"The Evening Campfire" from
The Herald, Dec. 3, 2006
F-Troop hunters see
plenty of deer on opening day
It doesn't get much better
than this. The alarm rang at 4 a.m. and I jumped right
out of bed — I’m like a kid at Christmas on the opening
day of deer season — and made my way downstairs to flip
the switch on three coffee pots for the six other
hunters
who would stumble down over the next 10 minutes at
FTroop
Camp. At 5 a.m. I
started down the trail, 30.06 bolt-action Remington
slung over my shoulder, pulling a deer cart with one
hand and pointing a flashlight with the other. A halo of
faint artificial light guided my footsteps down the path
in the dark and silent night.
By 6 a.m., I was up on top
of my 20-foot-high boulder, after hiking two miles in
and climbing 800 yards up to the whitetail escape bench
I’ve hunted off and on for 20 years. I kicked away the
boulder-top leaves, sat down on a hot seat, and relaxed
in the pre-dawn stillness. At 7 a.m., daybreak arrived,
and I loaded my rifle, stood up, and began the hunt by
scanning in all directions and listening for tell-tale
sounds in the dry-leaf forest.
Just before 8 a.m., my
peripheral vision caught motion, and I turned slowly and
saw them, two deer moving laterally into the shooting
zone 100 yards uphill from my rock. The first deer was
medium sized and doe-looking but the second was larger,
heavychested, and majestic in its carriage and gait. I
knew it was a buck before I saw antlers.
I scoped the buck and
counted three-plus points on the downhill antler, moved
my crosshairs forward to an opening between the trees,
waited until the deer’s chest entered the opening, and
squeezed the trigger. The buck collapsed in its tracks,
and my 2006 deer hunt was over.
Later I dragged the deer — a
fine eight-point — a half-mile east to the pair of
boulders where brother Billy and nephew Tom were hunting
over two sides of a steep hollow. They had both seen
more than 10 deer already, and it was only 9 a.m. I sat
with each of them for a time, and, while I was there,
more deer appeared, including a sleek forkhorn buck, the
kind we used
to gladly shoot before the days of antler restrictions,
that passed broadside within 20 yards.
I stayed in the woods until
noon, then dragged my buck downhill to the fire trail
and carted him back to the Jeep. I headed back to camp
then to ice down the body cavity, since it was such a
warm day, and to prepare the evening meal. Along the way
I noticed several groups of orange-clad “hunters”
lounging on their
camp porches, having already apparently quit the hunt,
probably
sitting there complaining about the lack of deer in the
woods. But there
was no lack of deer for our group that day. Billy shot
an eight-point buck himself, but not until 4 p.m., by
which time he had spent 10 hours on stand, and Tom shot
a doe at 4:30 for the freezer. All told, our seven
hunters reported spotting more than 125 deer on opening
day, including eight or 10 different bucks, half of
which were confirmed as sub-legal. That’s a lot of deer,
even with some overlap among our group, which was spread
out over three-quarters of a mile of ridge, bench, and
valley, especially considering that we hunt wide-open
public lands up north in the big woods, where many
hunters say there
are no deer anymore.
Todd spotted 12 during the
opener, Rocky 17, Billy 27, and Tom more than 30. The
rest of us saw decent numbers, too, perhaps
because we scout our hunting grounds, hike back in, and
hunt intensely all day.
Last year our seven hunters
killed five big-racked bucks during the first two and
last two days of the season. We saw moderate numbers of
deer then, mostly mature bucks and immature yearlings.
With last year’s mild winter, those yearlings apparently
survived and produced additional fawns for this year.
And maybe the fact that so many hunters have given up on
the
big woods — we saw far fewer hunters and hunting
vehicles
than we used to see five or 10 years ago — means there
are that many more deer for the F-troop gang. We believe
that if you get out there and hunt, you can still have a
quality deer experience
in the Pennsylvania big woods.
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