It was about 10:30 AM and I would be the last to come out of the woods. I was by far the furthest away from our departure point earlier that morning, the opening day of the 2005/2006 season. I had hunted a small saddle on the property that bordered the large commercial apple orchard. This saddle was one of my favorite spots for morning hunts. The saddle itself was about eighty yards wide and perhaps two hundred yards long. The glacier that formed this geography some thousand years ago had created the perfect whitetail hideaway. At the edges of the saddle were large cedar trees that disguised the shear drop-offs to the creek beds below. A grove of ancient white oaks graced the middle of the saddle. The cedars provided perfect bedding for whitetails looking to escape the plague of insects that had yet to be eliminated by the first frost of the year. I learned from my father at a very early age that whitetails prefer to bed in cedars in late summer and early fall. He claimed that the cedars kept the bugs away much like my mothers large heirloom cedar chest that had been handed down from generation to generation. “A natural bug barrier” he would tell me and I would accept this fact at that tender young age when every word out of your fathers mouth was akin to being etched in twin tablets much like the commandments. In the half century I have hunted whitetails since he made this statement, I have found nothing to cause me to think he was not correct.
I was in my timbertall climbing stand that morning more so due to ritual then the actual thought that I might launch an arrow at a buck. The real opener was this afternoon when we would go to the bean field and kill the king. But, I was always in a stand on opening morning and this season opener would be no different then the countless openers that had proceeded. I was there to enjoy the sunrise. I always enjoy the sunrise. The small wrens were always the first to announce the beginning of the new day. Soon the blue jays and the robins would join the chorus. The woods at sunrise is a celebration of life, the joy at surviving the night and the prospect of living for another day. We humans have long lost sight of this fact. We grumble and complain and must have our coffee and caffeine to begin our day. Somewhere along the trail of our evolution we forgot how to celebrate the fact that we will live another day. We take it for granted. We think of things in the future, we make our plans. I think about this every opening day morning and I celebrate along with the animals. I vow to think about this more often but somewhere in the middle of February, I forget my vow, grumble and look for my coffee.
I was watching three mature does and five fawns feed on the sweet white acorns around 7:45 AM when I saw my first buck of the season. I knew this buck. I had observed this buck on this property for the past four years. He was never anything special and from his meager beginnings as a spike buck until last year’s effort, a very narrow albeit tall eight point rack, he never showed any sign of being a great buck. I was appalled by his appearance. He was emaciated. His right eye was virtually missing and it was apparent from the lines across his chest and neck that he had been on the business end of a larger bucks antlers last year. He sported the same high narrow eight point rack as he had last year only this year it was even narrower, almost freakish in design. He walked with a limp and never really seemed to put any weight on his front right leg. I knew he would never see spring again and would die during the winter only a short eight weeks ahead. Had I been hunting in a multi buck state, I would have killed him and spared him the slow death he was undoubtedly going to experience. But we only kill one buck here. My tag would not be used to spare him from his fate. He would die as nature had dictated when he fought that larger and stronger buck. His genes would no longer course though the collective local population of whitetails. He was inferior, and he had been chosen for elimination. Mother Nature is very good at deciding who should be eliminated. She has been doing so for eons.
Most of the morning hunt I thought about the king. We were only going to have two realistic opportunities to get within bow range of him this entire season. The first would happen this afternoon. If we screwed up this afternoon, we would not see the king again until the rut and even that chance would be by shear happenstance. I did not want the king to live until the rut. It’s not that I didn’t want him to leave lots of “little kings” behind; I just didn’t want him to leave my little exclusive hunting area. The king would roam during the rut. He was indeed the king of his domain and there were no bucks that I had seen that were going to challenge his crown. His core living area was within my hunting domain and his favorite bedding area on the gun club was only accessed via my neighborhood. His breeding area however would be vast and put him well outside his core range. It would put him in front of other hunters. Most of his pre-rut activity would take place close to the sanctuary of the gun club so I knew we would not see him during that phase, not in daylight hours anyway. He would not run the does early on like the young inexperienced bucks, he knew better. No, we would only see him when the rut was in full bloom. Our chances this afternoon to kill the king were infinitely better then the chances of killing him during the rut. I kept reviewing our plan over and over again in my mind as the morning sun warmed the back of my neck. What had we overlooked? What had we missed? There is always something, of that I was positive. I have screwed up hunts for whitetail bucks my entire life so I am somewhat of an authority on this subject. I have been busted by a major whitetail buck in every possible circumstance and unfortunately, in every possible position. You know the drill, you’re slowly turning in your stand or you look from one side to the other and you see him looking right at you. You freeze in what ever position you are in as soon as you see him. Of course you never give any thought to where your arms and legs are in relationship to your eyes. You just freeze. And as you become this ridiculous statue you lock eyes with the buck in a stare down that you know you cannot win, but you play anyway. You remain motionless and your body starts to send you little messages like “time to lower your arm now; your shoulder muscles are organizing a strike vote.” But you press on, locked in a mortal test of wills with the buck. When it becomes obvious that you cannot remain motionless a second more, you adopt the theory that if you move slow enough he wont notice the movement. And as you make yours best attempt to duplicate the technology used to review pro football slow motion replays, the buck now locks in on you even more and after stomping his foot once is gone in an instant. We’ve all been there. And what if the wind did not come from the west as forecast, what then? We could not take our positions as planned. If the wind was not just perfect, we simply would not hunt the king and the bean field in the afternoon. Schrader would go along with me on this. We would just have to once again set the lawn chairs up in the pickup bed, have a few beers, pretend to look for finches and scour the field for the king.
As I left the woods and entered the small grassy area next to the long gravel driveway where we left the two trucks some hours ago, I could see part of a deer antler extending above the top edge of the pickup bed of my tundra. I immediately knew two things. First, this was a large buck. It had to have a great spread judging by how much antler was sticking up above the side of the pickup bed. And second, it had to be Doc that shot it. If Shrader or Becker had shot the buck, it would be in the back of Shrader’s F-150. The closer I got the louder the celebration became with Becker and Shrader giving simultaneous epiphany’s on the size of the animal and his glorious head adornment. And there was Doc, sitting on the tailgate of the Tundra looking like he just had been elected man of the year by Outdoor Life magazine. He smiled from ear to ear and when he saw me approaching he got up off the tailgate and appeared to stand at attention like he was ready for a full inspection of both he and the great animal he had just harvested.
The buck was a magnificent ten point with ivory white antlers, tall and wide. I had not seen this deer before and that told me that I had been lax in both my scouting and hunting of this property. As I mention earlier, this property that borders the apple orchard has produced good bucks in the past and I had not given it proper attention due to my addiction to the king. “What did I tell you yesterday about this place!” I said to my three companions trying to conjure up my best impersonation of an all-knowing soothsayer. “I told you we could see a big buck here!”
I was delighted for Doc. This was far and away the best buck he had seen other then the king, and to actually have killed him was almost too much for him to take. I thought he was going to burst. He told us the details of how the buck came into the white oak grove and started to feed on the acorns. When he came right under the tree Doc was in he told us he got so nervous he thought he was going to have a heart attack We took the buck to a patient of Doc’s that has a big walk in cooler and went out to breakfast. We made Doc tell us the story over and over again and the three of us reveled in the joy we saw in him as he told it. Finally, after all these years the monkey was off his back. He was no longer the one who didn’t have any good stories to brag about when the four of us were together. It was if he had just been granted membership in the club, as if he was now officially a member of the “four horseman”. As we were leaving the restaurant to go back to my house to get some rest before the evening hunt for the king, Shrader turned to me and said “There are pigs all over Florida celebrating today.”
Below is a picture of the author with Doc's buck at the taxidermist before the mount was completed.
