THE BUCK THAT WASN'T COMING

  WHITETAILS IN THE RUT

I find myself journaling today on the oak knoll, one of my favorite woodland spots on our south twenty acres.  Patches of blue sky amid strips of gray clouds wallpaper the sky above me on this mild November day.  We're just a couple weeks away from the whitetail gun deer season here in Wisconsin.

The winds are calm and I can hear a pin drop if one does.  It's a perfect day to sit and look and listen for a whitetail buck that isn't coming.  But there are signs of him.  I walked past a fresh scrape on my way here and there's another scrape just ten feet in front of me where I'm leaning up against an oak tree.  That's part of the reason I chose to sit here today.
 

A fresh whitetail buck scrape spotted on my walk to the knoll

A gray squirrel dashes from an oak tree to the woodland floor and scuffles along through the freshly fallen leaves that blanket the ground all around me.  I love that smell of fall, it brings back nostalgic memories of falls passed.  But today I also smell the slight odor of a skunk that must have waddled through here last night.

I hear a woodpecker high up in the trees pecking for a meal and I search for it with my eyes.  It looks like a female hairy woodpecker.  Between the large oak trees, clusters of spindly young white pine trees are filling the gaps in the woods around me.  They are so thick that I wonder how many will survive, and how it's decided which ones will.   

All of a sudden I hear leaves rustling directly behind the tree I'm sitting up against.  I turn around and grab my camera, shocked to see a spike buck sneaking up on me.  His neck is puffed up, his eyes are glaring at me, and I think he's as shocked as I am.  I fiddle with my camera and attempt to snap a shot but he quickly darts back into the trees where he came from.  All that I capture is his tail.

Dang it, there he was for a split second, the buck that wasn't coming, right there behind me, and I forgot all the rules about having patience and moving slowly that I learned from deer hunting years ago.  I know now that the rut is in full force and I'm just tickled that I've had the chance to see a buck up close and personal...  Life is great today!

My favorite leather hiking boots, they don't owe me a thing.