Gone Fishin'...for Deer

 

It was noon, high noon, and Eddie Bostic of Sand Springs and Brian Johnson of Tulsa and I were fishing for sand bass in the back of a remote cove on the Arkansas River arm of Lake Keystone. Catching them, too, but slow and small.

That started me fishing for Pam’s ham and cheese sandwich in my duffel. Where is it, where is it? It’s in here someplace. Ah, here it is; all zip-locked with chips and pear to boot. Good girl. Worth money, but not for sale.

That first bite of sandwich directed my gaze upwards where automatically I began scanning a rock-ribbed bank with a nice six-point buck picking its way carefully, but quickly, down towards the water’s edge right in front of us maybe forty yards away from where we sat in Eddie’s boat, him working the trolling motor.

“Look,” I said, mouthful of ham and cheese, “a buck. Right here at high noon. Jeeminy Christmas. I guarantee you the rut just started today. Right now, even. I have yet to see even the first bloody spot on the highway.”

That last, by the way, is as good evidence as I know when the annual mating cycle of deer kicks in. If you have to have an exact date on the calendar (not possible) circle November 1 every year, and understand that every bowhunter believes it. It’s their time of the year: No gun hunters in the woods. It’s also the time the bloody highway spots left by deer/car collisions start showing up all over our part of the country.

The Wildlife Department sets the high-power gun season the third week of November every year, when two-thirds of the rut is over, on purpose. The deer need as much an untrammeled opportunity to regenerate their numbers as possible. The number of dedicated bowhunters is so low, by comparison, they don’t bother them that much, and of course they mate (the deer, I mean, you pervert) without the sound of gunfire about their heads. Only the soft, sibilant whistle of flighted arrows.

That deer never saw us, so intent was he on an odor or mental image in front of him, and quickly got back on an angle that took him away from the water’s edge, and back up into the woods almost as quickly as we saw him. He had a purpose, as do we all; you could see that.

Me eating my sandwich got Brian and Eddie hungry, and they broke out their lunch bags to join me. Eddie poured himself a steaming cup of coffee from a steel thermos that looked to be about as old as me and set it down at his feet by the trolling motor. Lunchtime, out on the lake. Free men, with their cell phones turned off, thinking about deer, now.

That’s when the second deer, a “forky” horn, showed up about five minutes later, following almost the exact same path as the first buck. Whoa. No doubt about it, Henry. Two bucks? Again, at high noon? People would be running over them out on the highway by dark.

We were thinking about stashing the trash and picking up our rods when the third buck showed up about ten minutes later. This was the Big Boy. This one was a monster, and true to the class, he never came far enough out of the shadowy cedars and post oaks to give us a good look at the furniture atop his head. He was at least a big eight point, and maybe a ten, with lots of antler mass. And he was pushing a doe.

Then he was gone, too.

We tried to fish for two or three more hours, but it was hard to concentrate. We caught twelve keepers. Maybe that many “throwbacks”. Nobody wanted to clean fish, so we threw the keepers back, too. We all had late afternoon “to do’s”.

Eddie fired up that big 200, got the boat up on a plane, and made that engine whine all the way back to the ramp at Whispering Hills. He put tears in our eyes.

We hunted deer all the way back, way out there in the middle of the lake. For no apparent reason.

Copyright © 2015 Conrad M. Vollertsen