I flexed a little bit of time at work today so I could get into the woods and cover some ground. I wanted to walk around the back of the mountain I’ve been hunting to see if I could locate an area where the deer have been feeding.
I expected to find more than I did. I made sure to navigate around the edge of two swamps where we’ve had a lot of luck in the past. The snow was a little deeper than I thought it was going to be.
By the time I got around the second swamp, I was highly disappointed in the number of tracks I had cut. I figured there would be a lot of sign along the ridge where we killed the Blizzard Buck many years ago, but nothing of any significance caught my attention.
As I wandered through a bottom where a bunch of fingers run down into it, I began to see more sign. I found an incredible scrape, one that I will have a camera on next year. It had a number of broken branches on the tree above it. I’m not sure if they all acted as licking branches as it appeared, or if a few bucks just caught the other branches in their antlers while they were using the scrape.
When I finally reached the top of the mountain and began my journey out, the wind picked up and howled with a vengeance. It blew right through me. I was glad when I finally arrived back at my truck. I didn’t see a deer tonight or much sign of any deer. I’m not sure where I’ll go in the morning, but I’ll be out there someplace. I live for this. I killed this deer when I was 16 years old. It was just a short distance from where I hunted today.
