This ain’t your daddy’s deer hunting anymore
By Bob Zettler
November 21, 2011

“Aarrrrhhh.” I heard the deer grunt again and it was very close and to my left. So I slowly turned to look…

It was the third day of the Illinois deer season and I was up in my tripod stand overlooking a confluence of deer trails through the reclaimed strip mining land I hunt. There is a thick stand of cattails directly across the clearing from me where I had seen two young bucks cross alongside their edge less than 10 yards away from where I sat during the last hour. Another one, unseen, had slowly crashed through the thick cane to a spot maybe another five yards from the edge and right in front of me thirty minutes earlier. While I could not see it, he sounded big and possibly hurt as I had heard it move through the cane a few feet at a time for possibly five minutes - and that was pretty slow.

It was still pretty windy and in my face at 10+ MPH from the north and it had been raining ever since I arrived at the stand more than three hours earlier. I was wet, miserable and the curiosity and anxiety over what was in that cane was killing me, or, was it the onset of hypothermia from being soaked to the skin as the outside temperatures had dropped 20 degrees from the night before? So I texted my hunting buddy and gave him the intel. He replied right away from 70 miles away that I needed to be patient. And if I couldn’t then maybe I should grunt or whistle but if that didn’t work get down and check it out in stealth mode. Thanks Matt but I was so miserable that I didn’t even remember what a grunt call sounded like or even if I could make one given I didn’t have one with me! Plus, the bleat call I had bought last January and that had been sitting on my kitchen counter ALL year just for this occasion had fallen out of my pocket in the darkness just as I sat down on the tripod seat never to be seen again this very morning. I was screwed or was I…

That is when I started to think about how many of us have fallen away from the basics our fathers and grandfathers had taught us. Heck, they use to go out in blue jeans and a red flannel shirt or coat with their trusty smoothbore they had just been hunting ducks with the day before and were using plain old slugs no less! Nothing was rifled. Nor were sabots available. They simply went out into the woods or alongside a field and either sat down against a tree or climbed one for a chance at the elusive white-tail deer. They had their ham sandwich wrapped in wax paper and if they were lucky they had a thermos of coffee to wash it all down and ward off the chill. And if they were truly industrious, they would have built a wooden treestand that would get them off the ground, minimize their scent and provide some vantage point that wasn’t available sitting up against that oak.

I got into deer hunting back in 1978 when I was in college at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and one of my buddies took me to the Shawnee National Forest. What an experience! With Topo maps provided by the Forest Service I found this spot about nine miles south of Golconda on a scouting trip a few weeks earlier where I got stuck miles from nowhe…I mean, Golconda. However, my Dark Cloud had a silver lining when a beat-up truck came around the corner literally seconds later on this primitive trail and got me free in 30 minutes! Randy and I came back that first season and used my 1975 Chevy van as a base where we had a couple of other hunters camping nearby with whom we shared our food and adult beverages. I felt we were in the lap of luxury back then as my van had a built a bed and carpeted interior with cabinets and even a built-in Coleman cooler. And, get this, I even had a small Black and White battery powered TV to boot! Good thing too as that first night after not seeing a single deer 33 years ago today, we had dinner, a few brewskis and settled in to see who shot JR on Dallas; a television event we had been waiting months to see. Unfortunately, due to our activities that day on November 21, 1978, we both fell asleep (me in the bed and Randy on the carpeted floor) and never found out who killed JR until we returned to civilization but I digress already…

Now I had never seen a live, wild white-tail deer in Illinois and that Sunday I climbed my first tree in the darkness. We also had thick fog and even though I couldn’t see 10 foot in front of me I could hear them crunching through the leaves as I sat on a limb shivering from getting wet from falling into several creeks during our mile trek to this spot which I had just found the day before. And when I shot and dropped that button-buck and started to climb down out of that tree I discovered to my horror it had been a dead tree and the limbs shattered this time under my weight (I was lean back then). Fortunately, my experiences in the Air Force allowed me to complete a PLF (parachute landing fall) avoiding serious injury as I had no harness Then my new hunting buddy helped me cut a limb that served as a porter pole allowing us to carry it back to camp a mile away. That is when we discovered that according to our map (which we had left at camp) showed a road maybe 200 yards away from where I shot the deer and where we could have left it near then driven to pick it up had we known. Que sera, sera…

That’s when the true madness began as I swore I would be smarter and use all the tools out there the next time so I could harvest my deer! Now back then there weren’t Garmin GPS’s and even Delorme maps were brand new and not readily available but I knew I wanted to hunt off the ground and scrounged the money together to get a Baker “portable” treestand; made out of aircraft aluminum no less! Well this sucker weighed nearly 15 pounds and no matter what it would creak while I was up in the tree but it beat sitting on a limb. We wont even discuss how they were prone to slip off the tree and leave you holding on for dear life without warning. Next came the cover scents and I can tell you my supply of skunk juice was a hit when the fraternity brothers harassed the pledges the next season! The details are too disgusting to repeat here…

Then came attractant lures like Tinks #69 (my favorite) which I would use religiously and a Hastings rifled slug barrel which provided some confidence building. By now, in the early 1980’s, home-made gimcracks and the like started to become big business opportunities for the unsuspecting obsessed deer hunter. There are the aforementioned scents (attractant and cover); better treestands; synthetic rattling antlers, bags, sticks, etc.; calls (grunt, wheeze, bleat, etc.); special knives; slugs replaced by rifled slugs and then sabots; clothes in camo patterns that even Mother Nature wouldn’t recognize (ever see the one made with naked people); scent free bags and clothes; lights for seeing, tracking, locating treestands, etc.; special boots; carts to drag them out (and all your gear in); handheld GPS units; satellite imagery; scopes of all shapes and sizes with one that even calculates the distant to target; rangefinders; and even a spray bottle that puts out some powder to tell you wind direction!

The list goes on and on to where the guy or gal who is thinking about getting into deer hunting will need a huge bank account and a bearer to assist taking all the gear to and from your hunting stands and locations! Now I am guilty like the rest and get kidded for my DROID smart cell phones and how I use them while hunting but they are a useful tool in my honest opinion. Whoops, that should read IMHO but they do come in handy. I had used mine that very morning to keep a constant check on the weather where it confirmed I would be wet and cold. And it kept me in contact with friends nearby and all over the planet where I could call on them for support, assistance and simply to pass the time. So when Matt suggested I give a grunt call I went on-line and after Googling grunt calls and located a Wav. file which I was able to download for free! After listening to it on low volume I confirmed I could not make that sound and went back to being miserable in my (non) Gore-Tex soaked rain-gear that turned out wasn’t waterproof and placed it in as deep under my layered clothes as I could to keep it dry and working.

A little while later, my friend Gary texted me and said “(redacted) the rain” but I decided to stick it out another hour just to prove I am tough enough, if not to provide the crippled deer in front of me more time to bleed out or decide to come out into the open. Thirty minutes later and there’s that sound coming from near the edge of the cane right in front of me and slightly to the left of where I last saw some cane move and where it had crashed into. My new H&R Ultra Slug 20 gauge with a Nikon 3x9-40 Slughunter scope was up with the trigger ready to be pulled back and released onto the new Lightfield Hybred Sabot residing within once my big buck made his appearance as he was close, very close. In fact he sounded right next to me as he sounded off again. Patience. I had to remind myself what Matt had texted me ninety minutes earlier as I tried to control my shivering and calm my nerves on what was sure to be a BIG buck!

He grunted again and I was on edge but why did all the grunts sound the same and why couldn’t I make out at least an outline as he had to be right there in the cane just 10 yards away. I mean he sounded like he was right in my lap…and that is when I realized I had just “Butt-dialed” the grunt call! What a maroon. Here I have all this technology at my disposal and I just got fooled by my gateway to the world, a Smartphone and a big butt! Maybe our fathers and grandfathers had it better as it was a lot simpler back then and they still brought home the deer. Or, maybe not for how else could I stay in touch with friends and access the vast repository of the Internet out in the cold rain? You be the judge, but in any case, it just ain’t our Daddy’s deer hunting anymore….