Thursday PM: Buck in Brush

Doe and yearling fawn.

Couldn't face the pasture and treeline again so I snagged a plastic Walmart chair from an old position and walked across the creek. I HAD a chair over there previously but it disappeared.

Bigfoot. My hero. And I don't mind supplying a nice plastic arm chair to a reclusive hairy-butted outdoorsman like him.

Eased in over the indian village and through the toothpicks. Across the creek at the log and in and out of holes on the powerline. At the across-the-creek cam I SAT down and changed cards. Dang civilized to have a good green plastic chair under you. Up the hill I picked a spot in the middle of an abandoned logging road and watched across a cheery little creek fork up the far hillside. The pines and hardwoods are tall and rob the sunlight. The understory is vines and hollys and hardwoods. Good grass and spindly cedars up the hill. Thick.

I was here sitting on the ground a couple of afternoons ago.

A scrape is just out of sight. Marked by a child's sweatshirt over a limb. I found it on the hillside. No clue. I hung a cam on the scrape a couple days ago. With my rifle across my lap I watched for an hour.

Lots of squirrels racking around. The owls booted up and started booming. Little dusky birds zoomed through the understory fussing and rasping. Then a little buck stepped into a hole in the brush right about where I expected him. 30 yards. Maybe.

If you don't see a HUGE rack first thing, there is no point in getting excited. I started the rifle up slowly just to scope him and set up for a bigger deer following, if there was one. He stepped back out of sight and ten yards later I saw his head bobbing along the ground through another hole. Then he started and ran. I think it was the smushed horn buck.

Perhaps the blinking red light got him. Or just the strangeness of a new plastic box on a tree. I put black target pasters over the ready light but need a double layer to really close it off. The cam flashed twice more. I waited for him to circle and maybe he did on the other side. The light fell and I tip-toed out.

When I come over to pull the card on that cam in a few days I'm going to bring a pair of loppers and quietly open up some slight lines. This ought to be a good place. You would think a nice buck could be rattled up in here.