Season Opener: Pennsylvania

November 28, 2005. It was a windy, muddy walk down to the stands for the first day of Pennsylvania’s whitetail deer rifle season. The temperature rose overnight, and the random patches of snow on the field edges had shrunk by half. In the woods, the more-or-less solid snow cover of last evening, which promised outstanding visibility, had become patchy at best.

The stand felt solid under my feet after yesterday’s repairs. Yes, I guess we’re no better than those last-minute hunters who wait until the day before the season to fire their rifles to check the sighting, alerting every deer for miles around that it’s time to go stealthy. In our case, it was trying to fix the effects of a year’s worth of wind and rain and sun and cows on our two favorite home-built stands. Dom, though, is a wizard at impromptu fixes, and with the come-along, some chain, a couple hands-full of nails and some random pieces of weathered 2x4’s, the two stands were more-or-less vertical, solid, and safe to hunt for at least the next two weeks.

The stand I hunt is the hottest corner on the farm proper — where deer funnel up from the bottom, and down and up from the mountain in the evening, and around which they trickle back up to the mountain and down to the swamp at daybreak. It was always Dom’s son’s stand, but when he is not here — all of bow season, and lately rifle season, too — yours truly, Dom’s enthusiastic protégé, is given the privilege of waiting there for the deer to appear. I took my first deer ever with a bow from that stand, and a nice buck with a bow, and various does with rifle and bow.

It was still full dark when I settled in at 6:10, 50 minutes from dawn, and the air was damp and thick. There would be no sunrise this morning. After the darkness lightened a bit, I snapped the clip of four .270 Winchester shells into my rifle, and waited. With a little more light, I chambered a round, clicked the safety on, and waited. A little more light, and I flipped the covers up off of the scope, turned the dial from the 3x setting I used for the close-in brush hunting at Sweet Surrender, to 9x for maximum magnification across the open field. I waited some more.

By now it was light enough to see as far as I was going to see this morning, which was not far at all. There was a persistent wind off the mountain, from the East, and as it blew the fog across the fields it looked like blowing snow. I would have preferred blowing snow to this muddy dampness with droplets splatting off the trees. The thick atmosphere made it as quiet as I think it’s ever been for me for hunting. No motor sounds, no human sounds at all, just the plop of water droplets and the wind hissing in the trees. It could have been an ancient hunt on a primordial hilltop, the timeless pursuit of food and clothing and survival, matching wits with wary prey at the upper end of the food chain, but for beautifully engineered Swiss masterpiece of cold steel and polished wood resting on my lap.

The scraping and chirping of a flock of turkeys echoed through the fog. Eventually, a lone hen took to low flight and landed halfway between me and the patch of woods that separated Dom’s treestand from mine. She seemed to be involuntarily separated from her flock, and spent much time calling. She worked her way down to and around the pond and eventually disappeared, evidently rejoining the flock and moving off into the silent woods.

The temperature warmed, but the fog never lifted. It was a morning of few rifle shots. Over the course of two and a half hours, I counted just ten, including those from an obvious distance. How many would ring out on a “normal” opening day? 30? 40?

After a while, Dom left his stand, crossed the field, and went into the woods, up the rise to where we leaned a ladder stand last year. He was caught by surprise by a lone buck, and couldn’t get a shot off. I didn’t see one deer.

Clearly, the deer held the day this morning. All the better for this evening, if this fog lifts and the rain holds off. That was the first morning of the first day of rifle season in the Laurel Highlands of southwestern Pennsylvania.

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Later… The fog lay thicker and thicker all day long, and didn’t budge by afternoon hunting time. Visibility was 50 yards at best. Dom decided to hunt nearby, straight behind the house at the edge of the woods that lead up to the mountain. I opted for the ladder stand where he saw the buck this morning, since 50 yards is as far as you could see in there even without any fog. It is at a spot where I used to climb to hunt with the bow, 50 yards in from the field, at the crest of a hillock where several game trails cross. Back when deer were plentiful, that patch just before the field used to be a staging area, where a number of deer would pause and browse and make sure there was no danger before they entered the open. Now, with deer more scarce than ever here, not much staging gets done. There was, however, an active trail directly in front of the stand, which was very evident last night when there was snow on the ground.

It is a magical perch. High in the trees, looking down an open glade to the right, and into thicker stands ahead and to the left, the air was thick and damp. Though the wind was gustier than earlier, and the droplets fell incessantly from the branches onto the sodden leaves below, there was an almost sacred silence and stillness — an open air cathedral and I was the lone worshiper.

It was no wonder, though, that nothing came. If I were a prey species, I would think more than twice about going out on a night like this. 100% humidity and swirling, erratic winds made scenting predators impossible; the constant splattering of drops on the forest floor and wind in the treetops masked all other sounds; and the fog rendered the range of vision dangerously short. Yes, I imagine a dense thicket felt pretty good to a deer tonight. But hopefully, the rumblings of their stomachs will make them move tomorrow.