This is bush hunting. Wife's buck, story, tips.

[Bushleague]

Me and my wife still hunted the thick stuff this morning. It was a new spot we've never set foot in, with a bit of luck (and over a decade of hunting this way) we were fortunate enough to have a nice buck on the ground by 10:30.

PA080253 by , on Flickr

Bush hunting gets asked about a couple times a season on here. While I wouldn't exactly call myself an expert, after 15 years of concentrating on bush hunting I feel that I have begun to take the luck out of it. This is not the dry, highly detailed manifesto I could peck out, so long as some poor sucker would listen. Instead its the story of a nice buck that my wife shot this morning, which highlights a number of lessons I've learned about timber hunting.

1. A ridge and an edge. One of the toughest things about bush hunting is wading through huge tracts of bush to try and find productive areas to concentrate on. I'd drove by this spot numerous times and always knew it would be a great area to hunt. Why? The best place to start your search is where an edge and a ridge meet, that is the "X" that marks the spot where your search begins. This was a big, densely treed valley on the edge of a huge burn that was logged extensively. The bush road runs on the top of the west side of the valley, I followed this road until I hit the point where the live timber started and we started hunting.

2. Irregularities and sign. So now we had a ridge and an edge, bingo! Well, not exactly, this is only where your search begins. What I start looking for next is irregularities, in both the edge and the ridge. For some reason these are often the pockets where sign is concentrated, and sign is what you are after. When I hunt a new area I move pretty quick until I find good amounts of sign, then I slow down and start still hunting. There's no point hunting where there are no animals.

3. Think positive. Things didn't go super well right off the bat. Theres a little bit of snow down, but things are still pretty loud when you are moving off the trail. As is often the case on all my most productive ridges, the wind was terrible, switching constantly, and the undergrowth was ridiculously thick. If you do a lot of reading, or watch enough wild TV, its supposed to be impossible to kill deer in these conditions, experience has taught me otherwise however. One just has to do their very best and have a little faith that at the point a deer shows up the variables will be in your favor. When things are looking truly hopeless I have a little trick I use, I ask myself what I would rather be doing. The answer is always "Nothing", once I realise that I'm right where I want to be I settle back down and do my best. This trick doesn't really work with my wife.

4. Loitering. We made our way far enough into the timber that the undergrowth thinned out a bit, the wind was still conspiring against us though. We were following a deer trail that had some fresh moose tracks on it, now I felt "in the zone." When one is on the sign one needs to get rid of the notion that they are going somewhere. Sure you are moving a bit, but this isn't a hike, it isn't really even a stroll, one simply loiters their way along waiting for something good to happen. Like killing a -30 day at West Ed Mall, or a vagrant wandering around White Ave. You've got all day, theres no rush.

So now we were in "the zone" frustrations slowly ebbing, all of the sudden I saw a horizontal line about 80 yards ahead. Any horizontal line in the bush is worth looking at, but especially so when its the only one without snow on it. Through my binoculars I could see it was a doe, the wind was dead wrong, I blew a buck call just to try and get her to leave without making a fuss. It seemed to work because off she trotted, another deer followed, no antlers there either. I could see another deer tucked behind a pine tree and was trying to put antlers on it when I heard a crash to my left. I looked over, expecting to see the moose who's tracks we had been following. Instead I saw a buck, high tailing it back the way we had come from.
I gave a shout and he pulled to a stop about 50 yards away, his head was behind a big poplar, a screening of brush hid most of his body, but through a little hole in the bush his shoulder was showing. I turned around to ask my wife if she wanted the honors, and saw that she was already lined up on him, a couple seconds and she touched off the shot.

We didn't have a very long drag back to the truck, but it was all uphill and nasty. Walking backwards, both hands on the antlers, heaving a big bodied buck over deadfall and through thickets, up the ever present steepness. Drag 30 yards, rest for half a minuet, repeat... unless it was a super bad stretch in which case it was more like 5 yards between breaks. A couple hours of this and we eventually had him in the truck. And that boys, is how bush hunting should be done IMO.