A pale, yellow, crescent moon cast a wry, toothless grin from the clear, southern, predawn sky, remindful that it wasn’t going to be easy. The message was unnecessary. For me, it seldom is. But there was reason to be optimistic on this, the first Friday of muzzleloader deer season.

A discovery made late the previous afternoon while attempting to push deer past my hunting buddy had brought newfound hope to what had been a difficult season — warm, snowless and tick-infested. With the fruitless walk through an oak grove, then a dense pine bedding area complete and my buddy’s orange in sight from a well-used run across a shallow ravine, I had spotted a bare spot of disturbed earth that wasn’t there the last time I performed the same maneuver; a buck scrape, fresh.

I stopped to investigate, pointed downward and spoke out to my friend, seated some 40 yards away. “There’s a fresh scrape right here,” I said, the first I had found since shotgun season opened.

He signaled with his hand for me to join him and I did just that, meeting at the base of a massive twin red pine I had used dozens of times for cover while posting the intersection of three busy runs. My buddy stood, slipped on his backpack, slung his muzzleloader over his shoulder and started walking.

“Follow me,” he said. “There’s another big scrape I don’t believe was here the last time I came through.”

We walked back toward my truck, eyes focused on the forest floor in search of a pawed patch of earth, and I spotted one, not 30 yards behind the stand.

“Here it is, right here,” I pointed, as he came my way and took a look.

“Nope, that’s not the one,” he said. “There’s a bigger one not far from here.”

He was right. Not 15 yards away, centered on a small, circular carpet of light brown leaves shed by a beech sapling, laid a dominant buck scrape, the kind deer hunters die for. Above it hung a gummy hemlock limb, behind it a four-inch, tine-scarred black birch. Classic.

Following hard overnight rain, it was difficult to assess just how fresh the scrape was but it had definitely been made that week, perhaps only a day ago. There was a good chance the scrape was active, meaning the buck that made it would be back to check it twice daily searching for receptive does. After three days, he’d come no more.

Had I not decided to leave my fanny pack in the truck to lighten the load for my short push, I would have freshened-up the buck’s calling card with the “Tink’s 69 Doe-in-Rut Buck Lure” I always carry. But I could perform that duty the next morning, when it wasn’t going to be difficult to spring out of bed. Fresh optimism is a wonderful feeling during deer season.

With the foreboding moon at my back, I drove up the steep hill in the morning, parked and exited my truck, dropped the tailgate and packed up for the slow twilight march to my stand. The circular beech-leaf mat and scrape were easy to pick up in the gray morning light, and the buck had not returned. I quickly doused the area with Tink’s, saturating the scrape and spraying the hemlock branch and black-birch trunk liberally to create a big stink before taking my stand.

On the way to my stand, 35 yards away, I hung a couple of Tink’s Scent Bombs seven feet high in small hemlocks. When I arrived at my familiar twin red pine, I hung out two more scent bombs for cover scent and kicked out a stand 90 degrees to the right of where I typically sit against the trunk so that I could clearly see the dominant, freshened-up scrape. The wind was perfect, blowing west-northwest, diagonally from me to the scrape. I couldn’t have ordered it up any better. Now all I had to do was sit patiently still and wait to detect movement. I knew my ears would be useless, given the blustery wind and damp forest floor.

Around 8 I caught movement from the opposite direction I was anticipating. Sure enough, a deer, walking quickly, wind at its back; then another, and another, following single file. As they passed through the pines, maybe 75 yards out and angling away, they appeared and faded from view several times, but once I thought I saw one of them hop up on the back of another and my adrenaline raced. Although I had not yet gotten a clear look at any of the three animals and had seen no antlers, I thought the big boy was there and would reverse direction as soon as he got to the downwind side of my Tink’s stink bomb.

Much to my delight, that’s exactly how it played out, as the three deer passed out of my view heading east and soon reappeared heading back toward where they came from. On two occasions I again saw one try to mount another, but when they came into clear view I was certain none of them wore prominent antlers. Hmmmm? Maybe another 4-pointer like the one we took the previous week, or perhaps a spikehorn, but clearly no discernable antlers from my vantage point.

The three deer passed me again, heading west, then angled south onto a run where I have seen many deer pass in 10 years, mostly does. Still searching for horns, rifle shouldered, the three of them came to within 40 yards and were bald. Two passed and disappeared into the slash and the third never showed itself after disappearing behind small hemlocks. Frozen, rifle still mounted, I held out hope that I was dealing with a spikie concealing its antlers behind its ears, and waited fruitlessly for it to reappear. Finally, getting stiff and uncomfortable, I slowly dropped my rifle across my elevated knees and waited. An hour later, still no movement. The third deer had vanished. Must have slipped by screened from my view, I thought. So I slowly spun my head 45 degrees to the right, staring straight at the scrape. Time to focus on what brought me there.

By then it was clear to me that what I had witnessed was the thin-faced doe and her twin fawns I had observed several times near three apple trees in a field above my house. One of the fawns, a button buck, was for the first time “feeling its oats” and playfully mounting either its mother, sister or both on their way to a bedding area below me. When they cut the trail I had taken to my stand, they smelled where I had rubbed up against the low browse, banged a U-ie and bedded on the knoll above me. The nature’s classroom alone was worth the trip, having never before witnessed a buck of any age mount a doe.

I refocused on the buck scrape below and at about 10:15 a.m. I laid my rifle across my lap, dropped my arms to my side and elevated my butt to shift from a resting point that had grown uncomfortable. As I settled into my new position I moved my head and a piercing “whew!” broke the still morning air. I slid my eyeballs uphill, toward the small hemlocks where that third deer had vanished, and scanned the landscape. I could decipher nothing before the startling sound again broke the silence.

“Whew!”

Then I saw her, the thin-faced doe, facing me, ears and body erect, nearly invisible against the brown forest floor and gray-brown undergrowth. She was looking me square in the face hidden behind my Realtree mask. She took two bounds away from me, toward where her fawns had bedded maybe 90 minutes earlier, then stopped, faced me again and blew one more time before disappearing into the woods.

I had once again learned how difficult it is to beat deer in their environment – even when the wind is right and they have no clue you’re there.

It’s a lesson that’ll be repeated many times in a deer hunter’s lifetime.

Too many.