Outdoor odyssey day 7, perils of public land hunting

Posted on: October 14, 2017 | Bob Frye | Comments

Early muzzleloader season hunting can bring competition.

Unable to hunt his chosen stand because of public land hunting competition, outdoors editor Bob Frye stopped for lunch under a tree.

If you’ often engage in public land hunting, you know what I’m talking about.

Opening day of Pennsylvania’s early muzzleloader deer season had me on a state game lands.

I’ll admit, my scouting of the place this year was skimpy. A giant, work-related summer project kept me from exploring as much as I wanted. I’d placed some deer cameras out, but not as early as I’d hoped, and I’d not been able to move them around as planned either.

My preseason, boots-on-the-ground work didn”t amount to much either because of that same work.

Still, the goal here is to hunt and continue my outdoor odyssey. And this is some familiar ground. Plus, I’d seen deer – just not close enough to shoot – while archery hunting here a week earlier.

On this day, I thought, with the extra reach provided by a muzzleloader, I’d be OK.

Not so.

I didn’t get in the woods until lunch time, but figured I’d settle into my stand—or set up a blind near where those archery deer had been — and be good to go.

Someone else had the same idea.

Walking in to “my” spot, I saw three other hunters approaching it from the opposite direction. They had a head start on me and got there before I did.

They saw me, I saw them. We all stopped, maybe 80 yards apart. They looked, I looked. They hem-hawwed around, I did the same.

In the end, one of the three plopped down under a tree right where I was headed.

He was on the ground and I couldn’t tell if he was carrying a muzzleloader or a shotgun for squirrels. Either way, he wasn’t going anywhere.

His friends seemed to spread out on the same slope and take up stands, too.

So, I turned around and went elsewhere. That didn’t work out.

Moving out of those oak woods, I set up on the edge of a field still planted with corn. A few deer showed up, too, but right at dark. No shots presented themselves.

Another day, another chance will come, I thought as I walked back to the truck in the dark.

Seven days down, 253 to go.

Bob Frye is the everybodyadventures.com editor. Reach him at 412-838-5148 or bfrye@535mediallc.com. See other stories, blogs, videos and more at everybodyadventures.com.

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