Patience Pays Big Dividends

Two hundred and seventy minutes.. Four and one half hours. Day nine, high up in the old choke cherry triangle. Buttsore. Stiff. Not bored, but horny for action.

I just knew bucks had to be running wild this morning. Dark skies, cold, damp air. Steady nor’west winds. I could taste spawn in the oxygen. I could smell it. The ponytail was at full mast and I was bug-eyed, nostrils flaring. The old wounded rock and roll ears were hearing perfectly once again. My squinty middle-aged eyes were seeing like an eagle. I sensed the oak leaves dying and the barometer falling. My instincts were on fire. Predator Teditor in all his glory. But getting impatient. Where are all the damn deer? Should I gargle Tedstosterone?

Nugent with late-day buck of a lifetime.

It happened all at once, as if He pulled a switch. A huge ten pointer busted out of the pinegrove in hot pursuit of a small yearling doe. Tailgating their vapor trail was another big bruiser with at least eight tall tines on his heavy, wide rack. A deep guttural grunt cut the fall air and the threesome vanished into the dark timber. Getting exciting now! Yet another good eight point brought up the rear, and I stopped him cold in his tracks with a deep burp from my ribbed A-WAY gruntcall. He stared my way, ears erect and statue still. Twenty feet high in my sturdy API treestand, I and my Mossy Oak camo blended into the background of trees and scattered leaves.

He began walking directly towards my ambush perch. I slowly raised my bow, anticipating the shot when the doe ran out of the pines between us. He was off and running with a noseful of hot wang dang sweet doe tang, in heat, on the hoof. Who could blame him?

Uh oh! Directly downwind stood another large doe. The Buck Stop Wang Dang Sweet Doe Tang and Autumn Scent spray worked flawlessly, and she became the perfect decoy! Just 150 yards away, a huge-bodied buck began thrashing an autumn olive bush, antlers flashing. I examined him in with my compact Leupold binoculars as he took out his frustrations on the unsuspecting autumn olive tangles.

I figured he felt left out of the fun and games, so I cupped a hand over my mouth and gave a loud, sexy, high doe bleat. The buck stopped his aggressions and looked my way. He saw the doe behind me, and here he comes! YOWSA! At a fast trot, nose down and grunting, he was hellbent for the she-deer call. I readied my bow as Tim Hart, videographer for our Ted Nugent Spirit of the Wild TV show, began rolling tape on one of the most exciting events you can experience in the wild.

The big buck covered the distance in moments and was now broadside, hesitating. He was 22 yards away, head up, radaring the surroundings. I was already at full draw, pulling with my back muscles, as he stepped clear of the few limbs that obscured his vitals. My 440-grain arrow was in and out of his chest in a flash. Nantucket slayride of the senses.

It was over in an instant. He scrambled to the edge of the dense autumn olive stand, paused and leapt a last mighty leap into the grove. And all was silent. A woodpecker called nearby. The Great Spirit had smiled down upon me and all the woodland creatures around. And it was good.

Tim and I had started out that morning in the pitch-black pre-dawn stillness, sitting silently 20 feet up in the middle of a big woodlot. A line of tall, straight cherry trees ran along a ridge of ancient white oaks. My observations of beautiful bucks over the last month gave us grand expectations, particularly with the rut coming on strong. According to theory, the does would still be feeding on the remnant acorns of the darker forest. Romeo bucks would be staking them out for that intense window of herbivorous courtship. But after three and a half hours of waiting, we were beginning to have doubts.

Our statue-still vigil gave way to sore butts. We were bewildered as to where all the deer might be on such a perfecto morning. Around 9:30 we descended and opted for plan B. We saw one grand buck flash by through the thickets, and our spirits soared. Keeping wind direction in mind, we headed for an old reliable ambush site–and were ultimately rewarded with the lifetime thrill just described.

The moral? A hunter has to stay out there if he wants to get a buck. He won’t find one back at camp as he sits in front of the fire. There’s a growing belief among trophy deer hunters that the killer time to get a dominant buck is mid to late morning rather than the traditional first and last hours of shooting light each day. I intend to try those alternative hours more often as my deer-hunting adventures continue.

Give it a shot. Maybe this tactic spells backstraps and improved hornage for you. You may be the same old dog, but it never hurts to try new tricks.

It was just after sunup in late February.. Two friends and I had just left our warm truck and hiked 100 yards uphill to enter a stand of aspen trees on a ruggedly picturesque Utah mountainside. While we were 6,000 feet above sea level, we were barely above the base of the mountain. The thermometer registered in single digits. We could hardly wait for the sun to clear the mountaintop behind us and start the temperature climbing.

I had hunted cottontails and jackrabbits extensively, but this was my first experience with snowshoe rabbits, more accurately known as varying hares. These big four- to six-pound hares are plentiful throughout Canada and Alaska. They’re also found in the northern and north-eastern tier of states, as well as in the Rocky Mountain West and along parts of the Cascade and Sierra Mountains. While they can sometimes be found in lowland swamps, snowshoe rabbits usually prefer mountainous terrain.

You don’t need dogs to hunt snowshoe rabbits successfully.

That was a fact I quickly discovered. Four inches of fresh, impossibly dry powder snow had fallen during the night, and we could seen dozens of fresh rabbit trails winding through the woods. There had to be rabbits nearby, but—except for tracks—we could see no other sign of these animals.

In many parts of the country, varying hares are hunted with hounds—keen-nosed canines that do most of the work. With baying hounds at its heels, the rabbit almost invariably circles back after a short chase. If the hunters patiently stay put, they’re likely to be rewarded with a brief glimpse of the fleeing hare as it flashes by. They may get one quick shot before the animal is again swallowed up in the snow-covered forest.

Without the benefit of four-legged help, we had to rely on sharp eyes alone to find our prey.. This wasn’t as easy as we hoped. Each of us set out to follow a different set of tracks, reasoning that there had to be a hare at the end of it. A frustrated hour later, we were still looking. There were tracks everywhere, but not a rabbit to be found. The critters had seemingly vanished into thin air.

Finally, the tracks I was following seemed to peter out. They simply ended! There was no nearby brush the animal could have hopped into without leaving evidence. Puzzled, I stared hard at the spot the trail ended. I focused, then re-focused my eyes, looking ahead of and to either side of the last blurry indentations. It took a minute, but I finally spotted a single hard, black speck against the all-white field. I could hardly believe it was the animal’s eye until I gradually identified an ear rising above it.

I stared so long and hard at the spot, the hare finally realized it was busted and took off in a powdery spray of snow. Once the animal was moving, it was easier to see. I brought my Remington 870 pump up and dropped my first snowshoe rabbit.

I’d discovered the key to hunting these pure-white critters without using dogs. You didn’t try to look for an entire animal against a snowy field. Instead, you concentrated on trying to spot that hard, black, shiny eye. The animal’s instinctive habit of freezing in place, relying on natural camouflage to save it, also helped. Once you found tracks that inexplicably ended, you could start looking for a giveaway eye.

As I’ve already noted, rabbits in motion were easier to see. We managed to kick a couple out of snow-laden brush piles. Again, the clue was tracks going into a brush pile, and none coming out.

Like other hares and rabbits, snowshoe rabbits are plentiful in some years, extremely scarce in others. For some unknown reason, their populations wax and wane on roughly a nine- to ten-year cycle. In wintertime, varying hares can be found among stands of conifers, and also feed on the bark of aspen, birch and willow. In addition to being fun to hunt, these ghost-like animals are excellent table fare.