Late Muzzleloader Comes to an End!

Sunday afternoon found me walking to the marsh.  I didn't expect to see anything really, I just wanted to end the season in the place I love to hunt most.  From a wooded hillside I looked down on the marsh until the shadows overtook the sycamores that grow along its edge and dimmed their snowy bark. 

I turned home, waded the creek, walked under the sycamores and made enough noise in their dry leaves to awaken the dead (they're noisy.)  As soon as I made the hardwoods I sat on the trunk of a fallen maple a beaver had dropped, emptied the water from my boots, pulled off my socks and wrung the water from them.

With the sloshing sound in my hikers gone I felt more like a hunter.  I slowly began moving along the logging road that bisected the river bottom from a tall wooded ridge.  I rounded a sharp bend in the trail, looked up on the ridge and saw two does scrounging acorns from underneath the leaf litter.  Twice I counted coup: I eased off the safety, looked at the rear doe in my sights, wrapped my finger over the trigger, eased off, and did the same to the lead doe.  Just maybe a buck would show.

For twenty minutes I watched the deer nose into the wind.  For twenty minutes I nosed along behind them.  A possum walked across the trail in front of me.  A grey squirrel jumped off a tree beside me.  My heart skipped a beat.  The evening was warmer than it should have been, the rut was gone, and I suppose the bucks were as tired as me.

Bow season is in for a few more weeks.  I know of a spot where the red oaks dropped a heavy mast.  Maybe the deer will be hungry enough to eat them and maybe I will be up a tree there when they do.

I am pretty sure this is the buck I saw in the marsh during shotgun season.  I had him in my scope three times, but I couldn't quite get the shot.  Maybe he made it through the rest of the season.