After taking yesterday off from hunting to go do some shopping and then settle in front of the tube and watch the Giants (yea!) and the Jets (BOOOOO!) it was time to venture out on the hunting trail again this morning.
The mouse in the wall must not have gotten the notice about Daylight Savings Time ending a couple weeks later this year. Instead of its usual 3 AM work, it started at 2 AM. Like I said, it missed the notice and turned its clock back two weeks early. I managed to convince the critter to go away and went back to sleep to awake to the alarm at 5:45 AM.
Feed the cats, make some coffee, eat some hot oatmeal, and then get dressed for the 17-20 degree temperatures. All that and I was out the door at 6:30 AM with my folding stool, rifle and backpack. I walked down an old skidway under the light of the now near third quarter moon and was able to miss almost all of the puddles along the way to a spot where I hoped to ambush a deer heading northeast.
As I neared the point where I wanted to find a seat, at 7:05 AM (before legal shooting hours or sufficient light to shoot under any circumstances), it happened. Fifteen or twenty yards ahead of me in some very thick beech saplings and the slash (tree tops) left from last winters logging, a deer snorted, jumped deeper into the woods, snorted a half dozen more times and then trotted back to the southwest from whence I assume it came.
I have no way of knowing if this was a buck or a doe. Does will sometimes snort like that to communicate with their fawns I am told and we have one doe in the area that is still nursing two fawns she birthed in late July. There is another that is still hanging around with her daughter from last year. A buck will snort like this as an alarm call or just to say he is pissed that something he can't quite identify is walking about in his woods. It sounded like it was just one deer but, hey, you never know.
I stood frozen in my tracks for five minutes hoping it would be as curious as the deer I played tag with on Friday, but it didn't return. Even if it did come back, the growth was so thick that even in the early, brightening, light of dawn, a shot would have been very difficult.
When the deer did not return after nearly 10 minutes, I moved on down the skidway to a small knoll where I found an area that was relatively open and offered a hundred-yard view for about 270 degrees. I picked out a tree to set up against, unfolded my little stool and shucked my backpack, and sat.
And sat some more.
And sat even more.
I sat from around 7:20 AM until 10 AM and then decided to pack it in as I watched clouds start to roll in. There was still some wood out in the open that needed stacking (I took almost all of Sunday off) and the latest forecast I had heard on Sunday night was calling for rain showers late Monday and through much of Tuesday.
I found Mark still hanging around his place when I returned. The creep never even went out. Nor had he answered my radio calls at 9 and 10 AM. He was outside his place doing chores--he says. To be fair, he's been complaining about a cold coming on and downed nearly a full bottle of night time cold medicine that had him conked out in the middle of the Sunday Night Football game. I'm not sure I would have wanted him in the woods with a rifle under those conditions.
Marls a bit discouraged by the lack of sign and pattern by the bucks right now. He says he wants to see signs that the deer have gone into the rut. Currently, the bucks are still hanging out in bachelor packs and there are no scrapes or tree rubs to be found. (Except in the apple orchard right behind my garage and barn where several maple saplings and small apple trees got themselves rubbed quite badly the end of September. One small poplar in the bunch got rubbed for a second time in two years and has been knocked over. That's a 15 foot tall and 3-4 inch thick tree at waist height I'm talking about.) Rubs and, especially, scrapes made on the ground are signs of territorial behavior by the bucks. With any luck, the rut should be beginning this week as the moon wanes toward the new.
Also, with a little luck, we might have some tracking snow on Wednesday morning. The weather gurus are forecasting showers tomorrow, as I mentioned. That's a cold front moving through that will drag the night time lows even lower. Tuesday's showers will become snow flurries and may accumulate 1-3 inches by Wednesday morning.
I may pass on going out Tuesday morning if the showers are around. I've got sufficient rain gear but my rifle doesn't. Scopes and such do not care for water. besides, with the promise of snow for Wednesday morning I'll want all my energy to try walking up a deer.
This afternoon was spent putting the rest of the wood in the barn and into the woodshed. All that is left out now is stuff that will go back to the Aerie and that is under a cover of several sheets of tin roofing.
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