My Janitorial business of 13 years went belly up in 1982 and I couldn’t afford my deer lease any more. I began hunting close to home again, in our public hunting area. Very public! During my 13 years absence the deer heard had grown. I loved the hunt as much as ever, but somehow I couldn’t find the kind of area I was blessed with on my lease. The 1983, 84 and 85 seasons were dry, as far as bagging bucks was concerned. By the end of the 85 season though, my Son and I had found the right area where no other hunters went. The area was a 250 acre high ground area along the bank of Bois d’ arc Creek. It was a nightmarish thicket of dogwood, briars, poison oak and marsh grass! Several things made the thicket so attractive to mature bucks. First, several sloughs ran parallel to each other and to the bluff along the edge of the creek bottom. Secondly, the sloughs virtually cut off the high ground area from the designated camping area, which was over a mile away. I had found the perfect place for mature bucks, but how was I to hunt it? I drew from my experiences hunting the, “Briar patch” on my ex-deer lease. I would go bursting into the middle of the place before daybreak — stay in my tree stand as long as I could — then break brush getting back to camp for lunch. After lunch I would do a repeat performance about mid-afternoon and stay until dark. No bucks killed … no bucks seen! In 1986, I began a new business venture that would eventually give me the knowledge that I needed to hunt my new found area, and to take mature bucks consistently. I began building furniture from dogwood saplings at a time when a more primitive, back to nature life style was popular and there was a demand for bent willow furniture. I spent one to two days a week, for the next twelve years, in the dogwood thickets that grow along Red River, gathering material for my dogwood furniture. Dogwood thickets tend to following water drainage basins leading into creeks and rivers, in what I call, veins. I learned to follow the dogwood veins and cut a trail down their middle so I would have a place where I could bring my bundles of twigs. Later I would shoulder them out to my truck. Deer thrive within the dogwood veins and scattered plum thickets along Red River and took up my trails almost as soon as I cut them. I learned that if I didn’t pay attention to the deer they hardly paid any attention to me. Frequently I glimpsed deer, and I began to notice that they were seemingly oblivious to my presence and my activity. I also noticed that as soon as I developed a “look-see” attitude they disappeared. I learned that deer recognize any thing that moves about in their world with a look-see attitude as being a predator. I soon learned that If I kept my head down and moved in a methodical slow manner — only looking through my eye brows — they didn’t become alarmed and vanish. I began to make a mental note of things that I did that bothered the deer. Deer perceive head bobbing, arm swinging, and neck careening so I can see, dead give-a-ways that a predator is coming to get them. One of the most important aspects of submissive hunting is body language. Although, there are many other skills required before you can walk into a deer’s world and not be perceived as a predator. I will attempt to tell you what I learned that alarms deer and what they will tolerate. Perhaps you can add other things from your own experiences. The teeter-totter we want to be on here is not to ring the big Buck’s bell and at the same time use every trick in our book against him … that he will tolerate.Many things hunters do: Either from tradition or from some strategy that they read about in a magazine or book; deer simply will not tolerate. One of the many things the written word, as well as our traditions, have taught us is the fear of hunting pressure. After all, who wants to hunt where the hunting pressure has made all the deer go nocturnal? This is going to sound contradictory, but hunting pressure is a welcome force if you are a submissive hunter. Hunting pressure makes more predictable what the mature bucks will do — when they will move and where they will go! Mature bucks are not going to subject themselves to hunters on purpose. The behavior of mature bucks however is altered, some-what, during the rut. The rut is a time when bucks are more prone to accidentally subject themselves to hunters. During the peak of the rut would be the only time I would even consider the more aggressive styles of hunting. Even then, you are going to see bucks that have accidentally made a mistake, and I have learned from experience that mature whitetail bucks don’t make too many accidental mistakes. We will examine hunter movement in separate phases, then examine what mature bucks may or may not be doing in each of those phases that enables them to avoid hunters. Phase one: The hunters approach to his stand. Traditionally, hunters leave their camp or auto very early in the morning, while it is still very dark. In their mind’s eye they want to have enough time to get on their stands above a, hoped for buck, before daylight. Actually what most hunters hope for is to be ahead of deer movement — as if that were possible. So what we have is: The woods are full of two legged predators armed with one eyed beams, trying to navigate the pitfalls of night travel. This fiasco takes place for about two hours, or maybe one hour, before dawn. In most states and in areas of public hunting this scenario continues daily for approximately a 90 day deer hunting season. Phase two: Finally on stand, sweaty and stinky, the hunters settle in for about a 3 or 4 hour wait and see game. The wait-n'-see phase last from approximately dawn until around mid-morning. Usually the longer the hunter waits without seeing deer, the more restless he becomes. A few hunters that have become restless continue to wait it out; but most, will have abandoned their stands by 11 o’clock. The few restless hunters who have stayed put are a bundle of nerves. Jittery, nervous, stand-sitters who have stayed on stand and those who have given up to still-hunt add sounds, movements and unfamiliar odors to the solitude of the deer’s woods. By high-noon vacating the Deer’s woods and making way back to camp or auto for lunch and noon socializing become the order of the day. Phase three begins somewhere around three o’clock in the evening. With stories swapped and hunger satisfied, the hunters don their orange and head back to the deer’s woods. The invasion starts all over again. This time the sit is shorter. When 5 p.m. shadows begin settling in and late evening cold wraps its arms around weary hunters the day's hunt comes to an end. There is something eerie about dwindling light that urges hunters to make the move out of the woods. They grab their one eyed beams and head back to camp. A note of importance here: That same dwindling light that urges hunters to get back to camp urges deer, that have lain up all day, to start moving. What a collision! By dark the woods again belong to the deer and night creatures. Mature deer, will not subject themselves to the aggressive hunting styles portrayed in the scenarios we have just examined. In Chapter 3 we will get into the mind of the mature buck. We will study his reactions to aggressive hunting, and compare those reactions to the reactions he will have when he is being hunted using Submissive Hunting techniques.