Hunting Article- Blacktail Deer

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.

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.