No, Fastflight I have not. I just got caught up in a rhetorical flourish there. I still stick to the general principle, however, that bucks whack on all sizes of trees, so that aging a buck by his rubs will boil down to lots of guesswork. I think.

By the by, I've started to wonder if the track measuring couldn't be used as a sort of poor man's game camera. Take a hand rake, and tear up the ground in a funnel, then check the spot for tracks periodically. Personally, I'm going to try it on one 4 1/2 year old buck I've got a half-arsed pattern on right now. I'm going to wait until July and August when more of the elk have moved out of the area, then I'm going to set up 3 or 4 such spots baited with a couple apples each. Then if the buck gets to it before the bears do, I'll have something. We'll see...