Pennsylvania Game News - February 2013 - 10

snowier. Although there have been some scorchers in the mix, too. One year, 1990, they were predicting temperatures in the 70s for the opener. It was still brisk walking to my stand in the pre-dawn air, though. It hadn’t rained for a while and the “cornﬂake” dry leaves were so noisy that I could’ve heard a chipmunk on the next ridge. I had no sooner settled into my stand when I heard deer coming. It was too dark to make out much more than shadows, but there were more than 10 of them coming from the point of the ridge above me to my left. They were strung out diagonally down a trail heading for a laurel tangle off to my right. I just had to sit and watch them go, knowing they were likely going to bed down in the thicket for the rest of the day. My only hope was that a hunter would get antsy and push them back up past me again. That wasn’t likely, though, as the warm temperatures meant hunters would not have to move to warm up like they usually did on the ﬁrst day. Once the sun made it over the eastern horizon, the day warmed rapidly. By late afternoon, except for squirrels, I hadn’t seen a thing. The only action had come shortly after noon when I had to scramble out of the blind to escape some wasps that had been awakened by the warm temperatures. They were falling out of a nest above me and were sluggish, but I didn’t know if they were too groggy to sting or not, so I wasn’t taking any chances. Around 3:30 I was getting groggy myself when I heard rustling off to my right. Apparently, someone was up and moving and had rousted the deer I had seen earlier that morning. Here they came, retracing their exact path, about 75 yards out.
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They weren’t running, but they weren’t wasting any time either. I put the scope on an opening and watched as they squirted through. Two or three of them were bucks, but they were moving too quickly to line up a shot. I frantically moved from opening to opening, trying to get a buck in the crosshairs before they were gone, but the last one disappeared over the point of the ridge before I had a chance. Dejected, I was lowering the riﬂe when I heard another one coming. As soon as it entered the ﬁrst opening I saw the rack. No decision to make here. I just had to ﬁnd an opening for a decent shot. I was too late getting set up on the ﬁrst two openings and I had one chance left, and that was an opening between two rocks farther up the ridge. I quickly found it in the scope just as the buck stepped into it. He paused for an instant and my shot was on its way. I saw his tail disappear over the ridge and I had 100 yards of mountain to scale to see if I had connected. I gathered my gear and started out. Hot and sweaty, I topped the rise and after some searching saw the white underbelly of a deer. I walked up to it and counted 10 symmetrical points. The day’s weather wasn’t at all the kind I preferred for hunting, but I couldn’t argue the results. One other year the forecast called for every sort of negative weather imaginable for the ﬁrst day. It was to start out warm and foggy with a light rain falling by daybreak. The temperatures were to drop throughout the day, with the rain changing over to sleet and then to a heavy wet snow. I was the proud owner of a new GORE-TEX hunting outﬁt, so I wasn’t worried a bit about a little bad weather. Truth be told, I was hoping for bad weather to test it out. Be careful what you wish for. Of course, that was one year when the forecasters hit the nail square on the head.
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Pennsylvania Game News - February 2013

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