Month: November 2011

 Note: Deer & Deer Hunting Editor Dan Schmidt has just returned from a weeklong hunt near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.  This is the fourth installment of a five-part blog series on his adventure. Check back each day this week for updates.

It has to be something with the aging process, because the older I get, the more I absolutely dread hunting in really cold weather.

Here I sit, watching the minutes tick down on my third-straight dark-to-dark sit, and I’m really feeling the effects all over. These types of hunts aren’t for everyone. We’re talking solid 11-hour days on stand. My back hurts; my knees ache; my neck is strained. At least I’ve seen some deer.

I’ve been on hunts like this in the past where I’ve seen nothing. A Deer & Deer Hunting sweepstakes hunt in northern Maine in 1995 comes immediately to mind. On that trip, I logged six consecutive dark-to-dark hunts in single-digit temperatures and over 2-feet of fresh snowfall. I didn’t see a single deer on that trip. In fact, I didn’t see a living creature. I heard a raven on the third day. That is going to be the title of my memoirs whenever I get the time to write them.

Despite this cold and so-far unproductive hunt, Saskatchewan is beautiful … everything that everyone has made it out to be. I truly believe this is one of North America’s last true wilderness areas to hunt whitetails. There are deer, wolves and not much else. Earlier today, I had a pine marten or a fisher try to crawl in the blind with me. It kind of freaked me out, honestly, because I thought I was the only one scanning the woods at that moment. When its muzzle pushed against my pop-up blind’s wall, I did the only thing a grown man could do — shriek like a little girl and swat at the intruder with my woolen mitten. Yeah, I’m not too proud to admit that I’m not half the bushman that my outfitter Mo Heisler seems to be. The dudes that grow up hunting and trapping in these woods are real men. Nothing scares them. Well, at least I don’t think anything does. Or maybe they’re just really good poker players.

So, what’s a guy to do when he’s logged 33 hours in the woods and has yet to cock the hammer on his CVA Accura muzzleloader? Be patient. He needs to keep open the continual self-help desk in his head. It will happen. Just got to be patient. Put in your time.

And ask for a new stand site tomorrow. That might not be the best move, but I think I’m going to literally go insane if I have to watch this same patch of woods for another 11 hours.

TOMORROW: Deer Appear, and the Rut Explodes in Saskatchewan

Earlier posts from this series:
Part 1: Big Bucks North of the Border
Part 2: Welcome to the Whitetail Jungle
Part 3: "That Has Got to Be the Biggest Buck I’ve Ever Seen!"

Note: Deer & Deer Hunting Editor Dan Schmidt has just returned from a weeklong hunt near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.  This is the second installment of a five-part blog series on his adventure. Check back each day this week for updates.

Over the past two decades, I’ve been chasing trophy whitetails across 18 states and now four Canadian provinces. Some of these big buck hunts have found me pursuing whitetails in the far-reaching forests of Maine, Montana, Wisconsin, Ontario, Alberta and even Quebec’s enchanted Anticosti Island. Without question, last week’s trip to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan ranks at the top of the list for "most wild." Never in my life have I hunted whitetails on such a virgin landscape.

Day 1 of the hunt started uncerimoniously, as I chose to stay back at camp and make sure my CVA Accura’s Konus scope was still "on," while 80 percent of the other hunters headed on their 2-hour excursions toward their stands. We were staying at Garden River Outfitters just outside of the Prince Albert National Forest. This is ground owned by the Canadian government ("Crown" land) that is leased to outfitter Mo Heisler. He has been guiding big-buck fanatics up here since the 1980s. His reputation is unmatched, as is evidenced by photo after photo of smiling hunters kneeling beside B&C-class bucks. 

Heisler’s approach is simple. A born trapper, he uses his keen woods knowledge to pinpoint prime deer areas across his 200,000-acre range. Canadians call it "the bush." I call it one endless sea of forest.

"How far does this woods go?" I asked innocently while sitting down at the shooting range to shoot my muzleloader. "I don’t know," Heisler said. "Never really thought about that. Probably all the way to the North Pole," he added I think half-jokingly.

Nestling my cheek into the gunstock, I held a steady grip while centering the cross-hair on the target. KABOOM! Smoke belched out of the fluted Bergara barrel and hung in the 18-degree morning air. My eyes strained to view the paper target through the scope.

"Was there a mark in that bull’s-eye beforehand?" I asked.

"Nope," said Heisler. "Someone will meet you up by the camp house. You’re ready to hunt."

I soon loaded all of my gear into a warm, waiting truck and was headed north with Cal, Mo’s head guide and right-hand man. We drove on snow-packed road that I assumed were paved underneath. And drove. And drove. More than an hour later, we pulled off the road and onto a path that wound through vast expanses of fallow ground. Thirty minutes after that, we approached an endless wall of woodlands.

From there, we loaded my backpack, Heater Body Suit and cased gun onto a waiting ATV.

"Put your facemask on," Cal said. "This ride can get a little cold."

He wasn’t kidding. Seated behind my guide on a one-man Honda Foreman ATV, I held on to the back cargo rack like a bronco rider as we drove countless miles into the gut of a incredibly gorgeous old-growth forest. I’m a tree man by hobby, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint the species I was seeing whiz by us as we drove. However, Cal later told me these woods are populated by mostly white spruce and black poplar. Forty minutes later, the ATV came to an abrupt stop.

"Here we are," Cal whispered while pointing to an Ameristep Outhouse one-man blind buried behind some well-placed spruce bows. "I’ll refresh the bait on the way out. Good luck. See you at dark."

After unloading all of my gear inside the blind and climbing into my Heater Body Suit, I ripped open six extra-large air-activated hand-warmers and stuck them in my pac boots, pant pockets and chest pockets. I then zipped up the blind’s windows, leaving one open just enough to see down the 15-foot wide path to the bait station. That’s all I could see. This woods was so thick that a deer could have walked within 30 yards of the blind in any other direction, and I wouldn’t have seen it.

Although it did seem a bit odd that I had traveled all of these miles to sit in a woods watching a bait pile, I knew full well that this is really the only way to hunt deer in this type of environment and expect to see something. The week’s temperatures called for single-digits. Tracking or still-hunting these whitetails is an admirable fantasy, it would be downright dangerous. Heisler warned us the previous night to not even think about blood-trailing a deer in these woods.

"It’s very easy to get lost out here," Heisler said. "Oh, we’ll find you. But I can’t guarantee that we’ll find you alive."

With those pleasant thoughts dancing in my head, I was more than happy to cast my gaze toward the alfalfa haybale resting in the snow 89 yards in front of my blind in this North Woods jungle.

Click here to read part 3: "That Has Got to Be the BIGGEST Buck I’ve Ever Seen!"

Earlier posts from this series:
Part 1: Big Bucks North of the Border

Note: Deer & Deer Hunting Editor Dan Schmidt has just returned from a weeklong hunt near Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.  This is the first installment of a five-part blog series on his adventure. Check back each day this week for updates.

I don’t know who originally penned the phrase "Go Big or Go Home," but it was certainly a diehard buck hunter. Translation: If you’re going to travel 1,144 miles to hunt whitetails, you best hone your mental edge before stepping foot on that plane.

I’ve spent the past eight months doing just that. If you know me — and know me well — you know that I love releasing the bowstring and squeezing the trigger. I just love deer hunting (and venison) that much. But when CVA’s Chad Schearer invited me to leave Wisconsin last week and hunt the wilds of Saskatchewan with him, I knew that this was a "big or nothing" proposition. I also knew that — despite the fact that we’d be hunting deep-woods bucks over bait — this would be anything but a slam dunk. 

It certainly wasn’t. And I learned that months before the trip happened. This was my first trip out of the country since the early 2000s. Yeah, a lot has changed since then.

Although I traveled just last week, the paperwork began four months ago when I had to apply for my first U.S. Passport. In August, I spent a good part of two days shuttling between work, our county courthouse, my safety deposit box (to retrieve my birth certificate) and the U.S. Post Office. I was lucky I started the process months in advance, because the passport showed up at my home just a few weeks ago.

From there, it was more paperwork. From copies of my firearms declarations (for entry into Canada) to the names, phone numbers and addresses of everyone I would come in contact with while visiting (every form printed off in triplicate) … I stepped into the airport feeling more like an income tax auditor than a wide-eyed deer hunter.

It’s a good thing I had all of that paperwork with me, because the lines and additional paperwork at the Canadian customs took nearly as long as my connecting flight from Minneapolis to Saskatoon. But all’s well that ends well, right? I began my journey to the airport at 4 a.m. last Saturday. By 7 p.m., I was standing in Mo Heisler’s Garden River Outfitters camp with eight other diehard whitetail hunters admiring some of those massive, dark-chocolate-colored  racks that has made Saskatchewan famous.

Click here to read part 2: "Welcome to the Whitetail Jungle."