I rushed to get out of work so I could get into the woods for the last few hours of daylight. The snow had melted a little bit, and the temperature had dropped. This combination made the leaves extremely crunchy. There was no chance of sneaking up on anything today.
I rested my back against a tree around 3:00 p.m. and waited for some action. The woods seemed pretty dead until the last half hour of daylight arrived. A few squirrels scurried through the snow and jumped from limb to limb in the trees above me. Blue jays cawed, and ravens made their presence known.
As daylight began to fade, I could hear a deer walking. I couldn’t sense where the noise was coming from, so I rotated my head to find the deer. When I saw it, I quickly identified it as a doe. It made its way past me and continued down the hill. Nothing followed it, so I gathered my stuff and headed out of the woods.
I packed my gear when I got home and made the trek up north to the tent, so I can sit for a few hours in the morning before returning home for Thanksgiving dinner. You all read that correctly. We are staying in a tent for the next four days. It will be good to go back in time, if only for a few days. There’s something about hunting in a tent that makes me feel confident. It’s probably because of all of the great memories I have of bucks hanging in the tree outside of our tent camp.
Here’s a picture of one from the past. I killed the buck on the right during a massive snowstorm, and it took us two days to get it back to the tent. My dad killed the smaller buck at the end of an extremely frustrating day, in which he missed a few good ones beforehand.
