck, the Grey Ghost, but this contact was in a different swamp and in a different area.
It was a cold, snowy, and frosty morning. The frozen ground under my feet echoed with loud crunches of my boots attempting to move me along, in stealth, along grandpa’s narrowing road toward the pond. My journey down this aged logging road would be about 15 minutes as I would walk a few steps and then stop to listen to anything that may ‘bolt’ during my approach to the backwatch.
The backwatch was a portion of a ridge that we would stand on to cover the route deer would usually take to evade a ‘driver’ (a hunter walking through a particular portion of bush to force deer toward other hunters).
As I walked along I had to step around several FRESH deer scrapes on the ground. In some spots along the trails there were two scrapes side by side. All had been done within hours, if not minutes, of my walk down to the watch. I sprayed each one with a squirt of my bottled doe urine and kept my finger close to the safety on my gun.
It looked very encouraging.
Eventually, I came to the point in the road where I would head up onto the high ground that overlooked the road and these fresh scrapes. I scented the last two scrapes with my bottled magic and sprayed some neighboring trees as well. It was important that I draw some attention to this location.
As I looked up the hill, where I needed to go, I took one step into the bush and then I heard the spine tingling sound of a ticked-off buck snorting. Three times that buck snorted and stomped before I heard it crash away from me. It had been standing just out of site past the spot on the ridge we like to watch. I needed to be here 1 hour earlier and this scenario could have been different.
His snowy track was huge. His leaps were few. I gave up tracking close to grandpa’s pond but made sure to remember the direction they were heading. Just past an old pine tree, in view of the pond, waits the lair of the Swamp King.
*This post was imported from my old blog location. The buck in the photo above was seen in 2010 close to the Swamp King's Lair. I'll be back there this year.
