05/26/2019
I’ve saved a bunch of the bigger brown antlers aside this year on thoughts everyone may like a rainy day story from time to time. These particular antlers required some luck for certain, and fortunately I followed my gut instinct on the spot we chose to walk that morning.
When we left camp that morning there was a hard frost on the windshield of the truck before daylight, and the weather was calling for overcast skies for the day. Melting frost and overcast skies make for great antler hunting days, there’s no sun glare to fight with, and the frost turning from ice to water enhances the scent conditions for my little four legged friends. When we got out of the truck a little after daylight the area I had chosen to check out didn’t look perfect, and wasn’t exactly the terrain, feed and cover I was hoping for but I had to check it out just the same. There was a turn around at the end of the road and a large wood yard blanketed with raspberry bushes on all sides of me. I picked a skidder trail, fought through the prickle bushes and started walking. Once we got back into the woods a ways there proved to be mediocre moose sign, not the type of sign that gets you all excited thinking you’ve really found something good. I continued to pick along, skidder trail after skidder trail with little to no bull sign to be found. I was on the verge of getting discouraged when I started seeing some nice rubs scattered throughout this one particular patch of woods. The color variation of a fall time rub and a winter, get these antlers off my head rub are fairly hard to differentiate at times, but when you’ve seen enough of them you can usually figure out which is which. I hadn’t walked too much further when I looked up ahead of me to see the dogs standing still, heads down, and tails going. Their tails are a dead giveaway that they’ve found an antler! When I got up to them and saw the antler I was tickled to see it was a nice big brown one, and immediately thought to myself “we need to find the match to that one.” We continued to walk skidder trail after skidder trail on every side of where we found that antler and eventually ran out of moose sign in all directions. We picked up one smaller brown antler in the search for the match, but we were beginning to think it just wasn’t meant to be. We collected our thoughts and decided that was enough time spent in there, knowing I have found matches to antlers over a mile away in some instances, you just never know. We picked a trail and started back for the truck. As we got to the end of the trail we were greeted by that same wall of raspberry bushes we had walked through on the way in, and as I looked up there was my truck about 35 yards ahead. Drake started pushing his head through the tight prickly mess and stopped. Much to my surprise he was standing over the match to our brown antler we had been looking for, laying just 30 yards from the pickup but completely concealed by the pricklys! It’s funny, sometimes an antler is laying so close, yet with the right cover it’s completely hidden from a mans eye. So there’s the match set, along with the story, we hope you all enjoy reading about our endeavors in the woods!
