Pennsylvania Game News - May 2011 - 31

Stevens’ Woods.” A fresh snow had fallen early that morning, and the air was sparkled with frost motes as I loaded the Great Plains rifle, made certain the flash hole was clear, dribbled some priming powder into the pan and snapped the frizzen shut. I liked the January flintlock season. I liked hunting with the flintlock more than carrying my single-shot .45-70 during the regular rifle season. Such hunting gave me a taste of the way our early ancestors hunted, the way they felt and the way they reasoned at the task of keeping meat on the table. So as my wife, Betty, pulled away, I took a deep breath and made fresh tracks in the snow around the foundation of an old barn and diagonally across the field to the edge of Paul Stevens’ Woods. At the edge of the woods, the land sloped steeply downhill for about 400 yards, leveled out on each side of Mallory Run, and then rose again into a narrow stretch of woods on the far side of Mallory Run. On the uphill slope beyond the woods, old fields were now partly overgrown with thornapple and scrub pine. The woods on both sides of Mallory Run held considerable mature timber and were open. As I stood there studying the wooded slope below me, a familiar shape caught my eye, a doe about two-thirds of the way down the slope bedded down in the snow with her head lifted and looking downhill toward the creek. Too far for a shot with the flintlock, I studied the terrain for a moment and then cautiously started to work my way downhill, going off to one side of the doe instead of directly toward her. I have always believed that most animals in the wild have an intuitive sense that alerts them to approaching danger. As a consequence, once I spot a deer, if I am unable to take my shot within the next few moments, I take my eyes off the deer and avoid looking directly at it, and
may 2011

take only quick peripheral glances now and then to keep aware of the deer’s actions. And if I am planning a stalk, as I did then, it is never a direct approach, but always slightly off to one side or the other. True to its nature, this doe sensed that something was amiss. I had not taken 20 steps when she stood up, shook herself off and slowly worked her way downhill and across the flat toward Mallory Run. Within just a few moments she was out of sight, along with a second doe that seemed to appear from nowhere. You never hurry these things. Just because two deer have left doesn’t mean that a third isn’t lagging behind under the security of a hemlock. And with that thought in mind, I continued to work slowly downhill and a bit off to one side of where I had first seen the doe. Although I didn’t see any other deer while making the approach, I did find where three others had joined the first two, and then all five had crossed the creek, gone up the steep bank on the far side and turned parallel to the creek, heading through the woods in a downstream direction. As I mentioned earlier, on the uphill side of the woods that bordered Mallory Run were old overgrown fields. I knew the lay of the land well. I had hunted on it, explored it and picked its blackberries for a long time. In my mind I felt I had a 50-50 chance of correctly predicting which way the deer would travel. So after following the tracks of these deer for maybe 50 yards and seeing that they were paralleling the creek, I left the tracks and the woods and went out into the overgrown fields, paralleling Mallory Run and the deer tracks, and kept watching far ahead to see if the deer would
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Pennsylvania Game News - May 2011

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