Last Hunting Article for 2013

Well the final wrap up of our deer hunting season is here. I chomped at the bit all week until Thursday morning when I headed up to camp again, Andrea had to work and Noah had already missed seven days of school so I was on my own Thursday and Friday when they would drive up Friday night to join me. It was slow going getting there as it snowed again overnight and the temperature plummeted to more than 20 below Celsius. I arrived at camp expecting it to be cold…I was not surprised to find it was like being in a flash freezer. It took a bit to get the wood stove going but once it was burning I unloaded to gear and got changed into my cold weather gear. I wanted to pull all my cameras as there was no more reason to have them out, they had become very ineffective lately. I have come to the conclusion that the deer changed their behavior about the time the time change occurred and the weather became much colder. The cold and lack of snow made figuring them out much harder as they were not using the same trails as they were in the warmer weather. The dusting of snow last weekend let us find some tracks and better understand what deer were still moving through the property and where they were going.

Using the time to pick up the cameras to check the fresh snow for sign I of course caused a deer to jump from its bed on the Ducks Unlimited property next door. The trail cameras produced exactly what I expected – nothing…but I found fresh sign where a big buck was entering the property coming back from the corn field to bed down on the DU property – it was using the ridge across our property through the thick stuff as were several does. I dropped off the cameras and gathered up some gear, time to move a tree stand and clear a couple of shooting lanes…three hours later I was done and moving out of there to let the noise settle down. I was not cold at all while I was working, the new Redhead XPS 4.0 long underwear from Bass Pro is too warm if you’re moving much at all, great for sitting though.  I decided to go sit in Noah’s ground blind but nothing was shaking.

A long cold night, keeping the fire going and learning how severe the shortcomings in the camp are, but very reminiscent of a good many army nights…I was of course up and around early and ready to go. Friday morning was bound to be a good one, -33 C with a light breeze, the deer had to be moving right? I climbed into my tree stand that I had prepared Thursday afternoon, settled in and started looking around. It just felt like a morning to get a deer, which was unusual because morning movement on our property had been almost non-existent.

15 minutes after sitting down I caught movement coming up the ridge from the farm behind me, two does acting very skittish very making their way up the ridge but only moving a few steps and looking back over and over. Whatever was behind them had them very preoccupied as they were not looking for anything in front, one was very, very large, the other was a good size. Both came out to 30 yards perfect broadside, it took no urging for me to slide my savage 270 WSM to my shoulder and take up the slack on the accu trigger while the crosshair was sitting right behind the shoulder of the larger doe…I guess my need for venison was larger than my need for waiting to see if it was the big buck coming up the hill because the rifle recoiled into my shoulder at the barest urging of my trigger finger, driving a 130 grain Nosler ballistic silver tip into the “perfect location” behind the does shoulder. Both deer took off down the ridge but the one I shot only made about three jumps before sliding down the snow covered ridge for 50 feet and fetching up in a tree. The second doe circled around to stand 40 yards in front of the ground blind for several minutes, I actually had a perfect view of her front shoulder at the bottom of the ridge through my crosshair but only one tag means only shoot one deer…especially at -30 getting a deer cleaned and hauled out is a real chore.

Let the work begin, I had to go get the truck and go off-roading as I had told Andrea I did not need the key for her atv, better to drag a deer than drive a Polaris was maybe the thought somewhere in my sub conscious, little did my sub conscious know I was going to shoot a doe that would go about 200lbs on the hoof. It was no trouble to drive the truck to about 100 feet of where the deer went down, just a simple matter to drag her out after field dressing and throw her on the truck…YEAH RIGHT, what is simple at -30? I did though manage quite nicely and loaded her on the truck and drove to the hanging tree at the camp. Man it was nice down at the bottom of that ridge, up on top it was blowing about 20 mph and still -25…no trouble cooling the carcass down in those temperatures…in fact a real problem was going to be not having a frozen solid hunk of venison that was brutal to work with. I wanted to get it hung so I tied it off on both hind legs and pulled…nothing, I reached as high as I could and wrapped the ropes around my forearms and leaned back, hmm, this carcass was going to be fun, it only went about 2/3rds in the air before we balanced out. Well then I have a large truck so I tied off to the trailer hitch and drove away – that got the damn thing (yes by now it was becoming a damn thing) in the air so I could tie it off.

The hunting Gods were certainly were smiling on me that day as I was able to call Andrea from the warmth of camp (normally we would have to drive about a mile to get a signal) while enjoying a hot coffee. After a quick conference she was stopping at Canadian Tire on her way home to get a gambrel kit with two double pulley’s and I was heading home to hang the deer in our garage so that it would not become a fur covered iceberg. At home it was a simple matter to insert and eye bolt in a rafter, hang the pulleys and raise the deer as high as I wanted, easy with the right tools.

After enjoying a nice home cooked meal Andrea prepared while I was driving home, we all loaded back in the truck to head to camp for the last two days of deer season. Saturday morning brought more of the bitter cold, but the wind had shifted to go with it and we could not escape it, no matter the gear we had 90 minutes exposed to that weather was enough at a time. No deer were seen that day and we arose Sunday morning to the building literally be shaken from the wind. Trees were being tested and there was no way ti was safe to be in a tree stand. It seemed our hunting season was over for 2013.

We enjoyed a lazy morning and then packed up everything that was attractive and closed up camp until spring. 

We learned that taking a deer in archery or muzzleloader season was a good idea: the deer thin out and become harder to pattern later in the year, waiting increased risk and even though we were seeing in excess of a dozen deer early in the year, by the end of the season we estimate there were three regularly using the property (the doe I shot was not one of the regulars).

At the end of the season we are very happy with the property and really enjoy the camp, we think we have a couple of ideas to improve it and will likely pursue those options rather than putting something else on another part of the property…those ideas and plans will be finalized in the spring.

I have enjoyed writing these articles and am considering creating a web blog to chronicle our adventures for the family and friends, no matter what some upcoming events include Andrea designing a 125 gallon reef aquarium, our ice fishing adventures and of course working on the house…

Nov 18 Original Date

So here we go again, rifle season week 2 over, only one week left to get a deer this year. Doug, Dad, Frank and Tina all have deer, well done all of you.

Andrea and Noah were off Friday so as soon as they got home Thursday evening we headed to camp, it was drizzling with a little frozen stuff mixed in and made for a very messy drive. It was nice and clear by the time we got to camp though and the moon was shining bright. Not so good news if you subscribe to the theory that deer browse on moon lit nights and stay in their beds in the morning then browse again mid-day and back to bed…anyway..

Friday morning Noah and I went and checked the cameras and there was very little action on any of them. I set up early morning looking over an open crossing point on a trail they seem to be frequenting. I stayed there until dark and not a sniff of deer. Andrea and Noah started the morning in the raised box blind down by the pond and seen nothing moving all morning so they ducked back to camp for a hot lunch and warm up. Andrea ducked down to see me and drop off a thermos of hot coffee which was wonderful. She and Noah then headed down to the ground blind overlooking the clearing in the woods where I had seen so many deer bow hunting. They immediately found the bright sun in their faces a reason to complain, however the hollow is set in the bottom of a ridge that is covered in trees, this ridge is to the west of the hollow and always got darker faster than the open areas and I found bow hunting the deer would begin moving along the ledge and into the hollow early than elsewhere because of the early shadows…Anyway the evening turned to blackness with nothing observed. Friday was over and other than a ton of fresh air nothing to report. Friday evening was another brightly lit night, and the coyotes were howling all around us.

Saturday we rose to find clouds rolling in and snow forecast on the radio (we are not far outside Brandon and use their weather forecast). The wind was cold and heavy and I figured if the deer were not out feeding before the snow they would likely not be seen again until after the storm. It appears I was right as we spent a long day Saturday brazing frozen snow pellets driven by a fierce north east wind without seeing a hair moving.

Sunday morning I was up to early, 4 am and wide awake so I sat in a dark camp drinking coffee as the wind howled and the frozen snow blasted on the window….at 6:30 I headed down to the blind, not a great morning spot from all experience and camera history but I was up and the blind would provide some shelter from the wind. After waiting there for three hours without seeing anything I decided to walk the boundaries of the property. There are some bedding areas on the eastern border the deer use quite heavily during the fall when they are feeding in the neighbor’s corn. I found nothing, not even a track in the snow until I got back to camp, a doe had crossed the open area right in front of the window at the table…I could have set in the warn heated camp and shot a deer out the window…of course it provided great fun teasing lazy bone hunters in the family who never braved the cold Sunday morning about the deer walking right by the camp in full view for 70 yards and they never even noticed…

We packed up and left at lunch time even though the snow was ending as we have a rule about stopping hunting in time to make sure the employed portion of the family is back home in time for work and school…of course I will likely be employed somewhere next year in order to pay for this fun and the changes we are planning.

I am planning to head back up early Thursday morning to hunt late morning until dark and all day Friday with Andrea and Noah hoping to get up Friday night…

The changes: Currently we access the property in the north east corner drive back and forth across the property in a very winding route avoiding swamp areas and other obstacles. We then drive a narrow path up a 100 foot high ridge to reach the camp on top of the ridge in the south west corner of the property. Not only is this a pain in the butt, the camp is actually located in a terrible spot strategically. All noise, scent, etc is blown down over the ridge through the trees where the majority of the hunting is.. I wonder sometimes if the deer a have patterned our coming and going as to a higher hazard period and alter their behavior.

We debated tearing down the camp and rebuilding it in the north west corner of the property close to the pond to make a less noticeable footprint in the hunting area. The camp is fine as a hunt camp, not a cottage and the cost of upgrading the size and insulation on top of moving it is not endearing to me. I began researching options and found that you can buy a park model camper used in the 30 – 40 foot size range for under 10K. Drop it on a leveled pad, box in and insulate the exterior and a comfortable weather tight hunt camp and cottage is done. The existing structure will be torn down o be rebuilt, the main building as a small barn for storing our quads, decoys and other items, the addition will be brought down to attach to the camper as a porch / cold room what have you.

We are debating on location, there is some attraction of having it looking out over the water but then again as we are going to be doing a bunch of goose and duck hunting over the water maybe the other corner would be a good idea. We will debate that all winter I am sure.

The picture below will give you a better idea what I am talking about, the pinkish line is a rough idea of the boundaries, the white line is the path we have to get to camp which is the yellow blob. The blue dot is a box blind, the red dots are stand locations. The land to the left has been donated to Ducks Unlimited and is posted no hunting. This picture is at least 4 years old, the growth that has happened in that time has been great, there is much more brush and early growth trees than shown here. We are no longer allowing cattle to be grazed on the browner northern portion and that will help with rapid regrowth of brush and trees as well. The yellowish outline is actually a well grown in area of cattails etc that may make a very good blind location for bird hunting…

Original Date Nov 12

The adventure started on Thursday, I pulled Noah out of school to go do some shooting. We wanted to go to our rifle range in Gretna but Enbridge is working on a pipeline directly behind the range so that was out. We packed everything up and headed to camp for the day, it was a balmy 0 degrees Celsius with a mild 10 Kmh wind from the west. We set up everything and started playing with a variety of rifles, most important to him of course was the opportunity to use his new Howa Axiom rifle in 243. 

The picture is from the internet but it looks the same.

We did well and luckily his rifle (and him) can shoot, it made a three shoot one hole group with Federal factory ammo. I also sighted in Andreas 243 and 270 as well as doing load testing on my 270 WSM with some handloads using Nosler Ballistic Silvertip Combined technology bullets with three different powders. I found a load that shoots one ragged hole at 100 yards so all good there, just need a deer to let me test the bullet on...

Noah skipped school again Friday and Andrea took the afternoon off so we headed to camp for the weekend. I never seen anything Friday night, Andrea was much the same. Saturday morning was much the same with the temperature starting to dip below freezing. The weather had been a mix of snow and freezing rain all day Friday and into the morning Saturday. It started to clear early afternoon and we headed off to our respective stands. Andrea seen a couple of deer but they circled around her not giving her a shot. I watched a nice six pointer come in from the south at about 80 yards, rubbing like crazy, I knew his rub line was going to take him east away from me so I started blowing hard on a doe bleet and eventually got him to turn around. He was in no hurry though ambling around but coming into the little clearing where I was setup. he eventually made his way right to my perfect spot, stopping to sniff at a doe scent drip I had setup. He was standing right at 25 yards, perfect broadside so I obligingly drew back my bow string, centering the pin right on his lungs....as I squeezed the trigger on the release he stepped forward but the arrow buried itself in his side.

The buck reacted like a pack of demons were after him, he whirled around plunging back the way he had came, running head first into a huge old oak tree, staggering sideways before plunging full tilt away to the east across the field. After waiting a bit I got down to retrieve my arrow...but, there was no arrow...nothing, no blood, no hair, nothing...it was rapidly growing dark as was my mood. I turned around and there were two button bucks standing there looking at me trying to figure out what was standing there. I honked my buck call a couple of times and they decided to retreat, leaving me to retrieve my gear and hike the hill to camp. Once I returned to camp Andrea and Noah grabbed more flashlights and we headed back down, it had been 75 minutes since I shot the deer so I was comfortable with making a little noise while trying figure out what was going on.

After looking around a little bit, Noah found my broad head laying in a crook of the oak tree the deer had run into, snapped right off. There was a bit of hair and blood on the broad head so I felt better knowing that I had made a decent shot. We moved out into the field scouring for any drop of blood, anything to track but nothing. After an hours search we called it a night, it was below zero and it seemed like a better idea to come back in the morning and see if we could find something.

Noah and I headed out at first light while Andrea went to her tree stand to hunt. I climbed back in the stand where I shot from and sent Noah into the field until he was standing where I thought the buck had ran off. I met him there and we started searching for any drop of blood, hair anything but there was nothing...we kept searching and I had the idea to follow his rub line as it would seem familiar to a panicked deer..(what do I know). There was a point where an older trail branched south and we tried that as well and nothing...Noah was getting bored as we had been searching hard for well over 90 minutes and if we had not found there broad head the previous night there would have been no indication I had even hit the deer. Noah started wandering around just wandering through the woods and gave an excited yell...he found where the buck had laid down, there was a relatively small pool of blood and just to the side I found the arrow, heavily coated with blood.

By this time I figured Andrea would be done her morning hunt so I called her on the radio to get her to join us while we started following the blood trail. Unfortunately there was not much of a blood trail and what there was, was very dark with no bright or bubbly blood. It had now been 16 hours since I shot him, so we felt he should be down if he was going down. I had a dark nagging feeling he was not hit badly, there was hardly any blood but off we went, he jumped the fence onto the next fence, up the hill and crossed a large open patch of ground. We found very little blood, none on any branches just occasional drops on the the ground or leaves. (The temp was still hovering just below freezing and most of the blood we found was completely frozen so he had likely made the whole journey the previous evening) We never found a place where he had laid down to rest, it was also concerning because the farther we went the less blood we found. We went large pieces of ground seeing nothing, using intuition to guess where he went and getting lucky and finding one or two drops of blood and continuing on. We tracked him over and under fences, through heavy brush and open ground, the further we went the less blood there was until we finally there was nothing...we spent a long time just circling around starting over, while Noah just explored looking in every nook and cranny but nothing.

Finally we had to reluctantly admit defeat, we had tracked there buck over 3 kms with no sign that he a stopped to rest, no large pools of blood nothing. I figure I either hit him to high and it was just a meat wound that will likely heal or I knicked his liver and not sure what will happen but we watched the whole area the next 24 hours for crows and listened for coyotes and nothing...

I had planned to stay up for a few more days rifle hunting but Sunday night the temp plunged to -20 and we found out there was a large amount of drafts in the camp. We knew we had to do some work to tighten up the place but wow, there is no seal around the joint between the floor and walls...I decided after hunting Monday morning that a cold air bed held little appeal alone when I could go home to a hot shower, a hot tub, a hot wife or sleep alone on a cold air mattress...hmmm this cat is not in the army any more folks, I went home. 

Noah and Andrea are both off Friday so we will go back up Thursday night and try again...until next week have a good one.

This was actually written the last week of October

We arrived early enough at camp Friday to have time to unpack and get organized, I had spent the day Tuesday up there scouting and placing a couple of new stands and Friday's wind was perfect for one of them right on the south fence line. I made my way to that one while Andrea headed off to her ladder stand. That ladder stand is likely in the best location on the property but more on her later...

I was quite happy with the setup of my new stand location, now for the deer to cooperate...sure enough two does showed up about 20 minutes before last light...on the wrong side of the fence, the large one was very curious, she could tell something was up n the tree but not what, she spent about 4 minutes walking back and forth sniffing, trying real hard to figure something out. After a bit her caution overcame her curiosity and she headed back south away from me but 5 minutes later she came back down the trail on my side of the fence. She was acting very cautious but not jumpy. She walked right down toward me but instead of heading North up the trail where I was set up to shoot her she crawled under a scrub oak and looked right at me for a minute trying to figure me out. She then backed out and started down the fence line to the east - I had not cleared the shooting lane over there but I knew I was going to busted if she got dead down wind so I decided to try and thread and arrow through the oak branches...no luck, it deflected down and was a clean miss, scaring both deer off from my area...that was the height of my weekend.

Andrea was much more organized this time and spooked a deer trying to get into her stand, nothing more was seen until end of legal light, as she was climbing down a real nice doe and 2 small ones came out...there was Andrea stuck on her ladder waiting for the deer to move on so she did not spook them...something was said about a cramp in a sensitive rear region LOL. Saturday morning was a bust but Saturday afternoon she took Noah as hers is the double ladder stand. They were thoroughly entertained as they had two button bucks playing around in front of them for over 10 minutes. They also had 2 other does pass over the ridge just to the west of the stand, she thought they would be headed right down to me at another location I had set up but I never seen a thing..

So another fun and eventful weekend at the Ingalls family hunt camp has come and gone, no fresh venison on the table yet but we have lots of reason to be optimistic...

The plan for the next 5 weekends will be to leave for camp lunch time on Friday, meaning Andrea has to take the afternoon off and Noah has to miss school, heartbreaking for both of them I am sure.

For those wondering why Andrea did not shoot a nice tender juicy young buck for our table please scroll down...and then read my closing comments

as you can see she has a more interesting buck on her mind than a mere button buck. When I said earlier she was in a prime location, I put new batteries in the camera located at her stand 2 pm Tuesday, when she pulled the card at 11am this (Sunday) morning there was over 300 pictures...my best calculation so far we have encountered or photographed, the buck pictured above, a 6 pointer, a 4 pointer a forkhorn and 2 button bucks, a large solitary doe, a large doe with 2 fawns, a large doe with one fawn and possibly one other. We also have seen two others on the DUL property within 150 yards of our camp.