By Rich Miller
I hope everyone is close to getting their Christmas shopping done. I am pretty much done with mine but all I had to get was some stuff for my son and wife. Thankfully, my wife got everything for everyone else and I didn’t have to do all of that. In between working and all this hectic Christmas shopping I did get a chance to get into the woods last week; and man did I have a good hunt!
I got in the woods Thursday evening and sat on a power line where we had a ground blind set up. There were a lot of signs going in, so I thought there might be a good chance of seeing some deer while I was there. Well, I was right because that evening I did see a lot of deer but they were all about 500 yards away from me up the power line where there was a box stand. I think there were about six bucks and one of them was a nice one. He was chasing a doe and came across the power line too quickly to get a shot at him.
The next morning I thought I had everything figured out and moved to the box stand where all the deer were crossing the evening before. Sure enough, not long after daylight a small buck crossed the same place they were all crossing the night before. The next deer I saw were a few does about 50 yards on the other side of the blind where I was at the previous evening. Well, you guessed it, behind them was a buck and he was a pretty decent deer; but him being 700 yards away didn’t do me any good.
I contemplated moving, but didn’t have time to because that’s when a monster stepped out! I saw the bone on that buck before I ever picked up my binoculars. He was a wide and heavy eight point and he was on the trail of the does, also. I picked up my grunt call and was blowing on it like a trumpet in hopes that the deer would hear me. A couple of times he did look my way, but of course he didn’t leave those does. I stayed in the stand hoping he might push the does up my way. Ten minutes later I looked back that direction and there was that big buck again standing beside the ground blind. Out came my calls again and I threw everything I had at him! I think I got his attention a few times but I could tell where his mind was. I sat there until almost noon and saw my last deer at 10:30.
I should have known when I changed stands all the deer would come out at the ground blind, but that’s hunting. I have made moves like that in years past that paid off, but this time it ended up biting me in the butt!