Far Afield
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WELLSVILLE, N.Y. -

The last day of the regular deer season was perfect. Cold, but perfect.

Squinting eye slits squeezed out the coldest tears in an attempt to shut out the westerly wind and see the night's fresh tracking snow along the field edge.

Better in the woods, not so windy. New deer tracks everywhere.

Night-roaming deer had pounded a soft maple blowdown, munching it down to pencil-sized twigs.

Good spot. They'd be back. So here it would be, the final day, with back to the sun and wind looking east.

Nothing. Two hours to go. Nothing.

A nuthatch, a pair of chickadees, a sapsucker and its cousin, a Downey woodpecker, each took turns bobbing and acting out miniature versions of a wintertime wilderness Cirque Du Soleil performance about 30 yards ahead where I had dressed out a buck on the second day of the season.

The entertaining little birds waste no time cleaning up the final remnants. Crow and coyote leftovers are smorgasbords for tweets.

The deer stand site, a couple logs rolled against a big maple tree, became an impromptu but comfy hunter's lounge near the adjacent property line. The more comfortable a stand, the better. We move less when comfortable, therefore are less detectable.

A noise directly from behind turned out to be another hunter, dressed in a blaze-orange suit, moving down the line.

Darn it!

After a wave of the hand in acknowledgement, the other hunter seemed to be moving off. But through the trees, the slow-moving hunter eased around and down through the woods until he was directly ahead, effectively cutting off where I had hoped and expected the deer to be coming from.

I couldn't really say anything to him because: 1. He was not on my land and 2. He was right. Silent and unknown to each other, we had independently arrived at agreement as to where the deer were at.

And he was going to get there first and cut me off. The last day of the season. Maybe he really needed a deer. Still not the right thing to do.

And chances are he would spook the deer.

Conditions were not right that day for still-hunting. Good days to sneak on deer are snow blown. Snow and branches fill the air with ambient noise and movement to cover crunching footsteps and our moving and deeralerting silhouettes.

Not on this day. Not on the last day. Chances are they were going to run. Hmmmm? Where?

Might as well move. Hardly logic, barely a thought. A strong feeling that precipitated a thought. Call it the hunter's instinct. A predatory tattoo on our DNA, handed down through the generations.

Well, if the deer ran to the edge of the woods, they might turn up through the big stand of hemlocks, rather than bolting out across the field into the open. Maybe, but maybe just as likely, maybe not.

You never know. One thing for sure, no sense sitting here. Move, now.

Under normal circumstances, most deer hunters don't like to move during "prime time," that last hour of daylight when the normal crepuscular-oriented whitetails become most active.

Whitetails are not dogmatic.

Deer act as if they not only never read the book of "Whitetail Behavior," but seem to deliberately and on occasion defiantly go against their own rules, as if they ever had any.

Use the other hunter. Let him "bird dog" the deer.

After a short walk to the other side of the property and just as the sun was setting on that last day, and as luck would have it, dark moving shapes quickly materialized into a small herd of deer, moving into the hemlocks.

They were "bumped" by the other hunter. He'd "stepped on them" all right.

The first three looked on the small side, and the larger animal, as is so typical of the whitetail world, followed. And in part "thanks" to the other hunter, during those last few moments of the deer season, my gun was able to speak once more its ultimate word.

"Thanks" was the furthest word from thought when that other hunter cut down through the woods in front. But because of him, I was really able to give "Thanks," on one knee.

Oak Duke, publisher of the Wellsville Daily Reporter writes a weekly column.