Fuel for the Fire

July 29, 2012

Traveled from my home state of North Carolina up to our SE Ohio hunting lease this past weekend (July 28, 2012) with my dad, to hang a few trail cameras and respray some fields and paths that had been done back in late April and try to do some late afternoon buck observations. But we could have never imagined what we were going to encounter on Saturday afternoon.

After getting all 3 trail cameras hung and spraying everything on the lease, it was time to go ride around and see if we could find any bucks out in the fields feeding. So we rode up to our neighbor’s and asked if he had been seeing any bucks out in the fields close by? He said that he had, and he would be more than willing to have us just ride along with him. So my dad and I piled into his extended cab chevy and hit the road at 8:00pm on Saturday.

We had not gone half a mile and came up on a field that had a a few doe and one small 8pt out feeding. So we continued on down the road to the next field where there were more deer out feeding, pretty much the same numbers as we saw before. Handful of doe and a couple small bucks. After glassing these deer for a bit we headed to the next cluster of fields that were a couple hundred yards down the road. Our neighbor told us that these next fields were the hang out of some of the biggest bucks he had been seeing this year. As we round the corner and 8:30pm we spotted a small 6pt, two doe and a fawn feeding in a small field no more than 60yrds off the road.

As I was capturing some footage of these deer my dad exclaimed from the back seat, “Good Lord, look at that buck.” As I panned the camera around to the right, I spotted the bruiser. He was standing just inside the tall grass of the creek bank. It was one of those moments when everything just seems to come to a grinding halt and time stands still.

Then after only a few seconds the bucks instincts kicked in and he retreated back into the safety of the brush and was gone. But in those few seconds that we were able to see and capture this bruiser on film, was just fuel for the fire to an already burning anticipation to the upcoming Ohio 2012-2013 Whitetail season.