Today was opening day of rifle season in the Adirondacks. Heading down the road, I knew I was early enough to beat the crowd — at least I thought I was early enough. When I slowed down to pull into the place I wanted to park, I saw three other trucks parked there. The guys were just getting up, as they had spent the night in their trucks. There was a light frost, and the thermometer on my truck read 32 degrees.
It was almost impossible to keep track of where I was going due to all of the leaves, and it looks even thicker in the darkness. Finally, around daylight, I got to where I wanted to sit. Amazingly, I wasn’t drenched in sweat. I’m thinking it was because I could never get going at a fast pace. At 9:00 a.m., I could hear a dear walking in the leaves. Staring into the maze of leaves, I finally saw legs moving. Suddenly, a spike appeared in front of me, and I watched it feed for about 15 minutes. It got so close to me at one point, I think I could have jammed the barrel of the gun into its ribs. It was neat to be so close to a buck and know it was clueless about my presence.
Josh, Dad and Brian all hunted today too. Nobody saw a deer except me. That seems to be a chance of pace. By the time I got done adding up the guys in the woods surrounding me, I came up with seven guys. It’s kind of hard to be successful when you have seven guys ramming and jamming through the woods. It doesn’t take deer very long to become aware of the intrusion and move on. Some people simply don’t understand that you can’t keep pounding the same area and expect good results. Deer, especially big bucks, will not withstand more than two days of intrusions in most places. At least, that’s what my experiences in the past have shown me.
I don’t have much of a plan for tomorrow. I’m going to go to bed tonight and figure it out in the morning when I wake up. It’s usually not good when I don’t have a plan, but I didn’t expect to have that may people in the same area as me. I’ll head to another area in the morning and see what happens.