Unless you have the luxury of glassing your hunting spot and no one else is hunting it to find "A" particular deer, you have to hunt the sign. You don't hunt all sign... but you hunt it. Based on what you see, tracks your find, knowledge of the woods and deer sense, you hunt sign early season. It's easy to find the does, you hunt them before, during and right after the rut. If you're hunting in Sept or early Oct and want to shoot a buck, they aren't going to be with the does. You have to hunt the sign as you read it. A series of rubs can tell you bucks are cruising an area. The size can generally give you some idea of buck size. Tracks in scrapes help. I personnally don't hunt rubs or scrapes, but rather use them as guides to where the bucks are moving. You have to add all that to the food sources to get a true picture. So to say, "DON"T hunt the sign" is really pretty short sighted. Unless you can sit there for a month and glass and see a buck come out everynight in a field at a particular spot what do you do? If you've read the sign correctly you can figure it out without the glassing. You can read the sing in a new strange woods you've never hunted and come up with a deer. If you ignore scrapes, rubs and all that, you're just hoping you're lucky. GMMAT says he didn't hunt the sign, he observed and cautiously moved in over a period of time. What better sign is there than visual observation. He said he didn't want to pressure them. However, we've all heard how the neighbors pressured them and shot several by wandering all over. And even later GMMAT shot another. If you read the sign, hunt the wind and do low impact hunting you can go just about anywhere you want with a bow. Most of us have limited hunting days. I prefer to put myself in a spot to shoot something everytime I go. If I don't get back to the area for a week they've forgot me.