I have posted this article before written by an outdoor writer in the 'Houston Chronicle.' It is a must read. I think everyone here can feel the message in this article. Very nice piece of writing. One of the best that I have come across in terms of "Why do we hunt?" Enjoy.




One hunter's thoughts from a week in the woods
By SHANNON TOMPKINS
Copyright 2001 Houston Chronicle

Wails and warbles and squalls cut through the fog of sleep, and I opened my eyes to a darkness so profound it took a few seconds to recognize I was conscious.

Alone inside the one-room shack, I groped for the little flashlight and checked the wind-up alarm clock -- 3:15 a.m.

I killed the light, slumped back onto the old bed and wiggled under the ancient quilt until reaching some equilibrium between its welcomed warmth and the refreshing chill of the November night.

The coyotes kept at it, their high-pitched calls seeming to come from every direction. One sounded as if it were nearly under the open window beside the bed.

I drifted back to sleep listening to the wild canines' songs, wondering what they were discussing and gratified they woke me to hear their conversation.

Moments such as that -- little episodes that bring comfort, enlightenment and wonder -- make deer hunting such a worthwhile experience.

Contrary to the slanderous stereotype, time spent afield in the professed pursuit of venison is not consumed in a saturnalia of alcohol or bacchanal of blood.

It is, for some of us at least, a ritual of the most serious sort -- a chance to be part of an experience that helps us learn and grow and perhaps become more aware of the world around us and our place in it.

It is not at all unlike going to church.

This past week, the deer lease provided some memorable moments and fresh insights into deer, deer hunting and the reasons most of us go afield.

A handful of them, in no particular order, were:

·A deer's sense of smell is unimaginable when held against our pitifully weak human olfactory ability.

This is no news to most deer hunters; we've all heard the alarm snorts from unseen deer that have "busted" us from 100 yards away using nothing more than their nose.

But an episode this past week reconfirmed deers' ability to sift scents.

An hour after dawn, a sleek doe appeared about 100 yards away in the hardwood bottom where I sat in a tripod stand.

The doe's actions were unusual. She stayed right in that spot, occasionally nosing the ground and poking and rubbing a patch of American beautyberry with her nose.

She'd take a couple of steps, then turn and retrace them.

The doe was atop a scrape, a pawed patch of ground a buck deer uses as a kind of trap line for does in estrus.

After nearly a half-hour, the doe wandered off, taking a random path through the woods.

That afternoon, more than nine hours after the doe's visit, a young buck appeared from nowhere. He walked straight to the scrape, nosed the ground, pawed the earth, rubbed his preorbital glands on the twigs over the scrape then scrunched up and urinated over his hocks, washing the musky scent from his tarsal glands onto the sandy ground.

He then put his nose to the "French mulberry" bush the doe had nudged and brushed.

Through 10x50 binoculars, I watched as he lifted his head, slightly opened his mouth, curled his upper lip and shoved out his tongue.

The buck was literally tasting the scent -- the estrogen and other pheromones -- left by the doe.

He put his nose to the ground and like some pointing dog on the trail of a running quail began tailing the long-gone doe.

The testosterone-charged buck never wavered from her long-cold, trackless path, using nothing but his nose to direct him.

Amazing!

·Deer know what to worry about.

I watched does and yearlings and bucks pay no attention to coyotes yipping in the distance or crows yammering right over their heads.

Deer never flinched at the crack of rifle shots in the distance or paid any mind to the rattle and hum of logging trucks and chainsaws.

But when the faintest sound of human voices drifted into the woods -- whether it was loggers or folks working in the pasture adjacent to our East Texas lease -- deer immediately went into serious survival mode.

Heads and ears popped up and focused on the direction of the faraway voices. They would stare toward the sound, move anxiously, then melt away.

Those wild deer almost certainly never have had a close encounter with a human. How they develop, almost from birth, this awareness that the two-legged creatures are their most serious predator speaks to the honest natural relationship between hunters and their prey.

·The theory that a scrape is the purview of one particular buck is bogus.

Truth is, during the rut several bucks may use a scrape as a check station in their single-minded efforts to locate receptive does and pass their genes to another generation.

How many bucks may visit a single scrape?

Depends on the place and the scrape, of course. But some information gleaned on our typical East Texas lease proved interesting.

A couple of weeks ago, my brother Les set up a "deer cam" -- a point-and-shoot camera housed in a weather-proof housing and using infrared or motion sensors to trip the camera's shutter -- on a tree adjacent to a particularly large scrape he located near one of his tripods.

Over the next few days, the camera recorded 13 individual deer visiting the scrape. Most of them were bucks.

The camera recorded eight different bucks, from a pencil-necked spike to a healthy 10-pointer, using that single scrape.

Some showed at midnight. Others in mid-afternoon. But most of the deer -- bucks and does -- made their stops at the scrape between dawn and mid-morning.

The lesson is that just because a hunter sees a year-and-a-half-old forkhorn working a scrape, it doesn't mean he's the bull of that particular piece of woods. The next visitor to the rutting season signpost could be his grandfather.

It's the kind of knowledge that breeds hope and patience, both of which are crucial to deer hunters.

·There is no doubt the recent explosion in the use of "deer cams" has helped hunters learn more about the animals they pursue and increase their chances of success.

The cameras can unblinkingly monitor a feeder or a trail or a scrape, yielding information on which deer use an area and even patterning their visits.

But does the use of these inanimate "scouts" steal an important part of deer hunting's essence?

No doubt the cameras are fascinating, useful tools. It's exciting to get the film processed and have it reveal the heretofore unknowable. It's thrilling to see a buck you've never seen, or marvel at a photo of a bobcat skulking along a trail.

But does that knowledge make us better hunters or just more efficient deer collectors.

Deer and deer hunting should be magic things, filled with surprise and wonder and the unexpected. And for hunting to be the consecrated, honest ritual it should, it must be an exercise in skill and woodsmanship that shows the hunter to be worthy of taking an animal.

Having a machine chronicle every deer on a tract of land is like running Christmas presents through an X-ray machine before opening them -- the magic and wonder are gone.

When you know too much -- when a human has too much control over the animals or too little of himself invested in the experience -- taking a deer can become the sterile, soulless act of engaging a target.

But how much is too much?

Do deer cams cross that line? How about corn feeders? Food plots? Scoped rifles? High fences? Guided hunts?

The answer is not as important as simply asking the question.

·The best time of the day for a deer hunter is the hour before dawn.

Whether it's spent huddled against a rock overlooking a Hill Country canyon, secluded in a towering box blind at the intersection of two senderos in South Texas, or perched in a wobbly tripod next to a big swamp chestnut oak in an East Texas creek bottom, that hour or so before dawn holds the heart of the hunt.

Waiting in the dark, watching shooting stars, listening to the tremolo of screech owls and warbling coyotes while sipping a warming cup of coffee, a hunter can feel truly a part of a place.

And in that space just before forms begin appearing in what was blackness and the first wheezing call of a thrush confirms the end of another night, the excitement and anticipation builds. Anything is possible. This could be the day. Magic could happen.

That's what deer hunting is. It's about everything leading up to the moment when the trigger is pulled, and the respect shown the animal should the trigger be pulled.

It's not, as most deer hunters understand and most non-hunters can't comprehend, about pulling that trigger.