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Hunting
I couldn’t tell if the roar came from the creek or the rain pelting trees and leaves around me. It was raining that hard. Saturday, Nov. 11: A sky as soft gray as my son’s stuffed dog rained without mercy on Dukes Creek Woods Conservation Area and the rest of northeast Georgia. The downpour raised…
Dry leaves, the cold, dead husks of another summer, were twirling down in sheets over the swamp, blanketing the dry ground, dotting the surface of the black creek water, piling up against limbs that hung in the current. Sweet gum leaves cracked under the hooves of the Cemetery Buck as it plodded slowly beside a…
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye just as I pulled my rattling antlers apart. I slowly turned for a better look; but whatever it was that had made the movement was no longer visible. I softly blew a grunt tube, and at the sound of the grunt the buck jerked his…
Darkness was beginning to lift when the deer that Jay called the Bay Buck came creeping through a list mist to the sheltered side of the Hornets Nest. The buck made no noise except for the droplet-sounds of icy water falling from its hoofs. It passed through the flooded tupelo and black gum on the…
When the Cemetery Buck finished rubbing the oak, the tree was already dying. The straight, slender trunk of the turkey oak sapling had drawn the buck across a hundred yards of wiregrass prairie. It stood among other young trees and sapling stalks, but something about the one tree pulled at an instinctive cord, and the…
The Cemetery Buck drifted through the early morning September fog like a specter. It walked in smooth, silent strides and seemed to float over the dim trail without touching the earth. On its flanks and throat were the scabbed-over wounds left by the wild dogs more than a month ago, but otherwise its thickening coat…
The buck was tiring when it reached the top of the sandhill and stopped near the cemetery. It turned and stood in the open, facing back into the swamp where the dogs would be boiling out of the trees. Through its nostrils and open mouth it blew loudly. It had run far enough and…
“At least we were able to call the police, and didn’t have to call an ambulance,” said Kim Keel, of Duluth, after a night-hunting poacher’s high-powered rifle bullet plowed through a trailer at a Marion County hunt camp and just missed her two children and a friend’s child who were inside. The incident could easily…
This story is the absolute truth. I have written it because this incident is unusual and it proves two things that most people do not believe: (1) Rattlesnakes will strike before they rattle. (2) Snakes will come out of their dens anytime of the year if the weather is warm enough. My ordeal occurred last…
What does Mr. Abe A. Northcutt, of Eatonton, have in common with the late, great Fred Bear? For starters, at a spry 80 years of age, “Mr. Abe,” as his friends fondly call him, is an avid whitetail hunter who has been chasing Piedmont bucks for nearly 40 years. Mr. Abe started hunting deer in…
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