Facing up to botching a stalk

By By Otha Barham / outdoors editor
Feb. 6, 2004
Alright, I have finally proven beyond all doubt what I have suspected for a long time. I am among the world's worst stalkers of big game animals. Shooting houses, ladder stands, climbing stands and green fields have ruined me. I am spoiled rotten. I couldn't slip up on a blind hog hanging in a processing plant.
What, you ask, has revealed this certain truth? I spooked a deer. Or I should say another deer. Well, the whole of it is I spooked two deer. At least two deer.
Here it was, the last day of the black powder/bow hunting season, which means the positively very last day to legally take a deer during the 2003-04 deer season. Having been out of service because of a bum shoulder during the entire rut and hearing daily (make that hourly) from thoughtless cohorts about nearly being trampled by amorous bucks chasing every doe in sight, I was happy to have a couple of days at the end of the season to hunt one of these exhausted deer.
I needed one more deer for the freezer and to make jerky with Billy Morgan's recipe. Any deer would do. A doe would be fine.
So I hunted on Friday from a shooting house that overlooked a green planting adjoining a large acreage of thick cover that had gone largely undisturbed during the long season. At least one of every known wild animal in this hemisphere, except a whitetail deer, had paraded across that green field, sashaying through succulent, ankle-high oats while I watched the procession day after day early in the season.
My day?
Friday would be the day. A buck would show at last and even out the odds. I had earned a buck. And on Friday, the payoff would come. But I waited until dark, thumb on the safety, and drew yet another blank.
So I left home while Saturday morning, the last day of the season, was just a hint of light in the east. I took provisions to spend the entire day in the woods if need be to bag one of those many deer that the biologists have assured us are too numerous for maintaining a healthy herd. I was meat hunting. A scrawny doe; anything.
All morning in another shoot house. More animals stirred on the land in the days just before Noah opened the doors of the ark. I didn't even see a buzzard, although once I thought I glimpsed a dove flying over with an olive leaf in its mouth.
While back at my truck for lunch, I decided to walk over to a friend's green field out of curiosity, a field I had not seen since he had established it. I knew that the fellow had closed his season days before.
As I approached the field, I peered through a dense tangle of brush and vines and thought I could make out a shape that could be a deer feeding on the green grass. Squinting through the tiniest slit in the thicket, I eventually saw a slight movement and, yes, it had to be a deer.
The wind was blowing in my face. All I had to do was ease along on the quiet pine straw for another 10 yards and I would clear the thicket and have a tree on which to rest my rifle and touch off 130 grains of Pyrodex and send the 348 grain elk bullet out there to do a number on the helpless deer. I could taste the jerky already.
The stalk
I eased forward without making a whisper of a sound. The brush was so thick that this deer could not see me through it, and besides, it would not likely be staring right in my direction since there are 360 degrees on the compass available for its viewing and I was occupying only one of those degrees. Great odds, right?
Guess what. My next peep through an opening the size of a bacteria revealed a white flag waving goodbye to me as the deer leaped into the far woods line. And beside him/her was another flag, and I think a third one. Had there been an opening the size of a dime I might have seen a whole gaggle of the disgustingly prancing creatures.
All I had to do was to lie down and crawl up to the field and I could have taken my pick from the herd. But no. Mr. Stalky-pants could handle this one with no problem. Riiiiight.
I had all afternoon back in the stand that, because it had not produced Friday nor any day this year had to be due, to stew over my ineptitude. My whining continued uninterrupted by the appearance of a deer until black dark.
So much for my Daniel Boone aspirations. I am a stalking failure. Leave me alone. I want to feel sorry for myself.