Many years ago, I was on the last truck of standers to be put out for a dog/deer drive. As I helped an elderly gentleman get into the back of the truck to ride to his stand, I heard him say, “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to get off at the first stand that’s closest to the camp house. If I get cold, I can come back to the fire and warm up.” The huntmaster, who was also the truck driver, smiled and said, “Yes, sir, Mr. Jones. I’ve got just the spot for you.”

As we pulled away from the camp house, we went down a dirt road beside a sharecropper’s garden and stopped at the end of a little point of woods between two fields. On one of the sweetgum trees was a metal sign with the number 1 painted on it. Stand number 1 was so close to the campfire, the club house, the sharecropper’s home and a pen full of dogs that no one ever had taken that stand.

As the truck reached my stand site, the next-to-the-last stand on the old logging road, we heard a shotgun report twice. The huntmaster behind the wheel of the truck told me, “That’s Mr. Jones’s stand where we heard the shot. Go ahead, and get on your stand. I’ll put out the last stander on this road, turn around and go back to check on Mr. Jones. I hope he hasn’t had an accident with his shotgun.”

All morning long I was concerned about Mr. Jones and the two shots and imagined all the bad things that could have happened to Mr. Jones. Had he dropped his shotgun and caused it to fire? Was he sick or hurt? Had he fired the two shots to signal someone to come help him? After the drive began, and I started seeing does and young bucks, I couldn’t keep my attention focused on the hunt for worrying about Mr. Jones. When we returned to the camp house, I couldn’t believe my eyes when I spotted the biggest 10-point buck I’d ever seen taken on our hunting lease, hanging from the meat pole.

“Who got that trophy buck?” I asked the huntmaster. With a big grin on his face, he pointed at Mr. Jones sitting in a rickety aluminum chair by the fire. I was totally confused. I couldn’t believe that Mr. Jones on Stand 1 that nobody ever hunted – had taken the biggest buck on the property before the deer drive began. I went over to talk to Mr. Jones to learn about the big buck.

“To be honest, I wasn’t thinking much about shooting a deer,” Mr. Jones explained. “I just came on the hunt to get out of the house and spend time with all my hunting buddies. I’d pretty much decided not to stay on the stand more than 30 minutes or an hour after the drive started. I still could hear the truck we rode in on dropping off standers, when I spotted movement in the sweetgums about 50-yards away, off to my left. I was hiding behind a water oak tree when a big buck with his neck stretched-out tiptoed through the sweetgums. I had the wind in my favor. Once that buck got within 15 steps, I fired. While the buck was falling, I fired again to make sure he stayed down. I knew I’d never seen, shot or heard of anybody taking a buck this big before around here. I guess I was just lucky.”

That afternoon while I sat on my stand, I thought about what Mr. Jones had told me. I realized that when hunting pressure built-up, bucks knew the sounds that hunters made in the woods and then moved to places where they’d never seen or encountered a hunter previously. While interviewing Dr. Keith Causey, a longtime deer hunter and a retired professor of wildlife at Auburn University, he told me, “If I’m hunting with a hunting club, I wait until all the members of the club have selected the areas they want to hunt. Then I choose the stand site where no one wants to hunt, because I know that region probably has had the least amount of hunting pressure. It’s most likely to produce the biggest buck, especially in the late season.”

To learn more about hunting for deer, check out John E. Phillips’ bowhunting book, available in Kindle and print and soon to be available in Audible, “Jim Crumley’s Secrets of Bowhunting Deer” at http://amzn.to/XYTCEY and “13 Soup, Chowder and Gumbo Recipes You Can’t Live Without,” available in Kindle at http://amzn.to/1aiNUZx. You may have to copy and paste these links into your browser. (When you click on the books, notice on the left where Amazon says you can read 10% of the book for free). To see more of John’s deer-hunting books, visit www.amazon.com/author/johnephillips. John’s latest book, “Elk: Keys to 23 More Hunters’ Success,” was just published in Audible on November 15, 2021, and is available now in Kindle, print and Audible at https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09B2H9V6Y/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i10

Tomorrow: Use Trail Cameras & Hunt Hard for Deer