Don’t kid yourself, this ain’t going to be easy.

I let this thought sink in as my spotting scope gave me a voyeuristic view of a buck’s nose firmly planted in the doe’s rear end.

Ok, I guess the rut was finally on. That or this fella lost his keys in there.

Finding them only gets you five percent of the way there, the rest relies on sneaking within shooting range unchecked.

The rut is a double edged sword. On one hand you’ll never see so many bucks out in the open, not a care in the world, but on the other, how the hell are you going to intercept their path?

The rut with any animal can be erratic, but with a Coues deer it can be damn right silly. Unlike the whitetail of the midwest that can be patterned and depended upon to cruise trails in the river bottoms, the wide open desert where Coues deer call home leaves little in the way of dependability on a particular path they’ll take.

Picture the flight pattern of a fly and then add in a turbulent wind storm. Sure they have trails crossing through the broken hills, but they look more like a spider web than they do the straight arteries of their larger brethren.

Of the past ten years or so I’ve been chasing these little whitetails, I’ve only managed to kill two with my bow. Twenty percent success. Not impressive if you understood the amount of time I spend in the woods.

I don’t know what attracts me to this hunt year after year. A guaranteed tag in my pocket? Sure. Warm weather while everywhere else is in the throes of winter? Yup. Other hunts winding down after a ferocious rut while this one is just getting started? Absolutely.

But with the good comes with the bad. In this case, hyper alert miniature deer that are as mysterious as the hills they roam.

But what’s a hunt without a challenge?

There was no chance of catching up with this particular buck as he was pushing the doe at a breakneck speed. She darted back and forth, but this wasn’t his first date. Like a good cattle dog, he reigned her in and took control of the situation.

Just once I’d love to see them push in my direction.

Glassing from a high point is well and great, after all you get to see plenty of deer, but that’s about all you get to do, view them from a distance.

I wasn’t on a nature watch. I’m a hunter and I was there to get in on the action.

Over the last few days I noticed that this particular hill I’d been glassing was a hotspot for activity. It was time to insert myself into the center of this dating game and see if they would make a mistake.

Wind be damned. I had a consistent gust, but to call it a good or bad wouldn’t make sense seeing that there was no rhyme or reason to their comings and goings.. Get yourself in there and hope for the best. Not a particularly great strategy, but it’s all I had.

The walk over to the ridge was a clinic on how well these creatures can blend in. Out of the tall grass I flushed numerous does that were bedded down to avoid the prying eyes of the over-sexed males.

There wasn’t much to do but to keep pressing on and find myself a thorny pile of brush to tuck into.

It may have been winter elsewhere, but no one seemed to tell this particular patch of earth. The sun was relentless as it beat down on the earth. Movement felt forced and shade was becoming a priority. I crawled my way threw a thorny mess to the reprieve of a nearby bush.

The spot seemed to be as good as any.

I made a temporary home next to an ant pile. For the time being at least, the seemed preoccupied with their tasks at hand and decided I wasn’t an immediate threat. I wondered when their curiosity would become too strong and our temporary truce would be broken.

I nocked an arrow and placed my bow next to me, release at the ready. With everything laid out there was nothing left to do but to let the mind wander. Hunting certainly can be a proactive endeavor, but the older and therefore theoretically wiser I get, the more often I find myself just sitting and being quiet. Lord knows I make enough mistakes in the woods, so I try to stack the odds in my favor by just sitting still and shutting up.

The stiller I am the more I notice what isn’t. My mind took note of the repeated movement of the grass blowing in the breeze. It registered it in its unconscious memory bank as irrelevant.

Potential paths of movement were noted without consciously thinking of them. Funnels and paths of least resistance mostly. If they are going to walk through, it should be there, there and there.

I schootched deeper into the shadows of my blind, knowing that the darkness should make it tougher to pick out my outline.

An hour into my endeavor I noticed brown movement out of the corner of my eye. My brain signaled for an adrenaline dump, leaving my muscles tense and allowing me to feel every pump of blood throughout my system.

A waste. A few javelina root around then crest over the hilltop. My body dissipates the chemical and goes back into energy preservation mode.

The rest of the day withers by with no action in my vicinity, foreshadowing the rest of the season. There is plenty to look at from a distance, but I wear a force field that repels anything within shooting range.

It’s hard to complain however. A month slides by without an arrow leaving my quiver, but I’m all the better for it. The season had been successful thus far and one more kill might inflame my ego.

It’s good to know that I’m not king. I’m just a passerby that gets to share their domain from time to time

// Fred Bohm