An Outdoorsman's Journal

                                                                                               Young Deer Hunter                                      

Hello friends,

     Like the last several years I took a young deer hunter to a farm for a camping and hunting trip just west of Junction City in Wood County for Wisconsin’s Youth Deer Hunt, which is held for kids up to the age of 15.

    Friday, October 4th

    High 67, low 45

    Allie Schuster is 15, a sophomore at Deforest High School, the daughter of Shane and Sandy Schuster, and just happens to be my great niece.   Until three years ago Allie had no desire to become a deer hunter but that changed when she spent a weekend visiting our deer camp, “The Red Brush Gang”.

    The following fall I took Allie hunting to this same farm which is very close to the The Meade Wildlife Area and in the last minute of the last hunt she made an excellent shot on a 7 point buck.

    This farm was recently sold and the new owner was super cool in supporting getting our youth into the outdoors and let me continue taking kids here.  Today when we pulled into the farm it was basically empty, as the new owner does not live on the premises.

    I had a plan of building a rain proof camp, as heavy rains were forecast for the following day. At that time, I had a brainstorm and sent the new owner a text asking if we could sleep in the horse barn and received a reply “You can, but you are welcome to sleep in the house.”

   We chose the barn but first as daylight was fading we went scouting and also put out two trail cameras.

   Our scouting mission was very cool as we saw eleven deer including two bucks of which neither seemed very scared of us.

   Because of the impending rain I chose to hunt in a ground blind with Allie, and let me tell you the walk back to camp was very cool and as usual I used every minute to teach my young hunter as much as I could.

   Saturday, October 5th

   High 64, low 43

   The horse barn was a great place to sleep for night one and this morning we were in our blind which is surrounded on three sides by forest and one side by a pasture long before daylight. 

   I will tell you something about Allie and I, we are always giving each other a hard time and playing practical jokes on each other, that is what we did for our 4-hour hunt this morning.

   At ten this morning we headed back to camp and at that moment the rain began and the lake called the state of Wisconsin just kept getting higher.

  We hunted the last four hours of daylight as well and I was really surprised that we did not see a deer.

  Sunday, October 6th

  High 73, low 48

  The rain quit last night and we were in our blind by 5:40. The field that we are watching has an extremely active scrape in it and that is where we have one of our cameras.

  At 5:50 Allie and I had a crazy experience when an extremely large deer approached our blind in total darkness, looked in the window and grazed for at least ten minutes. I had rubbed horse manure all over the blind and I think it worked as the perfect cover scent.

  That was our only deer experience on that hunt and when we got out of the blind, we checked our trail cameras and had a picture of a massive 12-point buck that was tending to his scrape. We went back to camp in a we might see that big buck on tonight’s final hunt mood.

  Our final hunt was interesting as we have to cross a creek, that is now flooded, I went over my knee boots in the dark this morning, Allie has Selina’s hip boots, so she was fine. The atmosphere in this part of the state could be described as “water logged.”

  We gave this hunt our best shot and hunted till dark but as crazy as it seems never saw a deer in daylight all weekend except when scouting the day before the hunt started.

  Just before we finished our hunt Allie told me that she really enjoyed this experience and that she really wants to stick with deer hunting.

   Maybe in November as a Red Brush Hunter she will fill her tag!  Sunset