It’s not what we don’t know that can hurt us, it’s what we know that isn’t so, that could reduce the possibility of harvesting a buck of a lifetime.

Story and photography by Bob Zaiglin

As the winter sun dropped below the mesquite-lined escarpment, a luminous, pastel-orange-colored glow radiated upwards, and the temperature dropped precipitously.  The two yearling bucks that showed up shortly after entering my blind on the seven-acre oats patch upon which I was stationed were the only visitors.

But before I could zip up my vest to inhibit the cold air from permeating my lightweight shirt, a mature buck with a rack displaying nine tall tines off 24-inch-long beams entered the grain field.  It failed to take advantage of the oats littering the field as it paralleled the brush line, until it approached a well-used scrape at the base of a tall mesquite, came to an abrupt halt, and began to work over the well-used scrape.

While tending the scrape, it would occasionally pause, only to raise its head into the lower branches of the tree and rub its preorbital glands onto a low hanging branch before proceeding to paw away at the loose soil, generating a cloud of dust, before urinating in what I thought was its personal scrape, but that was definitely not the case.  Not long after the buck reentered the ocean of brush, another buck with 10 tall tines and considerably long, heavy beams appeared and began to work over the same scrape before darkness blanketed the brush country.

************************************************************************
To read more, click here to SUBSCRIBE