Ideally, attempting to track and shoot a deer should be done with a handy, lightweight repeating rifle. The Winchester 32 special I carried for much of the rifle season would be about perfect. Unfortunately, we didn’t get snow until the black powder season in December, and even then it was only just enough to follow deer tracks. My muzzle loader is around 10 pounds with the scope, maybe more. It feels like it after carrying it all day anyway. Tracking as a method of deer hunting is something I’m just learning. Last season I spent a few days trying it and although I caught up to and saw the deer multiple times I never got a shot.
Unlike sitting on a watch, where it’s all about the balance of how much to wear and how much to carry in, tracking is all walking. I’m used to carrying a lot of heavy stuff in a big pack, but for tracking I ditched the pack entirely. In my shoulder satchel I would pack: light lunch/snacks, water bottle, tag, knife, rope, extra loads and maybe a spare pair of gloves. The idea is you set out to look for a fresh track and then follow the deer until you can hopefully get a clear shot at it. This method was made popular in the northeastern United States by a family of deer hunters who would routinely track and shoot bucks that weighed 200+ pounds after field dressing. I’ve read a few books on their methods and watched some more recent videos by different YouTube personalities, but it’s all pretty basic. The tracks tell you most of what you need to know, you just have to know when to cover ground quickly, when to slow down, and when to creep along inches at a time. I have much to learn on the creeping part.
Having an antlerless tag, it didn’t matter much to me about tracking a buck in particular, but I quickly learned that it’s easier to follow a buck’s tracks. The few times I was on a doe track (or tracks) it got confused with other tracks easily. Does tend to travel with other does often, making it easy to mix up which track you were originally following, and the size of the track is indistinguishable from other doe tracks. Bucks are more solitary, bigger bucks have bigger tracks, they drag their toes, their stride is long and their gait is a little staggered rather than in a straight line. It’s a little easier to stay on a big buck track when it meets a group of other tracks.
Where the track turns from northwards and heads to the south is where they realized I was following them. I eventually caught up to them, found where they had bedded for a while and I bumped them again without seeing them, although I heard them ahead of me a few times.
This track was made while following a buck. I found his track crossing the road on my way in and decided to park there and follow it. The chase ended with the buck crossing the road again within sight of where I parked and then I lost the track entirely somehow. The snow wasn’t very deep at that point but if I didn’t know better I’d think he’d taken flight:
That was an exciting few hours. I found where this buck had bedded twice, and I messed up at his second bed. His first bed was only a few hundred metres from the road. I knew I started quite a ways behind this buck because there was a bit of snow in his track by the road. It had snowed in the wee hours of the morning, but I started on this track at around noon. From the road he meandered through a cedar swamp and eventually bedded on the edge of an open area. Finding the places that a buck chooses to bed down is a cool learning experience in itself. They have a knack of being able to pick a spot where they can see out but you won’t likely see them, like in a little ring of balsam firs on a knoll where they can see out from under the firs but you’d never notice a deer in there.
His track leaving that bed looked quite a bit fresher and I carried on. Thinking I was still quite a ways behind this buck I didn’t slow down enough when his track started to indicate he was going to bed down again. They zig zag, feed a bit, urinate and leave droppings. I was looking towards the spot that I figured would be his bed when I heard a snap about 90 degrees from there and 100 metres ahead. At the time I thought it was the wind. Sure enough, his bed was in the little thicket beside a large beaver flood and his track leisurely walked out towards the spot I’d heard the snap earlier. As it looked, the buck had been feeding in a little clearing here when I walked over the rise and was looking at where he’d bedded. If I’d been more careful and observant, I might have got a shot at this buck while he was feeding. Instead, he saw me coming along his track and bolted before I saw him, making that snap.
From then on this deer had my number. He would run flat out for a couple hundred metres and then go to ground behind some little rise or screen of trees and watch his backtrack. He’d see me coming well before I had any indication he’d slowed down or even stopped. It was a learning experience and thankfully he led me back to the truck by the end.
I had a few similar experiences throughout the week. It’s very different from sitting where you’re hoping for a deer to come by your watch. When tracking you know there is a deer at the other end of the tracks, you just have to figure out how to catch up without getting busted. It’s nice to go light, just your “walking” layers for when you’d sit on a watch are enough. You really only stop long enough to have a sandwich or a snack so there’s no time to get cold.
The highlight of the week for me was the track I followed on Friday. I hadn’t been on this track long and the buck fooled me by stopping in 2 beds within 50 metres. I thought I could move more quickly after the first bed and got busted as he’d only just left his next bed. I stopped for a while and had a sandwich, hopefully giving him enough time to forget about me, then started out again. Not much farther along I found a really good buck track crossing this one and he wasn’t spooked, so I swapped tracks and followed the new track for a while. This buck ended up getting into an area with a bunch of does and it got so confusing I had to abandon the track and go back to the one I’d bumped earlier. The upside to this was he’d had another 1.5 hours to settle down. His running track stopped at a spot where he’d gone to ground and waited for me, but he gave up waiting and walked away based on the sign. Things looked good, he crossed a beaver dam and started heading up a high oak ridge. At the top of the oak ridge overlooking a jaw-dropping ravine he’d bedded down again, but his track leaving the bed wasn’t panicked or startled. He picked his way along the edge of the ravine, digging for acorns here, eating some old man’s beard there, and I was going slow and keeping my eyes ahead. Everything felt right about this one, I couldn’t be far behind.
The buck seemed to know the only way down into this steep ravine judging by where the track went. There was a narrow outcrop running diagonally down the valley wall that his tracks went down and I was standing there debating whether I could climb back up that outcrop at all if I followed him down there. I was looking down into tree tops. As I was contemplating this, the buck jumped up from his bed at the bottom of the ravine about 80 metres from where I was standing. I brought the heavy muzzle loader up to my shoulder and thumbed back the hammer, found him in my scope for a split second, then decided it was a shot I couldn’t make. Even if I could, retrieving him from the bottom of that ravine would have been a whole other operation. I would have got him out of there eventually, but it might have been a long night and maybe the following morning.
For me, the black powder hunt was a success without filling a tag. I saw some beautiful places in The Park I’d never seen before, saw deer nearly every day and made some progress in my tracking skills. Venison in the freezer is great and big bucks are a nice bonus, but there are so many other things deer hunting “success” means to the individual hunter. Hunting is a game of patience and setting reasonable expectations. It’s very “failure” dominated. You fail most of the time you go deer hunting. I’ve attempted tracking maybe a dozen deer over two seasons, seen many of them and came very close to shooting one. That’s a pretty good start at something new I think, and I’m already looking forward to next season.
Thanks for reading and we hope to see you here at Land’escapes next deer season!
Greg Waudby
Greg is our operations Manager and his group has been trialing the Big Woods Hunting program for two seasons in the Park.