Snow Day

Being an outdoors man first and anything else second, my brief indoor stint broke today with a tracking outing. One of the reasons I love fishing is it allows my to micro analyze the behavior of fish and their prey. Though I am not a hunter, I LOVE tracking deer. I find it amazing to see how reclusive deer can be, even in an urban environment. Today I found two separate herds. One crossed the highway sometime during the night, when there were basically no people around. The other was more complicated and left a far more fresh and traceable track. I picked up one doe and followed it through some extremely thick growth to where it joined a heard of 5, two of which were bucks. I new immediately that it was the group I saw a week ago. I followed them on a wide arc around a warehouse building. Where there were gaps in the brush, they ran. When the cover was enough to hide them the slowed down. The two bucks occasionally wandered away from the does, at which times it seemed like the does always stopped to eat. At one point the whole group wandered around and fed. Two does meandered across a small stream, throw some thicket, the stopped short at the trail I had walked in on. I realized I hadn't seen their tracks on the way in, Which meant they came through while I was there. They turned, did not cross the trail, and ran back to the group; my guess is that they caught my scent. Then the group headed into some extremely rough swamp, and eventually I had to either brake off or risk getting more than my shoes soaked.