The big buck lies there in the frost killed grass and sawbriars beneath the 8-year-old planted pines. He is chewing the mixture of twigs, buds and ryegrass he fed on last night and dozing.

Subconsciously, his olfactory organs monitor the air he breathes for any danger upwind. The scent of a bobcat or coyote would raise his alertness only slightly, for these predators represented serious danger only when he was a fawn more than half a decade ago. But let the slightest hint of man scent flow through his nostrils and the message to his brain would ring out like a triple alarm at the firehouse.

The buck’s response to man scent is primarily, perhaps entirely, instinctual. For if these secretive animals used logic and reasoning to avoid man, they would make more evasion mistakes as men do when applying these strategies. And the big bucks don’t make many mistakes in avoiding hunters in the woods.

Hide or run?

It is true that an old buck might lie still with his neck stretched out in scant cover to avoid detection in certain circumstances and burst headlong from that cover to flee the area at another time. But I am convinced either action is more instinctual than planned. The big ones almost always make the right move. And they do it instantly.

The old bedded buck gets to his feet at mid morning and walks a few steps to where the sun is striking the ground to make a new bed. Here the warming rays will help conserve body heat. This saves a bit more of the nutrients from his browsing for replacing muscle cells and body fat lost to fasting and expended energy during the long mating season now ending. His cud will have to last him until tonight, as in a full hour or more after sundown, when there is not a ray of light left which could reveal him to a dedicated stand hunter.

Long after nearby does, yearlings and small bucks have left their beds for the planted ryegrass fields, the old deer slowly rises from his rest and listens intently for several minutes before drifting quietly through the night. The crows and songbirds are silent now, offering no interference with the buck’s keen hearing as he checks every sound and evaluates it for danger.

At the ryegrass field he stands inside the woods and watches other deer feed for long minutes. At last, about the time the hunters are home getting into bed, the big-racked buck slips to the edge of the field and feeds. Within an hour he moves away into the night, waters in the creek and browses his way back to the tangled thicket where hunters rarely go. He is bedded well before daylight.

Safe once more

One day the gun and bow seasons end and the hunters break camp and talk in the cafés of big tracks and rubbed trees as big as one’s arm and scrapes six feet long. The buck quickly notices the absence of that dreaded man scent. He feeds longer in the night, having to travel further to find the last of the ryegrass plantings and the remaining dormant buds, honeysuckle and mushrooms.

Winter has diminished his weight, but he is maintaining it now, and he will survive until the underbrush sprouts its tender growth of spring. Then he will shed his heavy antlers and much of his winter coat. And he will eat and drink and grow new antlers and store body fat in preparation for another season of high drama and danger, fighting and marking territory and siring new fawns. And, with the experience of another year surviving man and the elements, his wild instincts will be keener still.

The fall hunter who lets his scent drift to the old buck’s nostrils will not bag him. He will hunt the buck for days on end to no avail. In the end he will wonder if the shredded bushes and reeking scrapes and rubbed trees were made by a buck-ghost. And he will know the whitetail buck deer is a worthy quarry.