When you get a little older sounds enter the ear canal just not as loud as you need them to. So you lean a bit and look harder to make the sound clearer, which is mostly nonsense. Well near as I can tell, my hunting partner is snapping branches in his deer stand.

I'm cold. I'm not having pleasant thoughts. I figure I will stand to check Roger out. I rise from the white five gallon bucket I have been sitting on for over two hours. Not one red squirrel, crow, chickadee or blue jay. That’s a mystery, but to not have one whitetail doe show is amazing. Just stretching sends shivers through me.

Roger is perched in an oak tree with maybe fifteen leaves left. We mounted a portable in September and saw loads of doe’s here. He’s sitting about forty yards northeast of my, in the tamarack swamp bucket impromptu stand. A trail splits with one fork going by each of us respectively. To call these trails, is a disservice, there more like snow roads made by hoofed deer with sagging bellies.

Roger and I got skunked on bucks all fall. The season is going to close and we want to fill our tags. How tough could it be with all those doe’s that were here all fall. These trails still show heavy use, fresh droppings, and all kinds of different hoof sizes.

Looking at roger he has his back to me. The branch snapping is a woodpecker on a birch tree. Mystery solved I sit back down. I burrow into my clothes. How can a woodpecker make that kinda sound?

The daylight starts to fade and my attitude went below the horizon long before the sun. My frigid brain is possibly hallucinating. I can see a fat doe. Then two more. Now another. I raise my bow and the arrow drops off the rest. Fumbling I get it back on and turn to take the first deer that will go by me at no more than twenty feet. Two deer out of the corner of my eye are going to go by Rogers stand.

The doe is fat, whiskered and high stepping through the deep snow. Two deer back is one quite a bit bigger but I’m not taking any chances. First come, first serve. My arrow is perfect into the front shoulder and the deer whirls and now it’s a snow squall of flying doe’s.

I'm watching what I think is mine and its deer scrambling in at least five different directions up and over the ridge. It’s all over and quiet. I look at Roger he’s coming down out of the stand. We trudge towards each other in the snow. Before I can say anything he lets me have it. “Just before you shot I started to draw on a doe. When you let your arrow fly it sent the one I was aiming at into high gear. I never got a shot”.

I'm so happy for me, its hard not to feel bad for him. We get out some little pen lights and start sorting tracks. Roger finds blood first and it’s a tracking job of maybe sixty yards. The doe is piled up at the side of a birch tree. One nice thing about not shooting world record bucks in two feet of snow is they are much easier to drag.

Roger breaks a trail through the snow back to our main trail. We put on our snow shoes and alternate dragging the doe and carrying the two bows. He asked me something but I was huffing pretty hard from the deer dragging and I turn around and say” what did you say”? He answered….. “Because…. YOU….. Scared… MY… deer tonight, tomorrow you can drag mine out as well. I wish I had not heard that.

The trout whisperer

Karl "Trout Whisperer" Seckinger is a respected JustNorth author and outdoor adventurer. His guide service, DuNord Guide Service, and the trout waters that he fishes in the Superior National Forest, are some of the most tightly guarded secrets among Trout enthusiasts in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Contact Karl at 218 - 525 - 0442 or write to him at:

DuNord Guide Service - 6999 Culbertson Road, Two Harbors, Minnesota 55616