Around 1965, during one of the first Bow Seasons in Mississippi, I was hunting a field edge on a private club “over the levee” in the Delta. The field was known as the “Pea Vine Field”, as the club grew field peas there to attract and hold turkeys and deer, and provide extra nutrition. We found and noted the afternoon wind direction, and skirted the field on foot and out of sight to get to the down wind side to hide and hunt. I found a distinct, well-worn trail leading to and from the field, backed off 20 yards from the field edge, and set-up on the ground in a thicket of second growth saplings, the slight, failing breeze distinctly in my face. I had a clear shot along 10-15 yards of the trail from my hide-out. In a short while, deer, turkeys and a few feral hogs began to enter the 45 acre or so field. Watching them closely as they fed and frolicked unconcerned in the pea vines, I noticed one of them was a huge bodied deer, noticeably larger even at the over two hundred yards distance. The sun had set, leaving only about 30 minutes of available shooting light, till “last dark”. The big deer bluffed and bulllied the smaller bucks, chased and smelled the does, and gradually worked closer to my spot. His rack became visible in the failing light the closer to me he moved. It was wide, with tall tines and heavy mass. Minutes passed, and he was close enough to make out a perfectly symmetrical 6 x 6 set of antlers, a twelve-point! He had to weigh nearly 300 pounds! I shook and shivered, as much from adrenaline-stoked oncoming buck fever as from the falling temperature. He edged closer. Just as light was failing, he began to head onto the trail just in front of me, not spooked, just using the trail as his exit route. The wind or gentle breeze had died to complete calm-or so I thought. I came to full draw with my 53 lb. draw Bear semi-recurve bow, the 30 inch cedar arrow tipped with a deadly Bear Razor-head, slightly quivering from my anticipation of the coming shot, and the exertion of holding the full draw. As the huge buck came into my shooting lane, he stopped, raised his head, and looked directly at me. He snorted, wheeled and crashed away off the far side of the trail through the saplings. “What happened?”, I wondered, and probably yelled-no, SCREAMED- aloud. It dawned on me, then, with crystal clarity: I had forgotten the thermals. My scent, borne by the faint, nearly undetectable air movement of the down-falling late afternoon thermal had billowed out in all directions from my spot! The air all around me had to be saturated with my human scent! That buck was then the biggest I had ever seen, and now, all this hunting and observing deer time later, one of the biggest I have EVER seen. Is it little wonder, then, why I harp on thermal air movement, wind direction and speed, and “hunting into the wind?”
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