


Then I happened upon a spectacular pair of last winter's sheds. As I bent to pick them up it wasn't hard to visualize a big
buck jumping that fence and his antlers tumbling to the grass as his front feet pounded the deck. My thoughts brought a
smile to my face and reminded me of an incident from my misspent youth.
One dreary, drizzling January morning down in southeastern Oklahoma I was driving my old Dierk's forestry pickup along
the Lebow Trail headed to a pulpwood cut. As I rounded a high cut bank, a big whitetail buck bounded down into the road
practically on top of my rig. I had to slam on the brakes.
More startling was the sight of his antlers. They cascaded to the roadway when his front feet hit the trail. He bounded out of
sight as I came out of my truck to gather up those 10-point, ivory- and amber-stained antlers. I marveled at their symmetry,
noted a speck of blood on a burl, then tossed them in the three-foot deep gearbox in the back of my rig where they landed
among several gallons of tree marking paint, coveralls, snake chaps and assorted rain gear.
The year floated by and September found the weather unseasonably hot. As such it bode no fun for the deer season to
come. Rifling through the paint box one day while hunting a new nozzle for my marking gun, I found those fine, matching
5-point antlers that big buck had left in the road. I grasped them and rubbed the litter off on my pants leg. I carried them over
to the borrow ditch where I had spread my lunch and sat munching my sandwich looking at that wonderful ivory crown of
antlers near my feet.
Read the entire article Blacktails -- The Rest of the Story here.
Article: Blacktails - The Rest of the Story
by Glenn Dee Summers
The day was a bona fide toad roaster -- T-shirt deer hunting if I ever saw it. It was a hot start to the Oregon blacktail season.
Three days of sitting a stand had been as dry as the weather. The bucks -- in fact, all of the deer -- were reluctant to move
out of their shady, cool north-slope bedding thickets during daylight hours, and the ground cover was as noisy as 60 tons of
corn flakes. The alternative of still-hunting for blacktails is tough under any conditions; in this dry weather it was downright
impossible.
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