Photo By Chuck & Grace Bartlett

The day was a bona fide toad roaster -- T-shirt deer hunting if I ever saw it. It was a hot start to the Oregon blacktail season. Three days of sitting a stand had been as dry as the weather. The bucks -- in fact, all of the deer -- were reluctant to move out of their shady, cool north-slope bedding thickets during daylight hours, and the ground cover was as noisy as 60 tons of corn flakes. The alternative of still-hunting for blacktails is tough under any conditions; in this dry weather it was downright impossible.

Then I happened upon a spectacular pair of last winter's sheds. As I bent to pick them up it wasn't hard to visualize a big buck jumping that fence and his antlers tumbling to the grass as his front feet pounded the deck. My thoughts brought a smile to my face and reminded me of an incident from my misspent youth.

One dreary, drizzling January morning down in southeastern Oklahoma I was driving my old Dierk's forestry pickup along the Lebow Trail headed to a pulpwood cut. As I rounded a high cut bank, a big whitetail buck bounded down into the road practically on top of my rig. I had to slam on the brakes.

More startling was the sight of his antlers. They cascaded to the roadway when his front feet hit the trail. He bounded out of sight as I came out of my truck to gather up those 10-point, ivory- and amber-stained antlers. I marveled at their symmetry, noted a speck of blood on a burl, then tossed them in the three-foot deep gearbox in the back of my rig where they landed among several gallons of tree marking paint, coveralls, snake chaps and assorted rain gear.

The year floated by and September found the weather unseasonably hot. As such it bode no fun for the deer season to come. Rifling through the paint box one day while hunting a new nozzle for my marking gun, I found those fine, matching 5-point antlers that big buck had left in the road. I grasped them and rubbed the litter off on my pants leg. I carried them over to the borrow ditch where I had spread my lunch and sat munching my sandwich looking at that wonderful ivory crown of antlers near my feet.

Just for the heck of it I picked them up and began to smack them together. I had rattled deer up before, but deer season and the rut was still months away, and I'm not sure why I rattled those antlers. I kept it up for a while and then laid them aside and began to finish my lunch. I was gazing around when I heard a red squirrel chirring off to my right and as I turned to look for him I saw a big whitetail buck step into the road, look both ways and start walking my direction.

He angled across to my side of the road and jumped into the leafy brush. I picked up the antlers again and began to rattle in earnest. Directly I caught a slight motion and glimpsed that buck slipping through the cover. I stopped rattling and waited to see what would develop. He came up within about 30 yards and stopped to stand staring through the tangle. I was fascinated by all of this and realized he was looking for the rattling source. Then he locked onto my eyes and spun to race away. To say all this fascinated me would be the understatement of the year. But I had learned something: Deer will sometimes respond to rattled antlers even if the rut is not on.

RATTLING UP BLACKTAILS
Better than 30 years have passed since that incident but I have seen that same situation time and again over the years. I have rattled up whitetails, Oregon blacktails (one Boone & Crockett candidate) and Washington mule deer bucks not only when they were still in the velvet during the late summer but also during the rut and long after the rut had passed in the dead of winter.