The whole premise of submissive hunting is based on the fact a mature buck deer had rather stay put than to move. The fact is simply this: if you know where a mature buck is and he stays there your chances of bagging him are far greater than if he becomes alarmed and moves. Submissive, according to Webster’s, means: Yielding and carries the connotation of humbling yourself to, or being compliant to.Animals can be trained to be submissive and we can train ourselves to be submissive. However, wild deer are not going to submit themselves to you; so, you can quit waiting for one to come out from behind a tree and place his body broad-side to you or lay down in front of your stand! If you are going to practice submissive hunting at some point you are going to have to assume the role of hunter. The question is … at what point? I say not until you have your sights on your quarry! From the start I want to make one thing clear. There is no single act on the hunter's part that will cause deer to dismiss you as being a non-predatory creature. Every single action you perform will or will not alarm mature bucks. One aggressive action can nullify all the submissiveness you can muster. It is the accumulation of all the acts you commit, from the time you enter the deer’s woods until you leave, that the deer are concerned with. You must learn to change your complete persona. Make no mistake about it a mature buck has spent his whole life reading the intents of his predators. A prime example is: No matter how bad you stink or how much noise you make, if you are going into the deer’s woods to build a fence and build the fence you do, you're not going to alarm deer. Make uneasy, yes — alarm, no! One phrase in this paragraph is your first lesson in learning to become a submissive hunter … the deer’s woods. Most aggressive hunters think of the woods as belonging to them. Until you accept the woods as the deer’s woods you have one count against you. In the animal world there are attitudes of dominance and of submissiveness. In order to survive, mature bucks have learned to read this attitude in their predators. Head up means dominance while heads down means submissiveness. Animals also transmit their attitude by the way they carry their tails; tail tucked under is submissive. Mature bucks learn early on how to read hunter’s attitudes through our body posture. The attitude of our head tells him if we’re a predator or just going about our own business. If you go into the deer’s woods with your head up and looking in all direction, especially his direction, the deer will read the hunter as predator and become alarmed. Head down and steady stride, he’ll let the hunter walk on without becoming alarmed. Hunters don’t have tails; so, deer rely on our arms and hands for signals as to whether we’re a predator or just someone going about our own business. A hand extended to move a briar or break a twig out of our way means, get ready. Extend the arm and use the hand to point in the mature buck's direction means, “Run like the devil!” When we’re in the mature buck’s world he is dominate; we’re in his castle and we don’t want our conduct to make him feel any thing or any creature is more dominate than he. We can learn much from the accounts given of how the early American Indians hunted. We have many accounts of them sitting in steam baths for hours, to purge themselves of evil spirits. Most likely so they wouldn’t overpower their quarry with body odor. There are accounts of how Indians crept in a “bent at the knee fashion,” sometimes referred to as the fox walk. No doubt they did this to give themselves a lower to the ground more submissive appearance. We read of the typical hunter head dress being two feathers stuck into their head bands; that no doubt camouflaged their round heads. The Indians were masters at submissive hunting — until it came time to release the arrow! It’s fine to begin down your trail, from camp or auto in the dark, but when you reach the farther most point most hunters will go, stop and wait for daylight. This gives you an opportunity to cool off and is a good place to go to full camouflage, head gear and gloves. Proceed in a manner I call still walking which should be your best effort at still hunting with the hunting left off.Keep your arms and hands close to your body and keep a cadence to your steps that will tell mature bucks in the immediate area you are going someplace — not hunting their hides! If you do glimpse a deer, fall down to your knees immediately or better yet lie down and give the deer time to remove hisself from your presence. When you finally arrive at your stand, don’t gawk around, immediately get into your stand and settle down for a long vigil. When you leave your stand leave in the same manner you approached. In summing up Chapter 5 of submissive hunting techniques, I will remind you, I learned that everything I did the deer noticed. Every twig I cut, ever step I took and ever cup of coffee I drank … they noticed. Also they seemed to log the information into their brain in two different categories. He is a predator — or — he is not a predator? If I have done nothing else, I hope that when you have selected a stand, in an area you think is a sanctuary and you have used the techniques to approach and leave, explained herein that you will have no negative doubts concerning whether you are in the right place. I also hope as you sit on that stand the negative fears of whether or not the mature bucks have gone nocturnal will have been eliminated from you thoughts. If you can set aside all the negatives, then you can become the deer hunter you ought to be. One final thought and I have said this over and over; as you go forth in your endeavors to hunt deer, remember: “The woods are the deer’s woods not your woods.” Thus far, we’ve discussed sanctuaries and how you should access them, using submissive techniques. In Chapter 6 we will cover stand placement, sanctuary trails, and stand burn out and how submissive hunting relates to each of them. CHAPTER 6
May all your goings be downstream easy! Wildwood Dean, here ...