Three Rights

There is nothing I find more relaxing than sitting in a deer blind on a cool crisp morning. It has been about six years since my Aunt Nell decided there were too many houses around her ranch in Floresville, Texas, so it has been six years since I shot a deer. The very last one I got was with a crossbow, a piece of medieval-era weaponry that requires a whole new layer of skills to the hunt. While hunting with a gun requires setting a blind for a shot 100 to 150 yards away, a blind for an archery shot is only 30 to 50 yards away.

Before this season I had harvested two bucks with a crossbow, a spike and a tenpoint buck. Both had come within 20 yards of my blind, and I found both of them within 100 yards of the point where I shot them.

In the spring I found that my neighbor had her 200acre family homeplace for lease, and my friend Lee McDermett and I quickly signed a lease. Lee owns McDermett Insurance in Forney, and I have known him almost my entire life dating back to when we were kids in Floresville, TX. The gate to the deer lease is literally a quarter of a mile from our driveway. As I say all of the time: We live so far in the sticks in Lone Oak, I have to go toward town to hunt. While that is true, we only live a mile and a half north of the town of Lone Oak.

We decided we would manage our lease long term and run corn feeders all year around. Lee already had a complete collection of deer blinds, corn feeders, protein feeders, and fencing to keep cattle away from the feeders, but it would take me the better part of the summer to build a blind and set up feeders and cameras.

Slowly we started seeing deer on our trail cameras and the excitement began to build. At first, they came out during daylight hours but then a couple of weeks before the opening we began to only see them at night. It was like they had a sense that deer season was coming. However, we weren’t worried. We knew that once the weather turned colder, the breeding season, or “rut”, would come and bucks would throw all caution to the wind in search of romance.

I literally counted the days until the beginning of archery season the beginning of October. A couple of weeks before the season I had set up a popup blind exactly 30 yards from the feeder much closer than the gun blind 130 yards away that I had spent half of the summer building. I had gone through a rigid pre-hunt ritual, washing my hunting clothes in scentfree laundry soap, showering with scent-free soap and shampoo, even using scentfree deodorant.

Opening day arrived, finally. My son TJ came up from Jerrell, north of Austin, the night before and we were in the popup blind by 5:30 am, long before sunup. We didn’t see a thing that first morning but at my age getting to sit next to my son for four hours watching the woods was more reward than I can relay. I wasn’t bored for one minute and neither was TJ.