Here's the piece I did for my Edmonton Sun (Edmonton Scum to some)outdoors page about my mega-buck. Hope it's doesn't bore you too bad.
Mrs. Greg. I wanted to go to K and K which is just up the street but there were all done doing game until January so I settled for Victoria Sausage. There were eight bucks and a moose on the rail up ahead of me. Which sounds like a pretty good vote of confidence. Usually I do my own but this time I wanted to get some racks cut and I don't have a band saw.
Yup, Haymaker I bought a pair of Wal-Mart cheaters a few years back for fly tying. I pretty well look through glass for most everything now. Including Alberta Premium.
Highwood outa High River is not bad either. Although I hate to admit it but Alberta Distilleries was bought out by Jim Bean a few years back.
Here's the yarn.
Deer in the Rear-view Mirror
By NEIL WAUGH
In whitetail deer hunting hind sight is clearly 20-20.
Where if you had half a chance to come back to earth, you'd want to return as an owl.
Not for any great love of mice and gophers. But for one of those manic heads that can swivel pretty close to 360 degrees. A useful adaptation for sure when hunting the wily whitetail.
Because no matter how carefully you pick your stand and read the wind for what you anticipate will happen in front, there's always this turmoil in your brain that something's going on out the back door. And you're destined to miss it.
Fatalism and destiny being the two other dominant themes in whitetail hunting.
Allow me to plead my case.
The morning hunt had not gone well. A long stand behind a bale produced no game. Even though the fresh snow in the hay field was riddled with doe tracks. And because it's the back end of November – when whitey gets that lovin' feeling – there are lot's of four-toed, foot-dragging tracks too. Revealing the presence of breeding bucks.
But not this morning.
A push by my brother-in-law Marvin through an 80-acre bush, where the deer bed during the day, was equally uneventful.
But then again one man in a wood that size, where the hazel nut screen cuts visibility to a few metres, gives the deer a titanic advantage.
Even though there were four well-worked game trails leading from the woods, nothing had emerged by the time Marvin's blaze orange vest came sliding through the trees.
There's always that few minutes of anxiety and anticipation on a drive hunt between when you reckon the pushers – or more to the point the deer that are hopefully 100 metres ahead of them – should arrive at where you're standing point.
And the disappointment when they do with no bucks to show.
So when we headed out on our afternoon hunt, it was not with a lot of confidence and enthusiasm. Although with whitetail hunting sometimes that's a good thing.
But the mood suddenly changed when we came around the corner of a fair-sized woodlot stuck in the northeast corner of a canola stubble. And hit fresh tracks.
In typical whitetail fashion they cross-crossed the field randomly. But there was also a fairly well-beaten path along the edge of the trees. And three points of entry too.
Either a lot of deer were using the area. Or one deer in particular had set up a patrol line – keeping his nose in the air for hot does as he trotted around his territory.
The deer highway cut the corner at the end of the field. Then headed along the line fence to some more deer-friendly country to the south.
The wind was swirling a bit but was coming mostly from the southwest. And there was still a good long haul until legal light. Except during the rut the bucks can be moving at anytime. And standard whitetail law – which says you only get deer action in the last half hour before the show is over – doesn't necessarily apply.
This looked like as good a place as any to take a stand and see what the remains of the day may bring.
Marvin crossed the fence to keep an eye on a barley field to the north. While I tucked into some second growth poplar with my back to the bushy hedgerow, jacked a round into the chamber of my Winchester, eased off the hammer, and relaxed.
Stand hunting is my favourite form of whitetail hunting. Even though it's mind-numbing boring. And involves a lot of scoping and hoping.
Except everytime you reckon you've got the dance floor before you figured out, the light changes. And that black stump or tawny lump of grass that you had in the Bushnells a few minutes earlier, suddenly looks like a buck. Until another scan of the binoculars tell you otherwise.
The rational and logical part of my brain had already sketched out a schematic drawing of how the hunt would go.
After an appropriate amount of standing around in the cold watching the snowbirds, a buck would emerge from the bedding woods at one of the three designated exits, travel along the trail until it was well within range of my little brush gun, and…
Well, there wouldn't be any "and."
But that other part of my noggin, where apprehension and anxiety lurk like coyotes around a gut pile, kept reminding me that the world is round.
And despite the wind direction and the obvious deer-hunting buffet that was spread before you, never forget what's going on behind your back.
Because you never know when you're going to find a deer in your rear-view mirror.
In retrospect, everything made perfect sense. But in the random chaos of real time, I'll never know what made me turn my head from the canola stubble to the hedge row.
Had I heard something? Or was it some kind of primal sixth sense that had clawed its way through the genetic fog?
When I looked, there was a buck looking back at me from behind a screen of choke cherries on the far side of the fence. Obviously making the rounds on his patrol line.
This is the part of whitetail hunting when things suddenly go from dead slow to fast forward.
I raised the gun to get a better look through the rifle scope. Fork horn. Probably from last spring's fawn crop. A good little freezer buck. But no bragging buck. Then in a flick of its white flag it was gone.
But not far. Decisions that should really be debated for hours, needed to be made in nanoseconds.
There was enough of a gap in the line-fence tangle where a shot might actually get through. The scope found a patch of brown neck, I pinched the trigger. The recoil drove the butt into my shoulder.
And it was done.
Like I said, whitetail hunting is all about hind sight.
