Within a hundred yards the blood trail had suddenly thickened and then gone cold. I had just lung-shot a spike buck on the meadow side of a ridge, and he had disappeared down the steep wooded backside of the mountain. He wasn’t much of a buck, but he was the first one I had ever dispatched in a non-vehicular fashion and I was disappointed to lose his track. Judging by the pattern of the trail it seemed that he had bolted and then bedded down a short way down the slope and then fled again as I drew near following the blood trail. I spent the rest of the day tracking him down a steep mountain side and through the meadows and creeks at the base of the ridge, but he had disappeared. I was sorry to lose him and was dead set to do better at the next opportunity.
The next opportunity wasn’t that far off. One afternoon a few weeks later I was out hunting a creek bottom tucked between a steep wooded ridge of oaks and laurels on one side and a hill that rose gradually up out of pinewoods into a meadow on the other. I was nearing a point where the creek disappeared upstream off the land I was hunting and onto a neighbor’s property, so I decided to follow a deer trail ascending the ridge to the right. The leaf covered trail went straight up at a steep grade though thickets of poplar saplings and low scrubby pines. As I scrambled and rustled up the path on my hands and knees, I heard a loud snort and a rush of breaking branches in a clump of pines immediately to my right. A moment later a fine eight-point buck strode out across the path no more than fifty feet ahead of me. I quickly unslung my rifle, aimed and fired as the stag bounded off unharmed through the straight rows of the hand-seeded pinewood planted along the crest of the ridge.
I watched him depart with regret, a figure to fleet and distant to chance a follow-up shot. I followed him into the pines disappointed, but not discouraged. Walking on the soft needles of the forest I began to strategize how I would take that buck.
Before dawn the next morning I climbed up the far end of the ridge about two-hundred yards from where I had spooked the deer and made my way silently through the soft carpeted needles beneath the neat rows of pines along the ridge crest. The orderly columns of trunks and boughs left a vista through the wood where one could see a hundred yards ahead and behind beneath their branches. I stalked the pine rows multiple times throughout the remainder of the season, but I never saw hide nor hair of my buck, nor any other deer.
When the next autumn rolled around, my brother-in-law and I took advantage of early squirrel season to start scouting the ridge. I was certain that the strategy I had implemented the previous year was sound; we climbed through the darkness and rustling dead leaves of the oaks and laurels at the far end of the ridge before the sub-horizonal sun began to soften the early morning sky. Upon reaching the pinewood at the top of the ridge we paused and waited in silence for sunrise before we began stalking along the ridge crest towards the far end where the buck had disappeared the previous year. About a third of the way along the top of the ridge there was a slight saddle in the terrain that paralleled the transition on the lower slopes of open oak wood to close dense thickets of poplar saplings. As the two of us made our way through the coniferous mountain hall, out of the density of the slender poplars appeared two does and a fawn, completely oblivious to our presence as they browsed through the saplings. It astounds me with what perfection our Lord has camouflaged the deer. One would not think its tan and white coat would blend as well as it does, but every time I see a deer in the wild it is movement and shape that I notice first and then color, and generally the color is a near perfect match to the pallet of sun dappled forest floor, especially on the fawns. We sat quietly and watched them for a moment before they saw us and nimbly trotted over the far side of the ridge. Closer inspection revealed the saddle was lousy with tracks, coming and going over the ridge from either side.
The first weekend of bow season found me on the ridge top an hour before dawn, leaned up against a tree where the land first started to fall away on the backside of the ridge. Around dawn a fair-sized doe came through the saddle headed for the stream, but she immediately started and ran when I rose to draw my bow. I hunkered back down and waited, looking over the crest towards the opposite side of the ridge. It was quite for a while, but somewhere between dozing and dreaming I had the distinct feeling I was being watched. I opened my eyes and there twenty feet in front of me was a pair of antlers and the head of a rather puzzled eight-point buck quizzically peering at me over the top of the ridge. He stood there staring intently for a moment before stepping behind a tree. The white vapor of his breath drifting skyward out from behind the dark trunk of the pine. It seemed as if he and I were transfixed there for an interminable moment, opposing and unmoving on either side of the ridge crest. Slowly I began to rise and draw back my shaft, maneuvering for a shot, but with the first motion he bolted back down the slope and disappeared into the thickets.
I saw him again the next weekend, fifty yards down the ridge, gallantly strolling after a pair of does that had spooked when they had seen me a few moments before. But not him. He was completely smitten and blind to peril, though the peril I presented was negligible, as he was completely outside bow range, at least as far as I was concerned. He soon disappeared again into the poplar thickets on his romantic assignation.
A shot never presented itself through the rest of bow season, but I wasn’t too concerned. As a scouting exercise the season had been a success; I had found a path up on to the ridge which allowed me to quietly position myself in the pines within easy rifle range of my quarry. When firearms season opened a few weeks later my .308 GSR Scout with a new 4x Leupold was sighted in and ready and I was on the ridge an hour before dawn with a clear line of sight through the hall of pines on the long axis of the ridge top. Naturally, nothing stirred all morning and the next morning was more of the same. The following weekend wasn’t any different and by the second Sunday I was beginning to worry that someone else had got my buck.
The following Thursday was Thanksgiving and I was sitting on top of the darkened ridge praying silently to stumble across something to be thankful for that morning. At sunrise I was posted up at the base of a pine with my back to the trailhead where I had first seen the buck almost a year before. I could see a hundred yards out to my front, with a clear view of the saddle through the ordered rows of trees planted along the crest of the ridge. It was a chilly morning, but I was comfortably snug, sitting on an old army blanket and wrapped up in a hooded alpaca-wool poncho that my wife had given me that week as an early Christmas gift. The coffee-brown poncho blended well with the boles and needles of the pinewood and I was confident that as long as I kept still I would not be noticed by any deer crossing through the saddle forty-yards to my front.
It is often the case that things don’t go exactly as planned and yet still seem to go exactly as they should. That Thanksgiving morning, I sat looking down the long axis of the ridge towards the saddle where I expected my quarry to appear and watched and waited for two hours for something to stir. The morning hunt was beginning to look like a bust and I was just getting ready to pack it in when I heard something behind me. It is difficult to see anything clearly out of the corner of one’s eye and it is even more difficult when what little one can glimpse lies outside the periphery of the lense of one’s glasses. Hard to my left I saw what seemed to be the tan hide of a deer cautiously treading through the pines, the slightest rustle registering as he made his way through the pine needles and low dead limbs. I could just discern antlers as my eye strained to its extreme trying to perceive the world immediately to my left. As the deer continued to quarter away from me, I saw it was a buck, but it was hard to say much more about him as he was constantly obscured by the pines. He seemed smaller and younger than the one I was hunting, maybe just a six-pointer, but at that point I wasn’t feeling terribly picky. I slowly pivoted to the left and with the greatest caution began to raise the rifle to my shoulder. The deer’s pace quickened, and he stepped behind a large pine. I led him as he emerged and fired when his shoulder cleared the trunk. The explosion of the shot transferred to a burst of energy in the buck as he leapt, bolted and disappeared down the backside of the ridge into thick low brush.
With regret, I chambered a fresh round and made my way through the pines to where I was certain I had missed hitting him. I cussed at rushing the shot, and I cussed at having my back to the trail I had first scouted, and I cussed that I had probably scared off the eight-pointer I really wanted, when, looking down by the base of the pine, I saw a tuft of white fur and drops of red blood. I grinned. It was a faint track and I followed it with meticulous care, afraid that I would spook the buck if he had bedded down close by, like the one I had lost the previous year. The drops were small and spaced out on the needles and leaves every few feet. I momentarily lost the trail where he had suddenly veered right to follow an old logging road, but as I made my way through the brambles, grass and scrub pine that had reclaimed the old road I saw where the blood began to flow free and thick and it wasn’t long before I found my quarry. It wasn’t a small buck and it wasn’t a six pointer. It was the fine eight-point stag I had been hunting for the last year, shot clean through the chest, dead on the ground not ninety yards from where I had fired.
He easily weighed near 200lbs on the hoof and was still around 150lbs or so once I had field-dressed him. It was no easy task getting him out over a quarter mile of typical south-west Virginia terrain, but it was worth it. In the end, the hunt had not gone exactly as I planned, but it had gone well. My quarry had followed the patterns I had observed the year before but then forgotten. The ground he covered when I shot him was the exact path he had used to evade me when I had first seen him there on the ridge. As I came home later that morning with my fine eight-pointer I was proud and thankful that the Lord had blessed my endeavors and my hunt had finally been a success.
The Wild Outlander 