or, “Squirrels ate my bait”

or, “Where the hell are all the deer?”

Brilliant stars chipped out of the black crystal sky glittered overhead as I slowly walked through the woods to the bottom of the hill and my deer stand Saturday morning. My breath came out in frozen clouds of ice in the 0-degree-Fahrenheit air, and the snow – what little of it there was – squeaked under my boots if I stepped the wrong way.

And that was the beautiful – and cold! – beginning of the 2008 deer gun season up here in Wistucky. I sat for almost two hours, watched the sun come up over my shoulder annd slowly light up the woods, then wobbled, shivering and unsteady, back up to the “hunting shack” to try and restore feeling to my fingers and toes, with nary a deer sighted.

An hour or so later, I went back down to the stand for a couple more hours of watching some of the fattest squirrels this side of Highway 8 frolic through the corn in my bait pile. They ate. I watched. They ate a little more. I shivered a little, then sent my work buddy a text message on his stand about a mile away: “All quiet on the northern front; U?” His answer came back a few minutes later: “Nutin.” So I watched the squirrels pack my bait away in their bellies, considered the merits of bringing home a couple field-dressed squirrel carcasses vs. one (admittedly invisible) deer, and left the rifle safed in the corner of the stand.

My buddy, the landowner we were hunting with, and I had some sausage and sauerkraut fro lunch, and I got the recipe for the kraut. I think the secret ingredient is the 2×4 used for smashing the cabbage into the container.

Since there were no traces of deer at all at my friend’s stand, and the bait at my stand was at least dissapearing each night, we decided to go back down and sit together, and maybe try a team shot, assuming the deer would cooperate. (Have I mentioned lately how Wistucky’s deer population seems to be particularly uncooperative lately?) We sat, watched some squirrels, had bouts of whispered conversation, made a couple goofy videos (coming soon to a blog near you), watched the squirrels some more, watched a flock of maybe 50 canada geese fly low overhead and land in the field at our backs, and waited for the Deer That Didn’t Show.

And that’s pretty much the story for my time in the woods so far this season: Lots of beautiful things to watch, lots of time to think and play (quietly!) with some of my toys, but no deer. I’m not even seeing deer along the road while I drive, which is pretty damn unusual. And the deer drought isn’t just a local (read: my stand) phenomenon, either. A lot of hunters in the area, pretty much all of whom are much better at this than I am, are saying that they’re not seeing deer out there either.

And where the hell are all those pesky whitetails, you may ask. Good question! Maybe they got tired of being shot and decided to go have a drink at the pub. Maybe I’ll run into them there on my way home from the stand tomorrow night. Maybe they’ll buy me a drink and we’ll commiserate together and never look at each other the same way when we cross paths in the woods. Or maybe I’ll light off my deer canon, get a double lung shot, then get my hands a little stained and stinky while doing a serviceable job of field-dressing that thing. Maybe…