John and I met at the gate of our forty acre hunting woods and set out across the eastern edge of the property, our bows and arrows in hand, headed for the stands awaiting us. The walk took us pass several small hardwoods scarred by antler scrapes from previous years, their bark already rounding over the edges of the wounds. If a young hardwood survives its injury, one day no outward evidence of the distress will remain, just as the tree itself may long outlast any other evidence of the buck.
The active scrapes discovered the week before, along with the scene of the photographic evidence, lie in the southeast portion of planted pines. Our stands are there, spaced about 120 yards apart; John has a climbing model, I have a more conventional, if spartan, ladder stand. We arrived about 5 PM. A conversation with John's neighbor, an experienced hunter, gave us his opinon that the area's deer were most likely appearing just after sunset. With GPS-empowered accuracy the time of sunset was determined as 7:08 PM, with civil twilight ending at 7:32. Effective shooting light would certainly die out shortly before then.
I mounted my stand as the last direct rays of the setting sun shown above the treeline, which suited me fine as I was generally facing west. The thicker brush that covered the old house trailer site where we know deer have bedded lay about a hundred yards ahead of me, with the likely route to the feeder and scrapes nearby in my left front quarter. I settled in for the show.
Not to give the wrong impression, although this forty acre block of young pines is seldom visited, it does not enjoy the silence of isolation. Cars and trucks rushing by on the county road along the northern boundary were clearly audible, as well other random anthropogenic clatter. Yet another testament to the adaptability of wildlife when faced with all manor of environmental pollution.
Before very long a bank of clouds appeared to the northeast. It advanced over us and produced a shower, short and gentle. This was the first time I'd been out in a rainstorm in quite some time, since the majority of our summer rain here in Florida comes from thunderstorms that only idiots or tourists would stay out in. The rain soon ended, barely enough to make my newly-purchased camouflaged suit damp. I hoped it may erase the scent from our trial.
The wind that came during and after the storm rocked the small pine that supported my ladder stand. The sublime feeling of being strapped to a limber young tree, moving back and forth with the breeze, reenforced the attachment to nature that many hunters seek.
Before long the clouds passed and the last rays of the sun could be seen through the pines across the adjacent pasture. The distant sound of calling cows drifted through the woods. A few squirrels decided it was time to come out and procure some cones to gnaw for pine nuts. The evidence of prior feasts littered the ground below my stand. Crows called to each other as they flapped over the crests of the young pines.
A few small dead limbs, their sponge-like rotten flesh no doubt made heavy by the rain, crashed to earth from the young slash pines near sunset, upsetting the lengthening calms between vehicles passing out on the county road. Once far larger trees occupied this land: All evidence points to the historic existence of a Sandhill environment at the forty acre pines. The widely-spaced Longleaf Pine, with leaning, bare trunks supporting bonzai-like flat-topped crowns, would have towered over the savannah-like forest floor. Frequent fires raced through the wiregrass understory, bringing rejuvenation and renewal to the low-growing herbaceous flora. In October a bounty of wildflowers, yellow and purple and pink and white, would have been fueled by the previous year's ash. Now the darkened, needle-carpeted floor yields only the white daisy-heads of the invasive Spanish Needle, who's spear-like seeds will soon develop and annoyingly attach to and pierce our socks.
The tree-obscured horizon gave no clue of the exact moment of sunset, but as the light faded a flurry of small, brown moths began to flit around my seated form. Alighting on my bow, I believe they were drinking water from the droplets still beading here and there on the varnished wood. I touched one gently with my left index finger. It was not startled, but instead crawled up on my fingertip, were it remained for several minutes, its comrades still in motion all around us.
I let John make the decision to leave, since I would have gladly stayed until full dark when the waxing moon would have lit the way back, but he has a young family to attend to and needed to find his way home. I heard him descend, and so I shooed away my lepidopteran entourage and climbed gingerly down to meet him in the enshrouding gloom.
The deer remained as ghosts, a mystery, unseen in the night.
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