The anticipation is real. It’s different; different than what I’m used to. I’ve grown up and lived my whole life in West Michigan; chasing and harvesting Michigan bucks. Let me start off by saying I still love and will always love hunting Michigan. The anticipation for October 1st will always be there, and I still get jacked driving up north with my old man to hunt our lease in Onaway, Michigan for opening day of Rifle season. We’ve been hunting that property up north since I was 14 years old, and that place will always hold a special piece of my hunt-crazed heart. This is different though; this is an anticipation that I really haven’t had before in when it comes to chasing whitetails.
Columbus, Ohio: 10 miles ahead.
That’s right; we’re no longer in the Mitten. We’re in the buckeye state, and even though they share a border, they couldn’t be more different when it comes to whitetail hunting. You can sit all season in the Michigan woods and see multiple young bucks, and if you’re lucky you might see one mature buck along with the hundreds of does you’ll inevitably see throughout the season. Remember bucks and does are born at a 1:1 ratio, so the fact that you only see one buck for every ten does in Michigan really illustrates the problem throughout the state that too many young bucks are getting killed. Take that stroll down to Ohio though, and it’s a whole new story; not only is the buck to doe ratio much improved, but the number of mature bucks is significantly higher throughout the state. There are many reasons why there are way more mature bucks and more bucks in general; their gun season is much shorter than it is in Michigan, the number of hunters is significantly lower in Ohio, and you can only shoot one buck per year. I could go on and on with other reasons, but those are the three major ones that first come to mind.
Let me back up. Over the past few years I had heard stories and seen pictures of mammoth whitetails, but I needed to see it for myself; so in 2016 I made the trek to a piece of public land with my brother Tommy to see what this Ohio noise was all about. (Tommy is not actually my brother, but we’ve been inseparable since we were in diapers, so I consider him a brother.) We did a little bit of research, and I knew some friends that had hunted a couple different pieces of public land in southern Ohio, but we truthfully didn’t do a ton of homework. We just picked one of the pieces of public we softly researched, took a few days off of work in early November and jumped in the truck.
We pulled up to the piece of public land we’d be hunting at 8pm, it was pitch black outside, but that didn’t stop us; it was November and we couldn’t waste daylight time the next day throwing up stands. Which meant we were putting up our stands in the dark—at a piece of property we’d never laid our feet on. Now let me verify, I do NOT recommend this, but you put two avid whitetail hunters in a new spot and only give them 4 days to hunt the rut, you bet your ass we were spending every last second of daylight 20 feet up looking for a monster. Our stands had to be up that night.
Let me paint the picture: We’re going about 5 miles per hour down an old dirt road with more potholes than a Michigan highway, my head out my window, Tommy’s head out the other peering into the blackness looking for the highest ridge possible, all while looking at an aerial map laying in the counsel. We pulled over at a spot where there were extremely high ridges on both sides of the road. The reason we were looking for high ridges; the higher the ridge, the more shelves or “Military crests” there are on that ridge. These shelves or “military crests” are flat travel corridors of ground at different levels of the ridge. Bucks are known to travel these shelves in the rut to scent check and look for does at the tops or bottom of the ridges. We settled on which side we’d each hunt, and got to work.
Let me tell you, these ridges and hills are no joke. To Michigan boys, these were mountains. We started on the side of the road Tommy would be hunting; we climbed and climbed and climbed. It was hard to tell how close we were to the top due it being pitch black outside, but we settled on a spot that seemed darn near close to the top. (Tommy would find out the next morning that our estimation was wrong, he was about halfway up the ridge.) I’ll be honest, it was definitely eerie putting a stand up in the middle of the dark in a place we’d never stepped foot on; not to mention we were in the middle of the boonies about 25 miles from the nearest highway. The eeriness was cranked up a few notches when a big Great Horned Owl decided to swoop in on the branch just above the tree stand and watch us for a good five minutes while we struggled to overcome the darkness to get the stand secured in the tree. We eventually finished up Tommy’s stand around 10:30 pm, and made the trek across the road and up the opposite ridge to put my stand up. This time we climbed all the way to the top of the ridge; the tree I selected was nearly at the crest of the ridge. It was dark, but I could see there were two well-travelled shelves on both sides of ridge about 30 to 35 yards from the top. My stand was only about 12 feet in the air, but since I was at the crest of the ridge, the main trails were at least 30 feet below me.
By the time we finally made it back to the truck, it was 12:30 am and we were sweating so bad it looked like we had just jumped out of the pool. The high that day had been a scorching 82 degrees, and the temperature had only dipped into the high 60s, which is unseasonably warm for early November even for Southern Ohio. The rain was coming the following morning though, which was naturally accompanied by a major cold front which had us stoked for the following few days. Before a horrible night’s sleep in the F-150, we found a local drinking hole and gulped a few while we watched the Cubs curse come to an end in Cleveland for their first World Series since before World War I.
Nothing too special when it came to our camp; a truck, couple coolers, and a four person tent. In my opinion, roughing it in a tent adds much more to the whole hunting trip experience compared to staying in a hotel.
I’m going to skip ahead to day two of our 2016 Ohio hunting trip because day one brought rain that was supposed to taper down around noon, but didn’t end up clearing out of the area until 8pm the following day. This wasn’t a bad thing though, because 24 hours after we were drenched in sweat from putting up stands in the night time heat, the temperature had dropped to 39 degrees. We knew if there were bucks in the area, they’d be on their feet the following morning, and boy were we right.
We woke up to a cool frost; you know what I’m talking about, that kind of early November frost that gives every bowhunter an instant erection when he steps outside. It’s safe to say this was the most excited we had been to climb into a tree stand in our young lives. Even though it was cold, by the time I walked up the ridge and got to my stand I was sweating like I had just played pickup basketball for two straight hours; so much for showering myself in Scent-a-way before making the trek uphill.
Twenty minutes after daylight I detected movement about 100 yards at the top of the ridge in front of me. I put the knockers to my eyes – buck. I quickly discovered it was just a young 5 point making his way down the ridge, but it was good sign the bucks were on their feet. I hit the grunt call to see if I could get any response from the young guy, and sure enough it was like taking candy from a baby. One grunt and he swirled around and headed my direction on a string; he finally got downwind of me when he got to 10 yards and scampered off, but that was an awesome encounter to start the morning. Later that morning around 10am, I saw more movement about 150 yards straight in front of me on top of the ridge. Again, I threw my knockers up – buck. This buck was a better buck but looking through all the branches I couldn’t tell exactly what he was. As soon as I saw he had a decent rack on him I hit the grunt call twice. “This is public land? This is too easy,” I remember thinking to myself. He threw his head up in my direction and almost immediately started walking straight at me. He closed from 150 yards to 30 yards in less than a minute. It quickly came to my attention though that this buck wasn’t a shooter; he was a two-and-a-half-year-old 9 point. For most hunters throughout the Midwest, this is an easy buck to pass on. For an ole Michigan boy who dreams of seeing a buck like this pop up on his trail camera in the summer in the beanfields of Michigan though, this was NOT easy. This buck is dead and most likely on my wall if I’m sitting in a tree stand in the Mitten. This buck stood 15 yards in front of me for a good 10 minutes before he eventually made his way down the ridge. About 30 minutes later, just as I was watching yet another young 8 point making his way up the ridge in my direction, my phone buzzed.
One of the many young bucks we let walk that week. Their responses to the calling sequences we were doing was nothing like anything I had seen before. I called this buck into 10 yards with 2 soft grunt calls.
We had barely any service where we were hunting and both of our cell phones were running out of battery life fairly quickly due to the lack of service, so before Tommy and I went on our separate ways that morning we discussed we’d meet at the truck briefly at noon, and that the only reason we would call each other beforehand was if there was either if we flung an arrow or we were in some kind of trouble.
I looked down at my phone and sure enough it was Tommy. I picked up and for about 10 long seconds I heard was heavy breathing, followed by, “Dude, I just shot the biggest buck of my life!” I didn’t care that I had an 8-point walking up the ridge at me; I immediately stood up in my stand and did a huge Tiger Woods-like fist pump. Are you kidding me?! We had been sitting in a tree stand for only 3 hours on public land in spots that we had setup in pitch dark, and I had already seen 3 bucks and Tommy just stuck the biggest buck he had ever seen. We didn’t stay on the phone long; his buck had disappeared down the ridge pretty close to him and he didn’t want to be too loud in case the buck was still close. We agreed we would still meet at the truck at noon for some story telling and a quick lunch.
I ended up seeing another small buck just before noon; honestly, if Tommy hadn’t shot a buck that morning, I probably would’ve stayed in the stand all day, but I had to hear his story. If you’re a hunter you get it, we all LIVE to hear stories of successful and unsuccessful days in the woods.
When I got back to the truck, Tommy revealed to me that he had made an extremely long shot and hit the buck pretty far back – most likely a gut shot. When in doubt, back out. We decided to not go back up his ridge that afternoon to pursue the buck and go after it the following day. We were going to be there a couple more days and with no rain in the forecast there was no reason to rush it and pursue the buck that day. Just like the bucks I had seen that morning, Tommy had grunted this buck in on a string to 10 yards…10 yards! Just before the buck stepped out into a shooting lane though, the old bastards sixth sense that had kept him alive for years kicked into high gear, and for no good reason out of nowhere he looked straight up at Tommy. He busted Tommy and jumped back and ran out to 50 yards and stood in Tommy’s shooting lane looking back at him. It was now or never, so Tommy let one fly and watched the arrow soar and unfortunately hit the deer a little far back since the deer had a split second to take a step forward. Gut shot deer die though, and we were confident if we didn’t push him he would be laying dead not too far from where Tommy hit him. The forecast called for it to stay cold, so we were confident the meat would still be salvageable the following day.
The Lord was shining down on us, because somehow the weather the following morning was even better than the previous morning. The temperature had dropped into the low 30s; the frost gave the leaves the same crunch as if you were walking on floor covered in frosted flakes cereal, the wind was calmly making its way through the timber at about 5 mph out of the north, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. If there’s such thing as buck-killing weather, this was it.
It had been light for about two hours now, and I hadn’t seen a hair yet, which I found relatively surprising considering the buck-filled morning I had the previous day. Even though I hadn’t spotted a deer yet, I was still soaking every second of this beautiful morning from my ridgetop while doing a calling sequence every half hour in case a buck was cruising a ridge near mine. Deer or no deer, watching the sunrise and enjoying Gods beautiful creation in this remote piece of public land made the trip well worth it.
9:03 am. I had completed a calling sequence about ten minutes prior, and had just stuck my phone back in my pocket after checking the time when I heard it. The most beautiful sound in the world to a bowhunter; the faint sound of leaves crunching at the base of my ridge behind my right shoulder. Buck. I’ve been in the woods enough in my lifetime to distinguish a deer from a squirrel making its way through the timber, and this sound wasn’t the soft crunch a slow-moving deer makes, these were heavy crunches one after another, and most importantly the sound was getting LOUDER. My heart instantly started to pound and knees instantly began to shake as I quickly realized this deer was coming up toward the top of the ridge that I was sitting on, and it was walking at a pace that a doe doesn’t walk at. This was a heavy-hooved buck walking my way, and as I slowly stood up and shuffled my feet around in my treestand to face the direction the buck was coming from I noticed the buck had covered some serious ground and was only about 40 yards from the crest of the ridge walking straight at me. I could only see the tips of his antlers, and already made the conclusion that this was a mature buck that I was going to try to kill. He continued to climb the ridge until he stood right on top looking over the other side of the ridge, most likely to see where the grunt I had made minutes before came from. While he stood at the top, I noticed he was actually eye level with me only 30 yards away, but I had no shot because he was standing right in the middle of thick thorn bush that would be impossible to squeeze an arrow through. I hadn’t even drawn my bow back yet; I think I briefly blacked out in sheer awe and excitement that this magnificent mature buck was standing in bow range without a clue that I was in his presence. He stood there for what seemed like an eternity, which was probably more like 10 seconds before he started making his way down the ridge toward me. I hadn’t cleared a shooting lane in the direction he was coming from, but noticed that I had a natural lane about 25 yards long straight behind me that would he would be crossing within a matter of seconds. It was killing time, and when it’s killing time there’s no excuse for letting adrenaline or so called “buck fever” to keep me from putting an arrow in this deer. I drew back, calmed myself, and locked in on my target just like I would if I were flinging arrows at a target in my backyard. Just as the buck stepped into my shooting lane at 24 yards, I softly made a grunt-like sound, and he stopped broadside as I settled my 25-yard pin a touch below his vitals and let it fly.
As soon as I touched my release everything seemed to happen in slow motion. I watched the arrow fly and disappear behind his shoulder as he began to launch himself forward; immediately I knew I had made a lethal hit on this buck. As he made a few bounds down the ridge, I noticed how massive his body was, definitely the largest-bodied deer I had ever seen while hunting. He made a few bounds down the ridge and disappeared behind some leaves, and after that there was immediate silence. I watched and listened intently in the direction the buck bounded off, and after a couple minutes of silence the adrenaline kicked in again as I picked up the phone to call Tommy. While trying to tell the quick story to Tommy on the phone, I kept my eyes in the directions where I saw the buck disappear. I thought for sure the buck bounded down toward the thick bedding area at the base of the ridge, but after quietly relaying the story and celebrating with Tommy over the phone I saw movement from where the buck had disappeared. As I saw a flicker of a tail, I first thought it was another deer coming from the same area because it had been a couple minutes since the buck had disappeared. That’s when I saw the best sight I had ever seen in the deer woods; as I peered through the leaves, I saw the bruiser I had arrowed a few minutes prior slowly tip over and roll 20 yards down the ridge.
“BIG BUCK DOWN” is what I continued to repeat over and over to Tommy as I had witnessed all of this happen while I was on the phone with him. Unless you’re a bowhunter and know what I’m talking about, watching a deer go down from your arrow is a feeling you cannot buy or cannot match anywhere else in the world. With all of the preparation that goes into bowhunting, no matter the size of the animal, reaping the fruits of your labor is a feeling that you cannot describe. On top of that, the fact that I was able to accomplish this on public land that I had never bow hunted before just added to the sense of accomplishment and joyfulness.
Not much of a track job on this buck! A local landowner was gracious enough to help us track the buck and haul it out with his quad.
Later on that day, we got the trail of Tommy’s buck he had shot the day prior in hopes that he wouldn’t be far since we decided not to push him the day of the shot. Long story short, we were unable to recover the deer; we found blood about 100 yards from where Tommy hit the deer and followed that blood for a solid 50 yards before we lost it for good. We scoured the ridges for hours on end in hopes to stumble across a dead deer, but after a full days’ worth of looking we came to the conclusion that the buck was most likely still alive. There was no sign of it being a gut shot either. The fact that Tommy was able to put an arrow in the deer on a 50-yard shot with a bow he has had since high school was very impressive, but to our dismay it didn’t seem to be a fatal hit. Bowhunting is so challenging and rewarding, but like anything is challenging, it has its downfalls, and its biggest downfall is the possibility of wounding an animal. Our intention as bow hunters should always be to make a fatal shot so the animal doesn’t have to suffer, but being accurate with a bow while your adrenaline is through the roof is an extreme challenge, and unfortunately inaccurate shots happen from time to time. It definitely put a damper on the trip because coming home with both of our tags filled was the ultimate goal, although a lofty one since we were hunting public land in an area we had never hunted before.
Tommy hunted one more day before we headed back to Michigan, and saw a few more nice bucks, but didn’t get a chance to draw his bow again. On our way home, we counted how many bucks we saw between the two of us in our three and a half days of hunting. Fifteen. Fifteen bucks in just over three days, and over half of those bucks were decent bucks that anybody would be happy to shoot in our home state of Michigan. Our eyes had been opened to a whole new world of whitetail hunting, and there was zero doubt in our minds that we’d be coming back the following year.
Gripping and grinning with my Ohio bruiser. This buck will forever have me hooked on chasing mature bucks on public land. Side note: the tree I was sitting in is right at the top of the ridge behind me; the buck expired less than 60 yards from the stand.
Now fast forward a year and the “Colombus 10 Miles Ahead” sign is now miles and miles behind me to the north. We’re no longer in the truck with our anticipation riding high. The anticipation has ticked upward if that was somehow possible because now we’re sitting in our same stands on our same ridge tops as the year prior waiting on another chance at a buck of a lifetime. I’m looking to achieve the impossible and fill my Ohio tag for a second year in a row, and Tommy is back for redemption from his miscue the prior year. We are more confident this year because have a better understanding of the lay of the land and the bucks that were in the area. This was due to the fact that we were able to get down the first week of October for an early season hunt/scouting trip. We had DOZENS of shooter bucks on our trail cameras, and we made an adjustment to Tommy’s stand location to put him on top of his ridge where two other ridge tops all intersected in one area. It’s November 4th, and we’re back in our paradise; now it’s time to see if we can once again reap the fruits of our labor.
I look at my phone and it reads 5:30pm. I’ve already seen a couple young bucks running the ridge tops, but now it’s primetime and it should only be a matter of time before one of us sees a good buck cruising along the ridge. I stand up in my stand, and I feel my thigh vibrate and see Tommy’s name appear on my screen.
BUZZ. BUZZ. BUZZ.
As the phone vibrates, a quick thought passes through my mind, “We’re coming back to this honey hole for the rest of our lives.”
“BUCK DOWN!”
Public land paradise strikes again and Tommy redeems himself. Oh, and in case you’re wondering, there’s NO WAY IN HELL we are telling you where it is.
Tommy’s redemption buck. A solid buck that we had on camera from scouting in the early season. No matter the size of the buck, it’s so rewarding to fill an out of state tag on public land with stick and string.
-Steven Crawford