Last year I took off the last week of October and all of November to hunt whitetails in the hills and valleys near our home. Those weeks are the highlight of my year. I point toward them from the time the season ends until it starts up again. I also hunt the late season, which in Iowa is roughly the last two weeks of December and the first 10 days of January. That is the timeline for this article--the diary of my 2007 season.

Scott Prucha with the shed from the broken G3 buck that came past the author's stand seven times last season. Obviously, it was the other beam that had the broken tine.

Last Week Of October
Nick Mundt arrived at our home the evening of October 25 so we would be ready to start hunting together the next morning. Nick was filming me as I hunted near our home for the third year in a row, hoping to get something to use on Realtree's Monster Bucks video series.

October 27: That evening, an old buck popped out along the edge of the tree line 60 yards away and started eating thumbnail-sized shingle oak acorns. Every deer that came out that evening stopped to munch acorns under that tree before moving on. This buck was built like a bull. He wasn't particularly big of body, but he was all shoulder, chest and neck.

As soon as I saw him, my heart jumped and I started breathing hard. He had several stickers coming off his brows and decent mass--10 long points. I would shoot this buck. However, after studying him a little closer through the branches of the intervening trees, I noticed that he had broken off his third point on the right side. It was decision time. I don't like shooting busted-up bucks and it was only the third day of what was going to be 35 consecutive days of hunting. I just didn't like the fact that he was already busted. Nick urged me to shoot, but just as the buck began walking past, I decided to wait. He looked awfully good though. I remember telling Nick, "We'll probably see that buck all over the place."

He said, "I have a bad feeling that was our buck."

October 28: The next morning, Nick and I were hunting from a stand I had put up only a few days before his arrival. It was located on the end of a narrow one-acre food plot located in a natural opening in the woods.

I love this stand. It is now among my favorites. It is located just 90 yards off a county road that gets very little traffic. You can't see the plot from the road because it is on top of a ridge, but it is close enough to the road that I can slip in to the stand very easily and quickly for a morning hunt. I hunt it when the wind is blowing off the ridge top toward the road and deer rarely smell me. It is fun to sit in a stand and watch deer feeding nearby as a car whizzes past a short distance away. The deer don't even lift their heads.

We were in that stand at daybreak. An hour later, who should come in to a grunt call, but our old buddy. This stand is about one half-mile from the one we had hunted the night before and the buck came right in and nosed around for 10 minutes at close range before drifting off.