A Cap-and-Ball Buck

"I'm proud of you."

Those four words made me feel better than any others possibly could have. The deer in my truck was great; the feeling of accomplishment was wonderful; knowing I'd scouted the area where I'd taken him, and watched him chasing a doe was immensely gratifying - but they were nothing compared with the feeling I got when Dad told me I'd done good. I was positively floating.

It had all started a few weeks before, when I'd once again explored an area of the forest near the river. I'd found, to my surprise, that a bulldozer-wide trail had been plowed along the forest boundary. Where there had been nothing but thicket upon thicket, there was now a nice, straight, well-defined trail. It hadn't been long since the trail's creation, and the snow-white sand was still soft and loose underfoot. This meant a direct and silent approach was possible, where before it had not.

It was archery season when I'd found the trail, and it was riddled with deer tracks. I was uncharacteristically in awe of the place - I'd always liked the area, where hardwood hammock abutted scrub country strewn with crowds of sand pines, but it had been excruciatingly hard to hunt. This new trail made it highly huntable. I had even managed to miss a doe with my bow on that trail, when she "jumped the string" and stepped forward before the arrow could find its mark. Best of all, no other hunters seemed to have found the trail... yet.

Time to Hunt

Then came our three-day muzzleloader hunt. I'd hunted another area - in fact another wildlife management area entirely - the first morning of the hunt. That afternoon I'd driven north and set up my climbing stand on a fairly straight water oak along that trail.

The following morning dawned moist-cool, with low-hanging fog soaking up sound and soaking into my clothes; condensing on, and dripping from, leaves. Dad was hunting elsewhere that day, so I parked and walked in alone.

I had chosen to carry a Uberti revolving cap-and-ball carbine that day. With its .454-caliber round balls over 38 grains of black powder, it provided ballistics roughly approximating the performance of a 44-40. Most importantly, it provided quick follow-up shots - and extensive shooting on the target range had proven it plenty accurate at fifty yards. This was the first hunt I'd taken the gun on, and I chose it because I liked it, it was new, and the fog and terrain meant that I would not get any long shots that morning.

Buck-Grunt Mayhem

I had been on my stand for some hours when I heard some grunting in the thick hardwoods, south of me. My first thought was that some yay-hoo was over there blowing on a grunt tube, because this grunting sounded more like a tube than any other I'd heard in the woods before. When the grunting was shortly accompanied by crashing in the brush, I started to reconsider my earlier line of thought.

I stood in my stand, facing the commotion, which seemed to be heading my way. Suddenly the world exploded! Either that, or a whitetail doe came crashing through the brush. My adrenal glands and heartbeat responded as they would to either scenario, and I instantly fought through the intense rush and the pounding in my chest to focus my attention on the deer. The doe was not alone; it was being followed - nay, pursued - by a young buck intent on romance.

Awestruck

The pair ran a zig-zag pattern through the woods, passing almost underneath my position in the tree. The buck was grunting to beat the band, and the doe wanted no part of it - or of him. They continued in their chase, looping back into the thick woods and going back the way they'd come.

I had not had a chance to shoot, they were moving so quickly - but I didn't care. I realized that my face was split by the widest of grins. Whether I bagged a buck or not, I had just had one of the most intense and enjoyable, though brief, moments of my hunting life. I said to myself, over and over, "This is great!" I was awestruck.

I basked in the glow and the slowly-fading adrenaline rush for a short time, but the deer didn't give me much time to think it over. I was still standing there with a silly grin on my face when I heard something coming my way again - and that something sounded deery to me.

Soon I spotted a whitetail moving through the thick brush. It had come toward me and then turned to its right, traveling broadside towards the 'dozer trail. As it neared the trail, I spotted another deer following. "The one in front will be the doe, and that's the buck coming along behind her," I told myself.

When the lead deer got to the trail, it stopped for a moment. I grunted in my throat and it turned my way for a second. It was clearly a doe, and probably the same doe that had run past me minutes earlier. She looked back over her shoulder, and then walked nervously away from me along the trail. The other deer was still moving through the brush along the same route the doe had taken.

(Continued)