A lesson that has been pounded into my head from a young age is to take your weaknesses and turn them into an asset toward your goal. When you step back and look at how everything can work for our good, it can be the most freeing thing in the world. That lesson can apply to hunting in multiple ways, but probably my favorite way I’ve learned to accomplish this is with respect to how much time I have to hunt. One of the main tenets of being a basic hunter is that we do not have nearly enough time. Most would see this as a problem; I see it as freedom.
That may seem counterintuitive, but it has opened up my hunting world. Since I don’t have a bunch of time to scout and hunt, I need to get the most out of the time I do have available. This means that the tentative, conservative approaches to hunting that you might see big buck hunters (rightly, by the way) take is out the window. I need to figure out what works and go for it. Sometimes (ok, most times) I crash and burn and learn from it. But sometimes it works out.
Late Season Freedom
One of those times in which being aggressive at something new was a few years ago when I tried my first stalk on a deer during archery season. It was during the late season in early January. I had a doe tag in my pocket and a freezer that had some meat in it but also had some extra room in it. I could have thrown in the towel and not hunted in the bitter cold and wind. But I wanted to try something new – spot and stalk a whitetail with a bow.
Spot and stalk is a strategy in which you put eyes on a target animal from a far distance and then stalk your way into bow range of that animal. A hunter must beat the animal’s nose, ears and eyes while doing so. Contrast that strategy to the one I had grown up and continued to employ, which was climb myself up a tree and wait. I saw the whole thing as something Western hunters did and completely impractical for a whitetail hunter.
Until I watched Zach Ferenbaugh of the Hunting Public kill a number of deer from the ground with a bow via spot and stalk.
As the late season was winding down, I decided to go for it. It was late season, so if I screwed up, who cares? My family had a vacation planned for the following week to warmer climates. It was the last chance I would get to hunt for the season. What’s the worst that could happen? There’s freedom in knowing that you only get a couple of chances every year – so you have to go for it and take some risks.
The Plan
I had permission on a farm that I thought might be a good place to put on a stalk. There was an open ag field in which a farmer had planted winter grains, and the deer were loving it. I could see the does pile out early each evening. I also knew that the deer were bedding extremely close to the field with the cold temps and how early they would get out into the field. With all of the leaf cover gone, the 100-yard wide strip of woods between the field and the road was bare of leaves. There was no real way to get into a stand without alerting every deer in the area of my presence.
The one thing the spot had in my favor was elevation. The field dropped off about ten feet into the woods. This isn’t a huge drop, but between that and the giant ruts made by loggers a few years back, it provided plenty of ways to avoid detection. To paraphrase Dwight Schrute, I knew I could be better at hiding than they could at vision. Keep in mind, this is a doe herd that contained around twenty pairs of eyes to contend with. Deer have this annoying tendency to want to keep themselves and their friends alive, so if I screwed up with one deer, the whole field would clear out.
The deer’s nose was also something I knew I could beat, provided the day I went on the stalk had a strong wind blowing away from the field. A west wind would be ideal as that would blow scent right to the road. A north or south wind could also work because I could pick my direction of approach. East was the only wind I couldn’t pull off. It would also be good if there was at least some consistency and speed to the wind; calm days lead to unpredictable and swirling scent patterns. I would also make sure to go in the evening as the cooling thermals would pull my wind down the hill (instead of pulling up the hill with the rising temps of a morning hunt).
The deer’s ears were my last hurdle. In my overconfidence, I told myself I could wear rubber-soled boots and just be very careful about where I walked. I got lucky on the day of my stalk. The weather turned out to be a mix of rain during the day that turned to wet snow by evening. Normally, I absolutely loathe hunting in cold rain. Give me 15 and clear over 38 and rain every single time.
As I found out that day, wet ground is a Godsend for the spot and stalk hunter. I don’t think I could have made noise if I jumped up and down on dead sticks with firecrackers on my boots. Sometimes it seems that you could break sticks just by looking at them on a cold and dry January day. Add ‘spot and stalk’ to Luke Bryan’s list of the virtues of rain.
The Initial Stalk – Way Too Slow
I was excited as I set up to begin my stalk around 3pm. I had until about 530pm to close the deal. As I stood in the woods, I could see deer through my binos standing out in the field right outside the tree line about 200 yards away from me. The wind was right, the ground was wet, and I set off on my first spot and stalk. There was so much freedom to it. No stands, no ropes, no climbing sticks, just me and my bow, rangefinder, milkweed and binos.
The closest thing I could compare the idea of spot and stalk is to when I would play freeze tag at night with my cousins. I grew up in a large family and we would all play freeze tag together at night at my grandparents farm. Between the large trees, cornfield and brush, there were lots of places to hide and try to avoid getting frozen. You waited until the other person wasn’t looking your way, then tried to sneak to the next point that would get you to home base without letting the other person see you or hear you.
Spot and stalk is a lot like that. I kept as much of an eye on my quarry as possible, while ensuring they didn’t see me. Every step was carefully planned out. I looked for the next log, evergreen, depression in a rut, or brush pile that I needed to get to so I could hide and plan my next maneuver. I had to make sure my general path led me in the right direction; more than once I found myself taking a path that went toward the road instead of the field.
After an hour of this slow and methodical stalk, I realized I had closed about 50 yards of distance from where I started. Trouble was, the deer had moved about 50 yards further up the field. I had gained zero distance. Looking back, based on the terrain and how wet the ground was, I’m pretty sure I could have covered that ground in about ten minutes. Live and learn.
First Setup – Way Too Stupid
I moved much more efficiently this time, making decisive moves quickly and quietly. As I closed to within 75 yards of the deer, I settled down for a second to plan my final approach. I knew that there was a small locust grove of overgrown brush that I planned to be my final setup spot. As I got closer, however, I saw that what had been a ten yard wide overgrown patch of grass in October was now a wide open patch of nothing. There was no way I could cross ten yards of open ground without the deer seeing me.
My only other option was to sneak closer to the field to reduce my distance as much as possible and hope the deer fed back my way. I sat down in a small indentation in the ground with my back to a decent sized tree to block my silhouette. The deer were still about 60 yards away, too far for me to confidently take the shot.
Dumb.
Unbeknownst to me, some of the deer had come parallel to me out in the field from the direction I had come from. While I was watching the deer 60 yards away in front of me, I could see three deer walking into my field of view to my left at about 20 yards away. My crossbow was on my lap. They were staring right in my direction. I have a superstition about not looking into a deer’s eyes when you are hunting them; I get the feeling that they know you are alive and something that’s not supposed to be there. I had my hood up and was covered head to toe in camo between my bibs and my coat. I put my head down and did my best impression of a mossy boulder.
No good. The first doe wasn’t buying my act. I’m convinced she didn’t know what I was, but I am also convinced she didn’t like whatever she thought I was. Luckily, the first doe did the head-bob for a minute, sniffed the air, and then turned around and just walked back from where they came from. She didn’t white-flag or sound the alarm to every other deer in the field. While my setup might have been dumb, I was still in the game.
The Final Approach
With that excitement finished, I had about a half and hour of shooting light left to seal the deal, and things were not looking good. I had semi-spooked one doe group and the other group was 60 yards and moving away. This is where the Basic Hunter understanding of lack of time became and advantage once again. I knew the only way I could make this work was to close the distance on the group 60 yards away. They didn’t know I was there, and I’d be moving away from the more skittish deer.
I had to make a big 75 yard loop around the locust patch to get to the other side and within range of the does. 75 yards may not sound like much, but when you are within a baseball’s throw from a bunch of eyes, ears and noses with the evolutionary purpose of survival, it seems like a country mile. I played my favorite game in that moment – ‘what’s the worst/best that can happen?’. I had two choices. If I stayed in that spot, what’s the worst that could happen? No deer come within range and I go into winter with a half-full freezer. What’s the best? I don’t spook any deer. They were not going to realistically pass my way.
The freedom rang out in my ears when I contemplated the alternative. What’s the best that can happen if I make this move? I kill a deer from the ground through spot and stalk and fill my freezer. What’s the worst that can happen? I blow out the field, and end up in the same exact spot I’m in right now.
Let’s go.
I crept around the locust grove and found a nice deep rut from the loggers. I dropped down into the old track and half crawled, half crouched. I covered most of the distance within a couple of minutes. I popped my head up ever so slightly a few times to make sure the deer were still where I thought they were as I went. The last ten yards to the brushy edge of the field would have to be a crawl. There were some hardy grasses and brush that I slowly slithered through – set the bow in front of me, army crawl a few steps, pause to check the deer, and repeat.
I finally made my way to the edge of the brush. I slowly got up to my knees with a wall of grass between me and the field. I pulled my range finder out and ranged the closest deer, which also looked like the biggest doe in the field to me at the time. I know that it was probably my mind playing tricks because obviously the closer deer are going to look bigger, but I didn’t care at that point. 42 yards. I was confident at that distance offhand. With about ten minutes of shooting light left, I needed to make it happen.
I slowly rose to the point where my bow (not just the scope!) cleared the grass. The deer was calmly feeding broadside. I settled my 40 yard pin and took the shot. I tried to wait to watch the arrow hit in the scope, but there was an explosion of activity in the periphery of my scope after the initial thunk of my crossbow firing. Deer were running everywhere. It felt like a good shot to me. All of the deer cleared off over the rise and into the woods on the other side of the field.
I couldn’t see my arrow anywhere in the field, but that wasn’t surprising given the angle of the shot. I just had to know. I crouched as I walked up to the crest of the rise of the field. There, laying 50 yards away, was a dead deer.
The only thing I kept thinking to myself while I cleaned the deer, while I was butchering, while I retold the story to a couple of buddies, is what I will tell you now: ‘no way that should have worked’. But it did. I took a chance on something new, and it actually worked. And it has worked a few more times since then. Believe me, there are many new things I’ve tried that have failed or just aren’t realistic. That freedom to try, knowing that screwing up is not necessarily ok but it’s also a great opportunity to learn, is one of the biggest advantages a Basic Hunter can have.