The Haystack Buck

The Haystack Buck by Jon Bryan
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At 5:00 PM I had defied logic and was sitting behind a tree scouting for deer. What’s illogical about that? The tree that I was hiding behind was in the feed lot, not two hundred feet from the east side of my house and by dark, within fifty yards of my hide, I had seen eleven does and two young bucks! My cover was so sparse that I couldn’t lift up my camera for pictures.

In the thick fog the next morning, sitting in a tree stand by a food plot, I had only seen four yearling does. Then it dawned on me, the bucks will be close to where the does are! So, then and there, I decided that I would convert one of the partial round bales of hay in the feed lot, into a blind of sorts and see if that would provide me sufficient cover to get a shot. Moving the hay around for a makeshift ‘blind’ proved to be easy, but the hard part was angling into the chair so only the top of my camo covered head would show.

That afternoon found me ‘scrunched’ into a bale of hay, watching a spike about a hundred yards away down a lane in the trees, stop and rub his head against an overhanging limb, put his back legs together and urinate over his glands on to the obvious scrape. In quick succession, he would be the first of four more bucks, a six pointer and three shooters, to repeat this act. This was a first for me. I’ve seen one buck ‘work’ a scrape, but never two and certainly not five and don’t ask me why I watched and didn’t shoot!

A doe walked across the clearing not forty yards in front of me, followed by the spike. Soon the spike beat a quick retreat and I got ready. Out walked this nice buck, guessing his age on the hoof, probably four and a half with heavy body, wide horns and muscular neck. He looked at the doe as I centered my cross hairs in the heart/ lung area, bam, down he went and bounced back up, ran for twenty or so feet and fell dead!

Whew, that was some deal, but where’s the smoke coming from? The muzzle flash had ignited some of the hay, but it soon smoldered out. Getting out of my ‘blind’, I hadn’t taken two steps, when I saw movement ahead in the brush and three bucks exploded out.
Walking up to the buck, I noticed he was a seven pointer, with his left, main beam broken from fighting. Earlier in the week I’d passed on a big buck with only one antler. These guys around here are getting aggressive!

The big boys are moving and they certainly were close to where the doe’s were!

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