But I'm getting ahead of myself.
There is a particular patch of woods in the jigsaw-like forestry of Ocala National Forest which routinely shows signs of deer activity, and from which I couldn't seem to stay away. I'd been hunting this stand of timber for a while - in fact, this was my fourth season there. I had mapped the area using my Garmin GPS II and AutoCAD, and spent a good bit of time there, off and on... and I kept going back, in spite of the fact that I had never seen a deer there.
Dad and a friend had both seen deer there the previous season, but none of the whitetails had come home with us. All of my sitting and stalking had never amounted to anything more than time spent in the woods, but there was something about the place that kept pulling me back.
Been a Long Time
I should add that this was the ninth hunting season since I had last taken a deer on public land. All my freezer fodder during that time had come from private land in various locales.
I'd been earning another WMA deer for quite some time. The previous season I could have shot a buck in another area of the same WMA, but his antlers were just a bit too short to be legal, so I'd had to let him go. And a year or two before that, I'd had a nice buck practically climb my stand in a WMA that required his brow tine to be a half-inch longer than it was... and then there was the phantom buck that I'd missed with a muzzleloader on yet another WMA.
Getting There
The roads in the area, like most of the woods trails in the forest, grow increasingly bad. The massive influx of non-hunters with ATVs and motorcycles over the past several years has caused almost all of the sandy truck trails to be plagued with whoop-de-doos (never-ending, supremely aggravating, humps in the road), and the tough scrubby oaks press along the sides and do their best to tear up any vehicle wider than four feet. For this reason, I had decided to use the Wampus Cat, my new-to-me Arctic Cat ATV, to get myself back to those woods.
It's a royal pain to hook up a trailer, load the four-wheeler, go to the woods, unload the Cat, load gear, and ride on out there. But, I did it anyway. What the heck, I wanted to hunt those woods without trashing my truck, and that was the only way I could do it.
On Sunday, I headed out around mid-day with an old trusty climbing stand I'd been using for years, and went out to try my luck. I found a decent tree and got set up, and even raked a trail so I wouldn't make too much noise coming and going. Sat up there that afternoon until dark and, as usual, saw nothing.
After getting caught up on my work, I was back on Monday afternoon - and again I saw nothing. No surprise there. I was encouraged, however, by the fact that there were fresh deer tracks in my new trail, and nobody had been on the roads since I'd left the previous evening. I decided to get up early the next morning and try 'er again.
Sleep Gets in my Eyes...
Now, I'm not generally a morning person. I'm more of a night owl, so I was operating on about five hours' sleep when the alarm went to squawking. I got up anyhow, gathered my gear and put it in the truck, then drove around and hooked up to the trailer which already had the ATV on it, and headed out. About a mile down the road I discovered I was missing something... something important.
Well, it may be that you have never forgotten your rifle back at the house (and I think this was a first for me), but sure as heck I had to turn around and go get my gun. I wasn't happy about that... my morning funk had evidently been worse than I'd thought. Duh!
So, I went back and got my gun. I was using a Savage Sierra Model 10 in 308. Its synthetic stock makes it nice and light, and its short length makes it handy. This was my second season with it, and it had always done a good job with my handloads, taking three deer and a varmint or two by the time of this hunt.
The eastern sky was growing light as I drove along the paved road to my turnoff, so naturally I cussed myself for running late. I parked and unloaded the ATV, packed and loaded my pack, hopped on and went for the tortuous up-and-down ride over the million or so whoop-de-doos between where I was and where I needed to be.
(continued)
