If I cut a single deer track with some size to it, the first thing I note is how the animal making the tracks picks its way through brush and understory. If it is able to thread through small gaps in an aspen clear-cut, I know it is not a buck I want to try and get a shot at or stay with. I admit I don't poke hunt that much anymore. We used to do a lot of three man triangle drives, still huting through mature timber along stream drainages along the Sturgeon in the hills south of Mount Arvon and Curwood. Bucks move up and down the stream corridors and intermittent beaver flowages to look for does in the heavy brush along the Sturgeon River. When hunting deer in truly remote country up here, bucks will jump and run, and then often turn and stop to look back like a mule deer to see what spooked them up and got 'em going.
Sometimes a chip shot is too close. Why I didn't try and shoot that ten that momentarily parked himself next to my pop-up blind this season-too close to risk the shot based on experience. Check your blackpowder gun at close range to determine where the muzzle and crosshairs begin to diverge significantly. I had the buck on the right (below) walk in behind me to a bed I had seen near my blind when I dropped my chair inside the trangular log blind I had constructed along a hardwood tongue that dropped into a large cedar swamp. We found a number of nice sheds in this area in the spring. It was crunchy snow, so I heard the buck come in, but thought it was a band of does by the volume of noise. When I realized I the sound was bouncing off the swamp edge and the deer was coming in behind me he was right on top of me. I dialed the scope down to 2X and waited until I realized my bad knee was going to lock-up and deny me from rising to my feet from the squatted position I dropped into when I heard the buck coming in on top of me. So, I shifted over and stood, keeping the tree behind me between my position and the last place I heard the buck move from. When I was up I decided to step right to clear my shouldered gun. My scope field was full of the head of a very nice buck. I quickly shifted to his chest and saw a stump and roots blocked a shot at his chest, so I went back to the base of his neck, centered the crosshairs on his spine and fired, expecting to knock him over. He spun and blew out of there never allowing me to get a follow-up shot. I paced the distance; 23 feet. Hair and tissue were abundant in the snow, but I never hit bone that would enable the bullet to mushroom at that distance. My muzzle and crosshairs were "off" by about 4". My second mistake was to pursue him after waiting two hours. We had good snow cover, no wolves then in the U.P. and I should have let him bed and die overnight. Instead I pushed him out of his bed into a beaver flowage where I lost him. I found him dead a couple days later. I put my two hunting partners near that flowage as I wandered around the cedar swamp each day. Jim killed a beautiful 12point and his brother, Mike, shot a nice eight the following morning. We killed four more bucks out of that area before the beaver destroyed it and flooded it out.
