May 7 - Longest Deer Hunt

May 7^th

“If you always came back with your tag filled it would be killing not hunting.” 

                                                            -anonymous

 hmmm...Indiana Jones fills his tag.

I’m not sure exactly who coined that phrase, but Its been around awhile……and it is true.

The whole point of hunting is “the hunt”.  When you pull the trigger your hunt is effectively over.  There are mixed emotions at this point.  For me it is a sense of finality on what has hopefully been a fairly arduous process.

A number of years back my good friend John Cullen (USMC ret.) invited me to scout his hunting area with him in our near by Cleveland National Forest.  This is a huge honor.  Hunting sites are a lot like really good fishing holes.  The less people know about them the better. 

Now truth to tell, this particular site is not all that hidden or inaccessible, but John had found it and worked it, and a year or so earlier had taken a deer.

We scouted the land a few times during the summer, and had seen a few does, but never any bucks.  A game camera I set up though did show that there were some bucks in the area.

 Ok...well..we know there are bucks in the area...

 HOLY CRAP!!!  If I was not the one who actually placed the camera and retrieved this image I would never have believed it had come from Southern California.  This is a monster by our standards.

The opening day of the season was a bust for us though. 

No deer.

For that matter, no rabbits, quail, crows squirrels or lizards.

The place was sterile.

Move on to year two….Again we scouted, saw deer sign and decided that we would spread out our hunting zone to incorporate a nearby drainage as well as meadow.

Nada.

Year three…

Unusually warm weather the entire year.  Even during the scouting outings we saw little deer sign.  When on opening day we saw that the weather was going to be 90 degrees at 8:30 am we knew we were going to be in for a disaster.  We were right.  When we started sweating at 7:30 in the morning we knew any chance of seeing a deer, let alone hunting one was gone.

Now…to be fair…the area we hunt has one of the lowest rates of success in all of California….so going home empty handed is not exactly a badge of dishonor.

Year four….Ok…this time we were really going to do it right.  We were going to dedicate the entire opening weekend to getting a deer.  We would camp a few miles from the site, stay Friday night through Sunday night, and move over a whole lot of ground.

Sunday night we drove home….nice camping trip….no deer.

Year five.  Well…John had an opportunity to do some contracting work in Crapistan and just couldn’t say no to a bucket full of money.  This year I would be hunting alone.  I did my usual scouting and found an area where there seemed to be more than the usual deer sign.  Like the previous year I planned to stay up there the entire weekend and give myself the best chance to actually connect with a deer.  I also consulted the lunar tables…these are charts that some hunters swear by that correlate animal movements with the relative position of the sun and moon.  I’m not sure how they really work,…but suffice to say they tell you that at such and such time on such and such day it will be really really great to be hunting.  Ok…what the hell did I have to loose?

The tables told me that during the opening weekend the “best” time to be hunting would be 11:30 am to 12:30 pm and 4:30 pm to 5:30 pm.  Well…the afternoon best time made sense, but the morning one  kinda threw me.  I had always known game to bed down around the early morning hours, but what the hell…I would stick it out on my morning hunt till at least 12:30.

As the light came up on the drainage I was hunting at 6:30am on opening day I started glassing with my binoculars…within seconds I saw him.  A nice buck (well nice for Southern California standards) making his way up the canyon wall.  By 6:45 he was within my comfortable range.  By 6:50 he was on the ground following a 175 yard shot. 

It had taken me five years and countless trips into the forest to get this guy, and to say I was proud was an understatement. 

What did I learn from this experience?  Two things:

1)    Don’t rely on things like lunar tables…they maybe interesting, but trust your instincts…and never decide to sleep in because a table told you that your game wouldn’t be moving around until 11:30

2)    After four years hunting with John and getting skunked I got my deer the first time he wasn’t there….Clearly John was the problem.

UPDATE!!!!


John Cullen just read my blog from the oasis he is in in Godawfulstan...he wanted me to correct the record to reflect he had taken a deer out of this area every year UNTIL he started "dragging my ass along".  Ok John...the record has been corrected.