Want to kill more deer this season? Then get off the food plots.
Artie’s camp was already cranking when we pulled up elegantly late, near 9 p.m. on Friday. The slashing riffs of Jumping Jack Flash boomed through the camp’s walls and into Pelayo’s truck as Chris opened the door.
We could imagine Eddie on the booray tabletop doing his Mick at Madison Square Garden routine, which closely mimics his “Jim Morrison at The Warehouse” gig — except Eddie had driven up with us. Eddie’s “Joe Cocker at the Warehouse” gig tops even John Belushi’s, by the way.
Already in a festive mood, Eddie seemed eager to make up for lost time, grabbing his duffel bag and storming through the door ahead of everyone. Pelayo looked over and shook his head.
“Eddie’s got that look,” he frowned. “You know, the same one he got at his (first) wedding reception, right before he jumped on stage and started belting out Tom Petty’s You Got Lucky Babe!”
We all nodded. The ride up had been festive, now the “festivities” threatened to really explode. Eddie stormed through the door and pointed at the table in the corner piled with glossy hunting magazines.
“So Artie — what’s with all those deer hunting magazines?! ‘How to this, and ‘how to’ that,” he mimicked with a faux redneck accent.
Then he picked one up, turning randomly to an article.
“Primary Mast — The Candy Deer Gobble First!” Eddie read out the title excruciatingly slowly, while holding up the magazine and super-exaggerating the redneck accent.
“I mean WHAT’S the POINT?!” Eddie laughed, but maliciously. “Y’all wanna learn which trees to cut down or poison to death first?! Hunh? Is that IT?!”
Eddie looked around at a suddenly subdued camp crowd. The music went down and a few people started looking at each other, frowning and rolling their eyes.
“Remember last year?” Eddie plowed ahead. “Well, I do. And I well remember how last year the excuse y’all come up with for ‘dey ain’t moooovin’ (now he mimicked a YAT accent) was TOO MANY acorns! Dey had so much to eat in the woods. Dey had no reason to come out to the places y’all hunt almost exclusively, the food plots that cover this place,” Eddie waved his arm around, “at least during daylight. So why don’t we plan a work-detail weekend to chop down and poison all the oak trees! Won’t that make us all better hunters? Ya follow me!”
He turned to another magazine. “Primary Browse — the Vittles that Nourish Deer. “Nourish deer?!” Eddie roared. “With all the lime, fertilizer, clover, ryegrass, peas, chicory blah … blah … blah that y’all plant around here, you can nourish all the deer in the Florida parishes! And y’all nourish ‘em all they need — but mostly at MIDNIGHT! What’s the point?
“DON’T ANSWER! I know good and well what’s the point because I come up on those work weekends too — and have a BLAST, not that it has anything to do with actually increasing the chances of actually shooting a deer. For that purpose, I know people who — now sit down and pour a stronger drink for this bombshell – who actually venture into the woods and HUNT!”
“Heck, Eddie!” said Spencer trying to defuse the scene as he held up his iPad. “I’m all pumped for tomorrow’s hunt! Got three new video games downloaded. I’ll be plenty occupied on my stand all morning long!”
“OK, but keep the text messages to five per hour,” said Nick while holding up his Blackberry. “Cause I know I’ll be getting at least that many from Artie, and heck, I gotta pay attention to the food plot every ONCE in a while.”
“Hey Eddie,” Artie said as he got up with a groan on his way to crank the music back up. “Speaking of pointless magazines, I remember you sure piled them up back in our Tigerland bungalow. Did all those Playboys and Penthouses help you score at Zachary’s, the White Horse or the Brass Rail?”
The room went quiet, and all smirking faces turned to Eddie. Half the faces had also been Eddie’s Tigerland neighbors and roommates. They all struggled to stifle guffaws.
“So where’s my bunk tonight?” A suddenly subdued Eddie asked as he stumbled through the nearest door, dragging his duffel bag without waiting for an answer.
In minutes Eddie was back out, and as charming as ever.
“Planting stuff, building box stands and judging antler scores — you guys call that hunting?” he said. “You guys are farmers, gardeners, carpenters and ranchers — not hunters. Which is fine, but why not come out and admit it?” he looked around with a less malicious smile this time. “I mean why even wear camo? I know it makes you look like a hot-shot hunter when you hit the convenience store to buy more beer and flirt with the cashier. But you’re in a freakin’ box stand all the time? What’s the point?”
The faces in the room got redder than the bridesmaids’ faces at Eddie’s (first) wedding reception. Pelayo looked over grimacing and nodding. Chris whistled lowly. “Whooo-boy… he’s getting cranked up again.”
“Ah! so you got ‘em patterned ‘cause you started bow hunting Oct. 1, right Jake?” laughed Eddie. “WRONG! Instead, after you got the first one after the year’s first little front, you made most of the others in your area nocturnal, and before the freakin’ gun season even opened! They patterned YOU TOO. The rumble and lights of a four-wheeler. The clatter of climbing in a stand. The scent — come on! It doesn’t take them long to realize: ‘Hey, it’s that time of the year again, gang! OK guys and gals, from now on we follow the habits of bats and owls!”
“Sounds like a great motivational-educational seminar, Eddie,” laughed Jake. “Maybe you can go on tour, giving it at Bass Pro Shops across the South.”
But Eddie finally shut down, and the rest of the evening passed “ooing ” and “aaahing” at game cam pictures — none snapped during daylight, needless to say. None of the “youngins” (sons, nephews, etc.) showed up either. The only deer hunting they like is dog-hunting with their country cousins. “More fun” they claim. “More action.”
And who can blame them? Think about it: How many of US deer hunted as kids — much less from a stand? I sure didn’t. To keep me in one would have taken a straightjacket and shackles. No way. We hunted squirrels, rabbits, beer cans, doves, ducks, hubcaps, poul deau, armadillos, bleach bottles, nutrias, black birds, Coke bottles, grackles, raccoons, junked washing machines, sparrows, etc.
Point is, we went roaming around blasting anything and everything that moved — and many things that didn’t. That night we recounted the carnage while watching Morgus the Magnificent. Things were different 40, 30, even 20 years ago.
Nowadays, what’s a kid supposed to do with his first .22 rim-fire or crack-barrel 20 gauge, or even his pump pellet gun? He can’t just find the first stretch of woods, barge in and start blasting, reloading, blasting, reloading, peppering the dryer with a full magazine from the .22, refilling it and shattering the windows and stitching the fins on the junked Plymouth.
Take the typically rambunctious 12-year-old. Take the typically testosterone-addled 18-year-old. Who expects them to take to a sport where the most dangerous part — according to national statistics — is falling out of your stand because you fell asleep! Alas, iPads and Blackberrys have greatly ameliorated that danger recently.
On some of those swanky hunts in the Southwest Louisiana rice country with those fancy permanent, dry blinds, and those permanent decoys, we horrified our hosts by forsaking the comfort and squatting in wax myrtle branches a good 200 yards AWAY from the comfy blinds and pre-set decoys. Something about watching 98.7 percent of the ducks land in this area that caused a light to go off in our heads! Hey! Just maybe after four weeks of shooting, the ducks got hip to this blind and decoys! So they land way over THERE! HMMM? It’s worth a shot!” we concluded.
In fact it was worth many shots for each of us.
Returning to the camp with limits and comparing them to the total of two teal and a blackjack shot by three comfy blinds combined meant nothing, of course. What with the cooking, booray, boozing, Tigerland reminiscing and the Saints game, actually hunting ducks had a very, very low priority on this duck hunt.
But the principle of setting up AWAY from the main attraction stuck with us for some late-season Delacroix area hunts, and even influenced our deer hunting.
Pelayo had set up a game-cam a quarter mile from his food plot. He backtracked what looked like the most heavily rutted trail into the plot, which followed a brushy creek branch studded with privet and arrowhead (all heavily browsed), and set the cam where it intersected with another two deer ruts. No doubt his Austrian peas and clover were attracting deer, but the creatures were making their grand entrance into the plot a trifle too late to offer a shot — about three hours too late. The lush creekside browse seemed to be their appetizers en-route to the main course.
Now we “oohed” and “aahed” at the only game-cam pics snapped during legal shooting hours — Pelayo’s. His cam had snapped on several deer right at dusk. One pick was from dawn. None of the deer were monsters, but all were certainly trophies by our standards, especially the does. So Pelayo followed the trail even deeper into the abominable pine thickets, until he found the semblance of an opening (about 40 square yards), and there he set his climber on a skinny blackgum barely big enough to hold it.
“Reminded me of those little willows we used to climb to bowhunt at Pass-A-Loutre pre-Katrina,” Pelayo remarked. “But it was the biggest tree around. “If I could swing it drawing a bow off Dennis Pass, I could sure swing it aiming my rifle here.”
On the same scouting trip, I’d ventured into a small grove of sparse water oaks surrounded by a hellish jungle of briars, smilax vines, yaupon, wax myrtles and other instruments of arm-flesh laceration and facial mutilation. I guessed I’d found a “bedding area.”
Deer also seemed to be feeding on the few tiny acorns under these crippled oaks. But they also seemed to be browsing on the 50-square acres of tropical tangles all around me, courtesy of some select cutting greatly augmented by Katrina years earlier.
I needed the exercise, hacked a semblance of trail through the thickets and set up my climber, after bow-sawing away many limbs from a stunted tupelo gum. The season was still a couple weeks away, and I figured they’d be using the very trail I’d laboriously hacked when I returned to try and ambush them.
A hundred pounds of corn spread thinly between the greenbriar, blackberry, french mullberry, privet, muscadine, arrowhead and yaupon that covered the ground between the oaks, all of it heavily browsed, might add inducement and traffic to my makeshift trail, I reasoned. Food plots and corn certainly work. But deer require variety in their diet. And here they had it with bells on.
An hour before light, Pelayo dropped me off his four wheeler on the way to his ambush, and I trudged in. Eddie, Mr. Hot-Shot Serious hunter, elected to sleep in, claiming his usual: “I’ll make an evening hunt.”
My flashlight revealed that my trail was rutted with tracks, and even fresh droppings, both the Milk Dud and Raisinette type. So I got pumped. Hopefully, my climber had not been stolen. And if I flushed deer from the thickets en route to my hopefully-unstolen climber — well, that improved the chances of a shot for Pelayo or Artie. I was their “dog.”
In my experience, trails leading to (what appear like) bedding areas are more reliable. Trails to (what appear like) feeding areas tend to change during the season, as the food preferences change, as persimmons and white oak acorns run out, for instance, or as freezes kill preferred browse. Trails to or through bedding areas (hellishly thick stuff) tend to remain more constant, at least in our experience
My stand was — Glory Be! — unmolested, and I humped up laboriously and — yes — noisily. The vigil started, but across some pretty interesting terrain, actually. I find it easier to keep alert over this than over a boring food plot, especially on a power line. By 8 a.m., the wind had picked up, rustling leaves and swishing branches. The intensity of the first two hour’s vigil vanished. I was getting restless and antsy when I spotted movement. The head came up and I noticed … could it be!?
No. In fact, they weren’t antlers. They were dried branches behind the deer’s head. This was a doe, and she looked absolutely delectable. Soon I was gasping and shaking as she angled toward me, then away, browsing, munching up corn, then looking around with every couple of steps. I was giddy with excitement. The shakes convulsed my entire body as I started to aim.
She took another step, and her shoulder vanished behind a pine sapling. My rifle was anchored between the branch, the trunk and my hand. Still it wobbled. The crosshairs quivered.
“Take a deep breath,” I thought.
Then she took another step, and a tree obscured more of her vitals. I was breathing in gasps. I further steadied the gun just as she stepped toward a greenbriar thicket. Her rib cage cleared a little pine, and her head went down to browse (or grab some corn.) The crosshairs were wobbling crazily as my temples throbbed and heart pounded. Another deep breath.
The crosshairs finally steadied against the pine park. Her head came up again. The crosshairs steadied on her shoulder … and she suddenly jumped, blew and bounded off. No way I was taking a running shot. I stood in my climber shaking for another five minutes, unable to determine why she spooked. Then — BA-LOOOOOM!
The report from Pelayo’s .270 was unmistakable, even from 300 yards away. An hour later, I walked up to a smiling and loquacious Pelayo.
“Whole herd,” he laughed. “Four of ‘em. Looked like the ones in the pictures. Took out what looked like the fattest one. Fresh and tender backstrap tonight!”