Nov 23, 2019 5 min read

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was a regular contributor to the Pennsylvania Game News. I look back on those articles written in the 1970s and I believe they were some of my best work.

Articles such as “Opening Day Is Best” and “Ronnie’s Dumplings” are a couple of my favorites, but this piece is one that I had forgotten. I titled it, “Sometimes It’s Easy,” but then I made the mistake of not doing the companion piece, “Sometimes It’s Hard.”

As any hunter knows, there are always the bucks that appear on the scene, just as the hunter has gotten a few yards from the car and is still in the process of loading the rifle. It’s hard to register the offering of the gods of the hunt so the deer is missed and the story of the difficult hunt is created.

On the other side of the coin is a buck that has a mediocre rack but still can be a trophy. I remember a buck that wasn’t even shot at and was a round that tricky buck won. I have said many times that we don’t hunt like we used to, and I include myself in this statement, but instead have become a bunch of snipers.

Instead of moving quietly through the woods and briar patches trying to outsmart a deer, we sit on a hillside and try to down it at long range. Myself? I use the excuse of old age but this story happened just a few years ago while I was still in my 70s. I decided one day just to hunt the old method.

It had snowed during the night and it was late in the season, which usually means fewer hunters out and about. As I picked up the old Model 70, I took note of what I considered to be the rifle that was perfect for the method of hunting I intended to do.

With a bit of sadness, I placed the 270 back in the safe and instead took out a little Model 7 Remington chambered for 7mm-08. I needed, or so I thought, a light rifle and one that I could bring into play more quickly.

It wasn’t particularly early but it was still morning and things seemed quiet as I parked the truck in a spot I have often hunted over the last 40 years. The first thing I did as I made my way up the road to a spot to enter this thick piece of cover was to check the wind direction. I knew if I walked up on a buck, I better not have the wind at my back. Entering the cover, much of what I had learned over the years came back to me. The human foot is not designed to walk quietly through wooded cover. It invariably steps on a stick with almost every step. Being aware that you place each foot slowly and when a stick is felt, turn your foot slightly parallel with the stick. When doing this, the hunter moves not only quietly but also slowly. There is little doubt that most hunters move too fast. Move a few steps, then look around and even behind you.

I hadn’t moved very far from the car when I found a large set of deer prints in the snow that were moving in the same direction as me so I decided to track it, hoping it wasn’t a big doe. The movement told me it wasn’t moving from another hunter but just moving along taking a nibble from some growth now and then. At one spot, the deer urinated. Now I knew it was a buck, the puddle of melted snow and the placement of its rear feet said so. After about 100 yards of slow moving, he met up with a small group of deer and tracked the place up. Then they went their separate ways. After figuring out which was the bucks tracks, I started tracking again. This time, his travels took him into a large clump of briers and I thought he might have bedded down. But a slow circle around the patch showed me where he exited the cover.

There was a deep gully crossing this cover and as I approached it, suddenly there he was on the other side of the gully looking right back at me. The rifle came up smooth and he could have been doomed right there. But remember Murphy’s Law? If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. My mistake involved what I did before I left the house. That darn little Model 7 has a small safety button and, to top that off, it is a tad stiff. Instead of being released, my finger slid off it and the buck left to go make a fool of someone else. Sometimes it’s hard.

I remember that buck better than many others that I dragged out of that woods. Why? Because I found that I could still hunt the old hard way. I guess when I think about it, we both won that day.

George Block writes a weekly outdoors column for the Observer-Reporter.