There are very few things that a deer hunter finds more exciting than the approach of opening morning.
Some of us even go to camp a day or two early to have breakfast in a local diner, do some last-minute scouting, and tell a few stories by the fire in the evening. Our spirits were high this year, we knew the property a little better than we did the previous season and we had a few antlerless tags within our group of six.
My group was hunting the same block of land in The Park that we did in 2023. We managed to get two bucks last season between five of us. We didn’t have any antlerless tags in 2023, but could have filled them if we had… a story for another time.
Before you continue... This blog contains discussions of hunting and images that some may find disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.
The opener started out like most do; too warm, wet, and windy.
We all hope for those cool crisp mornings when the frost puts a crunch in the leaves and the air is still, but we rarely seem to get them. We saw a few deer on opening morning between the group and there were a couple of close calls but no shots were taken. At around 11 am we called it a morning and met up on the trail for lunch. Over sandwiches and typical brown bag fare, we chatted about the promising fact that we were at least seeing deer despite the uncooperative weather. Everyone picked a new place to sit for a while in the afternoon and it was quiet once again. A glimpse of a deer through the poplars for one member but no shot opportunity.
As a group we like to get out for sunrise, preferably on the “watch” before legal shooting light. We’ve adjusted our style a bit here because the typical terrain in The Park makes wandering in the woods in the dark not very advisable. A 30 foot cliff can be one wrong step away. Our strategy is to park the truck at first light (half an hour before sunrise) so you can have your firearm unencased and hunt your way to your watch.
The typical “watch” is until 11 am or so, although deer move around plenty in midday as well. The cameras don’t lie about that. We’ve just found it easier to break up the day, meet up for a chat and some lunch and then go sit in a new spot in the afternoon. It breaks up the monotony and keeps your senses sharper, in my opinion.
The afternoon sit is until 4 pm or so, as none of us are too keen on tracking and retrieving deer in the dark. I’ve done it many times over the years, but there are plenty of deer in The Park. At some point you have to decide where “vacation” ends and “work” begins. We’ve decided that dinner by 7 pm and bed by 9:30ish works well enough to get going again by 4:30 the next morning, but every group does things their own way.
The next morning was wetter than the opener and our freshly dried out gear got thoroughly soaked again, but we got through it. A waterproof “shell” layer with wool layers underneath is what I use. We’ve mostly all moved towards wool, and although heavy it’s warm enough even when it’s wet. The trick with our style of hunting is figuring out exactly how much to carry and how much to wear, so you don’t sweat too much walking in and you can put warm layers on when you get to your watch. If you carry it all and dress super light, you’ll sweat from carrying too much. On the other hand, if you wear too much you’ll definitely sweat too much. If you sweat too much you’ll get cold and fidgety and you’ll get busted by a deer. You also have to carry a knife, ammo, lunch, a chair or cushion, rope, and whatever else you need to spend a day in the November woods.
I heard hoofbeats on rocks heading to my watch that morning and got “winded” by a deer shortly afterwards. It snorted a few times downwind of me but I never did see the deer. Sometimes you just have bad luck. The wind was blowing in completely the opposite direction of the forecast, but the ridges and valleys determine the wind direction here most of the time.
More bad luck that afternoon when I noticed the scope on my rifle was a little loose. Even a little loose will make for a lot of misses or worse, a poor hit. I sat and hoped NOT to see a deer before the end of the afternoon.
By Wednesday afternoon we were starting to get a little discouraged. Despite daily deer sightings, shot opportunities just weren’t happening. Sometimes it goes in your favour and sometimes it doesn’t. That’s deer hunting. After some discussion on our strategy, we decided that our deer encounters during these first few days were very close to being shot opportunities, and luck was our only real issue. We had 3 days left for our luck to change and the weather turned cooler on Thursday.
On Thursday I went back to the spot where I got winded a couple of days earlier.
By about 8 am, I really started to feel that I was in the wrong spot. Although there was good deer sign in the area, it felt too open to be productive much later than first light. There was cover in the cedars along the creek behind me, and thick cover down closer to the big swamp to the west, but I was watching a deer trail through a fairly open area along a grown-over logging road. The deer had been hanging pretty close to the swamps all week in the heat (Wednesday got up to 20 degrees), and I figured they’d still hold pretty tight to the swamps this late into the week under hunting pressure. I decided to pack up and make a move to the west closer to the big wetland complex.
Things looked steadily better along the old ATV trail that ran down towards the thicker stuff. There were scrapes, rubs, and plenty of tracks. Eventually, I reached an area that felt just about perfect. It was close to the edge of the big wetland complex with some heavy cedar and balsam cover within 100 yards, deer sign everywhere and some fairly open shooting lanes. It just had the right feel.
Finding the perfect spot to sit is always an internal debate. If I sit here I can’t see that low spot. If I sit there I’m too obvious, on it goes. I try not to stomp around too much on these occasions. You leave your scent everywhere you walk and step. It’s part of the internal debate. Eventually the spot I settled on overlooked an old beaver dam crossing in the middle of a large dry marsh. On my right, to the north, was a little meadow full of deer trails and finger-width poplars and grasses. The meadow on my right was a little too high above my seat for my liking, but I assumed my main chance would be on the marsh crossing so I sat with the dam slightly on my left side (I shoot right handed). In hindsight I should have faced the meadow, but I don’t like looking uphill for some reason.
There was a fairly stiff NW breeze that morning because of the weather change so conditions weren’t great for hearing. I was a bit distracted while answering some text messages (but thankfully sitting still) when I heard the faint “snap” of a single twig out behind the meadow on my right. Behind a little cedar on the far side of the meadow I could just make out the movement of a deer’s ear highlighted in a patch of sun. Then I caught a glimpse of antler! He was raking the branch of the little cedar with his antlers. I’d made a few calls on the grunt tube a few minutes before he showed up, it may have been what brought him over from the marsh, it’s hard to say. My immediate problem was figuring out how to get turned around to my right without this buck seeing me so I could get a shot. He was still mostly hidden by the trees on the edge of the meadow, but I could see his head so I waited. When he took a step further behind the trees I turned out of the chair and got even lower to the ground, taking advantage of the meadow being a little higher than where I was sitting.
I got settled into a one knee crouch and cocked the hammer on Grandpa’s old .32 special. I couldn’t see him but I knew he was still behind that little copse of trees, so I waited for him to take another step or two. Somehow I managed to get my trigger hand behind me, grab the grunt call and give him a couple more to see if I could get him out in the open. He didn’t catch my movement. There was a wicked screen of poplars and grasses in the meadow, even more so because I was down on the low side. The buck took another step and I could see his outline fairly well, but there was too much stuff in the way. He just had to take one more step to get his vitals into the only clear window through the poplars I had, and it was a small window. When he started to step things seemed to happen automatically in slow motion. The bead got on the vitals, I pulled the trigger, levered the rifle and the buck took two jumps and was out of sight before I could get the bead on him again.
It had been a quiet week until Thursday morning, so my phone was blowing up with messages from the guys wondering who had shot. Not knowing the outcome of the shot, I had stayed on my knee ready to shoot for a few minutes longer so there was quite a delay between my shot and my reply. I typed in a shaky-handed post-adrenaline text that I had just shot at a buck and I was going to have a look for blood.
Sometimes it’s difficult just to sort out where a deer was standing when you shot at it. After a few trips back and forth from my chair I figured that much out, but there was no blood until he’d run about 15 yards. Once I located the blood trail it was a short and easy tracking job. He ran about 50 yards from where he was hit. It was a broadside shot through both lungs.
The moments that follow a successful shot on a deer are a different experience for every deer hunter. This was a special moment for me. This buck was the first one I’ve taken for a few seasons and my first deer in The Park. My late grandfather would have turned 100 this year, and it was my first deer using his old Winchester model 94.
I took some time to reflect on what had just happened, take some pictures and appreciate the moment.
Eventually a few of the guys arrived to help and I notched the tag, field dressed the deer and we started the process of getting it out to the truck. There are plenty of ways to drag a deer, but we prefer to use an ice fishing toboggan. They slide pretty well on everything but sand or gravel and wet leaves work almost as well as snow. If I don’t have a toboggan, I truss a deer’s front legs up at its head and tie to a 2 foot stout stick with a short lead. That way, I can pick the deer’s head and shoulders off the ground and it will drag much easier and the front legs don’t get caught up in the undergrowth. With the toboggan, I just step into the rope like a sled dog and pull until I get tired, then step out and let a buddy take a turn. We had a drag of just over a kilometer or so to the truck and it took us just under an hour.
With plenty of daylight left for hunting, we parked the truck in the shade for the afternoon to keep the deer cool and headed out to some new watches. Although the afternoon was quiet in terms of deer sightings, my brother noticed a bunch of fresh deer tracks in an area where they hadn’t been earlier that same day and decided he’d go sit there in the morning.
What is Big Woods Hunting?
Friday morning was forecast to be even cooler yet, and windy. My plan was to sit watching a deer trail way up on the top of one of the biggest ridges in The Park. The ridge is so big it could almost be considered a small mountain, around 500 metres by 2 kilometres. It’s very steep sided so difficult for past logging operations to get up there at all, making it a different forest type than much of the surrounding area. Although I generally liked hunting this ridge, I picked the wrong morning to sit up that high. I took some appreciation watching the sunrise, then decided to head to lower ground before I froze.
Big woods deer hunting can be an overwhelming prospect, especially without years of knowledge about deer movement on the property. A good place to start is to look at a topographic map and look for natural “funnels” or pinch points, where the terrain or ground features push deer travel into a corridor or “funnel”. You can “pre-scout” an area entirely this way and then confirm things on the ground later. We did exactly this before our first hunt at Land’escapes in 2023. Because we’d done our homework, I knew there was a great beaver dam crossing about 200 metres downhill from me and it would be sheltered from the wind. Beaver dams tend to be fantastic funnels in big woods deer country. Deer don’t like getting their feet wet any more than they have to, so they’ll pick the narrowest (or driest) places to cross wetlands and creeks. Those narrow points are where beavers build their dams, and because of the dam the area upstream is usually flooded. This pond or flood acts as a barrier, “funneling” the deer to cross at the beaver dam or just below it.
All this being said, I hadn’t sat watching the beaver dam very long before my brother (Andy) texted that he’d taken a shot at a doe at the spot he’d seen all the sign the day before. It was so windy I hadn’t even heard the shot.
Andy said 2 does and a fawn had come trotting over the ridge in front of him, moving towards him on a line and at a pace where he couldn’t even raise his rifle for fear of getting busted. They got close enough to catch his scent and immediately turned and started bounding back the way they’d come from. One doe stopped at almost the last second and turned back to look at him, offering him a decent shot for just a second or two. Andy took the shot with his .308 and said that when the deer bolted off he could see where the bullet had impacted, and it looked a little low. The blood trail can tell you a lot about where a deer is hit, and the blood trail did not look ideal. While it’s a graphic explanation, pinkish spraying blood is what you’d like to see if you hit a deer through the lungs. Anything else can mean a variety of things, but the best option if you don’t have an ideal blood trail is to wait a while before you look for the deer. Bumping a wounded deer out of a bed pushes it further into the bush, usually with a very sporadic or nonexistent blood trail. How much time to give it depends on where you suspect the deer is hit.
In the case of Andy’s doe, we waited a few hours before following the blood trail. She had indeed gone a distance before laying down, about 200 metres, but she had expired when we found her. Setting off too early on this track might have ended with us having a much longer and more difficult tracking job. The really fortunate thing was she went down about 250 metres from where the truck was parked, so the drag was easy.
As it turned out, Andy made the shot within an inch or two of where he wanted to, but the bullet did something odd when it hit the front shoulder bone and either fragmented or deflected entirely downward and back. This made for a marginal hit rather than the heart/lung shot Andy had intended.
Our luck had changed for the better. We had seen another nice buck that morning too but it hadn’t worked out for a shot. I was walking through a valley that afternoon and had to pass on a shot at a doe. I’d bumped her ahead of me twice and the second time she stood halfway up the valley wall and looked back at me. I had the bead on her but knew one of our guys (Smitty) was at the other end of that valley with his son. There was too much risk of a bullet bouncing off a rock and carrying on up the valley, so I didn’t shoot. The difference between seeing deer and getting a shot at them seems like a large gap sometimes, but it’s just a matter of luck and another second or two of being able to see the deer. We knew based on the number of deer we were seeing that catching glimpses of deer would turn into shot opportunities with a little patience.
That evening we had a treat for dinner. Learn to remove the tenderloins from a deer before it goes to the butcher and put them onto your camp menu for one night. The rumour is the butcher “steals” the tenderloins, but the fact is they just dry out quickly because they’re exposed to the air after the deer is field dressed. I like to cut them into ½” medallions and fry them in butter, onions and garlic with some pepper and salt. Melts in your mouth. We had fried potatoes, bacon, eggs, tenderloins and toast for dinner. The tenderloins from 2 adult deer gave 6 adults and one child a taste but not a plate full. Tenderloins from 4 would make a meal for 6. Our camp only hunts until the Saturday afternoon of the first week, so this made for a great end to our dinners.
Saturday morning started out with some excitement for me. I was heading back into the spot where I’d shot the buck on Thursday morning. It was only 15 minutes after legal shooting light, the sun was still below the horizon. Just as I topped a rise in the trail I saw a deer on the trail ahead of me bounding down the straightaway open stretch of old road.
I say “road” on some of these occasions but these haven’t been roads in years. The road I’m referring to is an old logging road, long out of use.
When he got to the bend about 100 yards ahead he stopped and looked back and I had the 32 at my shoulder with the hammer back. I could see his head, antlers, tail and the top of his back. Between the gun and his vitals were 100 yards of goldenrod and grass, there was no way a bullet would find its mark through that. When I tried to step to my right a little the movement was enough for him and he ran off down the next stretch of trail. Sure enough, when I got to the place he’d just been standing I saw him take off from watching for me at the next bend in the trail, about 80 yards up. This happened again a third time, without me being able to shoulder the rifle again.
Believe it or not, when I got to my watch I bumped him yet again. I didn’t see him this time but based on the direction he took when I last bumped him it made sense that this was the same deer crashing off through the brush.
Most of the excitement that morning happened early, within the first half hour of daylight. My brother briefly saw a nice buck, and I had a quick look at a doe (only her head and back) just after that buck encounter. At around 11 am one of the guys messaged that he had a small deer nearby and wondered about shooting it. Based on where he was and where Andy shot the doe on the previous day, I thought the deer was most likely her fawn. We don’t necessarily target fawns, but on this occasion it made sense to take the fawn as well as the doe. Sometimes another doe will look after the fawn if it’s orphaned but not always. In any case, this was a legal deer, our last day hunting together as a group and we still had more than one antlerless deer tag. We made the decision to shoot and Scott made a great shot on this “button buck”:
Being a small deer the drag was quite easy and not far, only a few hundred metres. We got the deer loaded in the truck, had a tailgate lunch and started making our way out to break camp and head home. Saturday of the first week is the official end of “deer camp” for our group. I’m fortunate enough to be in The Park most of the time, it’s my job, but it was back to the grind for everyone else.
Speaking of “grind”, this would be a good place to mention what we do in terms of processing deer after a successful hunt.
If we’d taken any deer in the first few days of the hunt, the warm temperatures would have meant we’d have to deal with processing immediately. Either we’d have to set aside the time and butcher it ourselves or get it transported to a butcher shop that processes wild game (always call them first). Our first deer was shot on Thursday and by then daily highs were below 8 or 9 degrees Celsius. In my experience (although circumstances may vary), hanging deer in the shade for a week or so is fine as long as daily highs are below 10 degrees and the nights dip down to freezing or below.
I had plans to do some hunting early in the second week with some family so we decided to leave the deer hanging until after that. 2 or 3 of us working together can butcher 2 deer in a day or so, but anything more than 2 becomes a multiple day job. With 3 deer hanging and more hunting planned the next week, we made the decision to take these deer and any potential deer from the next week to the butcher.
The first week was a wrap. When it comes to big woods hunting, our success rate for the week was outstanding. For five experienced hunters and one apprentice hunter to have a 50% success rate in WMU 61 is much higher than average, but that’s not what it’s about. The bonds you build spending time in the bush with family and friends are unique.
Success is nice when you have it but the experiences and memories you take home with you at the end of the week are the real trophy.
Greg Waudby
Greg is our Operations Manager. His group has been trialing the Big Woods Hunting program for two seasons in the Park.