The Best Deer Hunting Is Not a Moving Experience

I don't care much for deer hunting from tree stands. I'm from New York, after all, where humans don't sit still. On the other hand I'm fond of venison, which, properly handled and prepared, is as fine as any meat you'll ever encounter. And I love the woods and the little dramas that unfold there. Sitting quietly in a deer stand, you vastly improve your chances and see things you'd never see anywhere else.

Where else can you watch a red-tail hawk swoop through the tree trunks five feet off the ground, then perch on a limb a few feet away, or be shaken alert when a squirrel skitters across a branch just over your head? Last week I watched a woodpecker peck a dead sapling for half an hour in one spot before extracting a bug. A rare Baltimore oriole stopped in the thicket beneath my feet, looking just like the one on the ornithologically correct baseball cap.

But distractions like that are exceptions. Most of the time you just sit there, up some skinny, leafless oak in the cold, feet numb, conscious that even the slightest movement could ruin your day.

Unless it's dry and still, you won't hear deer coming. They are gray ghosts, easing through the damp leaf duff in silence. A deer could be 30, 40 or 50 yards away, sniffing for danger, and you'd never know. But twist an ankle to restore the blood to your toes or scratch an itch on your cheek and it'll probably see you and slither off unseen. "Move nothing but your eyes," is the advice given deer hunters as they climb into tree stands to await dawn or dusk.

That's when deer move. They live opposite to us, bedding during the day, emerging at twilight to feed in the dark, returning to thickets to bed again around dawn. Since you can't hunt in the dark, the best times to perch in a tree are the first two or three hours of light and the last two or three, waiting silently along trails they follow.

Some hunters claim you can successfully bushwhack deer in the middle of the day when they bed down. Anyone who walks the woods regularly will occasionally startle a buck or doe from a thicket. I do it frequently while walking the 37-acre woods behind our house, where a dozen-odd whitetails reside but no one hunts.

You'll be strolling along enjoying the view when suddenly with a crash a whitetail erupts from the greenbriers 20 or 30 feet away. As often as not it's as surprised as you, and stops in easy gun range to stare until you spook it by moving again.

If you don't like sitting in a deer stand, why not hunt this way? Years ago I knew a fellow in the New Jersey Pine Barrens who dubbed himself the Deer Whacker. His trick was to sneak up on bedded deer and get close enough he could whack them with his hand, or so he claimed.

In most of Maryland you can hunt deer only with a shotgun, not a rifle, which requires getting within 40 or 50 yards. If the Deer Whacker could get close enough to smack them with his hand, certainly one should be able to get 40 yards away, no?

Four or five times over the recently completed two-week Maryland gun season for deer, which ended last weekend, I followed that flawed reasoning and slipped out of a perfectly good tree stand to go stalking. I did it against the unanimous advice of wise hunters who warn that all you'll see are the white flags of spooked deer as they flip their tails up and take off running, out of range.

Well, those fellows know what they're talking about. I tried to pick appropriate times, when the wind was up and the ground was wet. That way I wouldn't make much noise walking and could move upwind toward the thickets to keep my scent from preceding me. But no matter how stealthily I approached and how frequently I stopped to scan the under story for flickers of movement, I got close just once, when a big buck jumped from a bog in Howard County just 20 yards away, then scampered into the brush before my gun was up.

The five or six other deer I saw I could not identify by gender -- they were just white tails bounding off in the shadowy distance.

It seems so sensible when you're up there freezing in a tree. Just slip quietly down the ladder, ease along the trail you've been watching for two hours to the thicket that lies upwind, stopping from time to time to look around. But the instant your feet hit the ground, you realize how obtrusive and ungainly a human is with his gun and backpack and blaze orange hat and vest in these dark woods, where only wildlife are truly at home.

And so another shotgun season ends, with no deer hanging in the shed.

· HAPPY HOLIDAYS: All right, you last-minute shoppers, here are some field-tested ideas for the outdoors types on your Christmas list:

Gerber multi-tools (the ones that snap open with a shake of the wrist); anything from Filson, the unparalleled outdoor clothes manufacturer; traditional L.L. Bean hunting boots (the ones with leather uppers and rubber bottoms that seem to never wear out); an unbreakable Thermos with the thin steel liner; fleece gloves with no fingertips for fishing, camping etc.; Costa del Mar polarized sunglasses; those little LED lights that clip on the bill of a baseball cap; propane-powered Coleman lanterns; comfortable Duofold long underwear, which is soft as a baby's breath against your skin.

Enjoy.