Dan Geddings: Things change

There was enough moonlight to walk the woodland road without a light, and the pinestraw and smattering of leaves gave a cushion to my footsteps that made no sound. The wind was forecast to be out of the northeast, which was perfect for the stand that I was headed to. It was pleasantly warm for early November.

When I approached the stand, a deer blew and bounded away toward the swamp. I stood in the road and waited for a few minutes. I told myself that the deer may have seen me approach in the soft blue moonlight, or worse, it may have caught my scent. Then another deer blew farther away, and I knew it could not have seen me. I realized that the wind had changed and my scent was revealing my presence in the predawn darkness. I turned back toward the truck.

There was enough time to get to another stand, on the other side of the property, if I hurried. There was also enough cloud cover to slow the light of the dawn, and I made my way to another stand in good time. I noticed that there was no visible wind, and not a leaf stirred. But a puff from my wind checker showed a slow drift from the southwest. That is a marginal wind for this stand, but I went up anyway.

Shortly after daylight I could hear a parade of trucks on the nearby road. Some were pulling trailers with four-wheelers. I could hear dogs whining in the trucks, and I assumed a deer drive was going to happen on the adjoining property. More trucks arrived, and I could hear people talking. I knew that I was in a good spot if the other hunters rousted a buck.

Footsteps behind me caught my full attention, and I turned enough in the stand to see a deer coming almost straight under the tree I was sitting in. It was a small buck, and he stopped about five yards away and looked back toward the road. Then he turned and went up the hill to my right front where my scent should have been blowing. I was a little surprised and took my wind checker out and puffed some white powder out to my front. It turned and floated to the northwest, toward the other hunters. The wind had changed again. I decided it was time to leave and got down from the stand.

It was still early and I wasn't ready to go home, so I headed to the block house to get some corn to put out on another stand. Some of the property there has been clear-cut, and an herbicide was applied by helicopter to kill all the natural re-growth. Pines will be re-planted in January. There are some mature pines and hardwoods left, but the landowner told me recently that they will be cut in a few years. It will be a big change to the land.

When I got out of the truck, I could hear dogs running in the swamp behind the house. Then a flurry of messages came over our group text. There were hounds running through other parts of the club. A deer drive doesn't bother me, but some hunters have no tolerance for hounds running through their lease, and some landowners, especially those with livestock, don't want dogs on their land.

I grew up deer hunting with dogs, and I still belong to a dog drive club in the Lowcountry. We have thousands of acres of land there, and other dog clubs are in the area. I love that kind of hunt.

Some dog clubs try to operate on smaller and smaller tracts of land, and it makes it more difficult to control the hounds. When I was a youngster, dog clubs could operate anywhere because no one still hunted. That has changed. There are a lot of things that we have no control over, like the wind and the weather, landowner management practices and hunter preferences. Deer hunting, just like the wind, has changed. The one constant thing about our world is that things change. We must be willing to adapt and accept changes.

Reach Dan Geddings at cdgeddings@gmail.com.