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Nickudu asked to hear more so what the heck -- Last year I re-connected with an old friend I went to college with in southern Maine for a few years, now over 15 years ago. After I shot my first big game animal a couple years ago, I searched around for his address and on a lark sent him a picture -- a couple months later, he called out of the blue and invited me up. He's a forester for one of the big timber companies up there, with huge landholdings all over the northern half of the state. (The company is very tolerant of its employees carrying rifles in their trucks and taking off all of a sudden during the workday as long as everything gets done on time.) Like many of his colleagues, he's totally obsessed with whitetails and can quote the dressed weights of dozens of deer shot in the county over the past dozen years, just like kids can quote baseball stats or most of us here can recite ballistics tables. Riding in the truck on the way to hunt, he makes up Capstick-style tales of deer that sound more like escaped convicts: "The mighty ten-point buck attacked the feller buncher, crashing through its safety glass windscreen and tearing the steel safety cage from around the operator. Nothing would stand in the path of his burning desire to befoul every innocent doe in the forest with his lust ..." (If you don't know what a feller buncher is -- I didn't -- click here) We've hunted mostly in the areas north of the St. John River, in the upper reaches of Maine's "unorganized territories" -- for those who don't know Maine, large parts of the state are so uninhabited that they've never been named as part of any township and are merely known by their place on a grid, such as "Township 17, Range 10", T17R10 on the maps or just 17-10 for short. Other than a little protrusion in Minnesota, this is about as far north as you can get in the lower 48. The land is privately owned but by Maine law and tradition, open to trespass for a modest daily fee. The only areas normally closed to hunting are those that are being logged that very day. Deer are exceptionally sparse for the amount of land and number of hunters, so only a few hotspots get enough pressure to make them go nocturnal -- especially since the rifle season takes place at the height of the rut, with the week before Thanksgiving typically the hottest. However, finding moving deer in all that space is the challenge. Year in and year out, the most effective method is probably following big buck tracks, as well described in Bryce Towsley's book, "Big Bucks the Benoit Way." The trick is to find a track that shows some signs of leading to a bed -- a couple of times we found one that looked promising and then just took off in a beeline headed for Montreal, a good way to wear yourself out for nothing. The variation is to follow any fresh track in hopes that it will lead you into a buck. The downside is that if it doesn't snow, you're handicapped. The upside is that a little fresh snow in the morning really cracks the code of what the deer are doing and makes tracking an educational treat in itself. To me, tracking really wakes up all the predatory senses -- there is nothing like finding a steaming, musky urine stain and realizing just how close you must be and where the heck is he right now?! At the opposite end of the spectrum are the "heater hunters" who park their GMC Sierras on a logging road, overlooking a promising stretch of road or clearcut, with perhaps a loading block on the dashboard to hold a fistful of cartridges to jam into the rifle while leaping out the door as a buck crosses your vision. (Wardens there are very hard on loaded guns in vehicles.) In between, many hunters, usually from out of state, have some success with various tree stand strategies. Rattling seems to work particularly well. The 2001 season was terrible hunting all around due to warm weather and lack of snow. We mostly hunted the Cross Lake and Little Black areas, if anyone knows those or cares to look them up. I got lost my first night out and my friend found me huddled over a fire. On the way home we saw a doe cross the road in front of us. That was it for deer sightings in 2001. A couple of times we tracked decent bucks that were later shot by others, which gave a nice check on my friend's talent at guessing a buck's weight by its track -- usually within about 10%. This year at a hunting lodge owned by an outfitter friend of his, we saw the mounted head of one of those deer -- kind of a strange experience, like meeting someone in person whom you've only talked to over the net... (The outfitter is Sean Lizotte , www.allagashguideservice.com -- I haven't hunted with him but do feel I can recommend him since we dropped by regularly to swap intel, he runs a nice lodge with great-smelling food, busts his rear all year to help his hunters score in November, and helped find me in the woods that first night though I wasn't even a paying customer!) This year was much hotter hunting, with fresh snow most mornings. (I was also there a week later, which probably helped.) My friend had filled his tag the second day of the season with a "pretty fancy shot" at 120 yards, a week before I arrived, so he carried no rifle and just tried to show me the ropes. We covered a lot of ground; it's fascinating just how little of the habitat the deer actually use on any given day. At one point I walked about a mile without seeing any sign -- between a clearcut with heavy sign and an area where we'd found steaming beds the previous day. The highlight of the hunt was the afternoon our last day, when we entered a new area and found it criss-crossed with fresh sign, including a fresh track of a moderate-sized buck and a couple does, a track that got fresher as we found warm droppings and then evidence that he was trying to breed them. My friend saw a movement in the distance -- the three deer had smelled us and took off. I saw them, too, and raised my rifle -- but they were too far off, behind too much brush, moving too fast with no visible antlers. We picked up their track and found that they'd run through a bedding area and spooked out quite a group of other deer including a very large buck. We poked around a bit hoping to catch them returning (it turned out later that one of Sean's clients was watching a nearby clearcut and saw several of the does run out, look around, and pause to feed) but no dice. On the other hand, we did get a glimpse of a moose that seemed to have lain abed throughout all this activity until it scented us. So it was a cool day and represented progress from the year before. This is a little longer than I'd sat down to write but I guess I'll keep going back up there until I get it right. John | ||
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John; Did I run into you a couple years ago, just south of Clayton Lake? You may have helped my boy and I load a bull moose he had just shot. I am headed that way tomorrow at 5am for a week of black powder hunting. I may not respond for about a week. If it was not you, have a good one. | |||
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Thanks John. You took me back, real nice. The papercompany lands extend across the state in Aroostock County and we seemed to do better to the eastern side, along the New Brunswick border. Off Route 2, South of Island Falls, there are some good access roads and one of our favorites was called "PD" road. We set up tented camps for years until meeting an old fellow named Harley Richardson, while weighing in our bucks at Giggies general store, one snowy evening. We were feeling a bit cocky with our two big bucks of ( 9 & 10 pointers) but got slight reaction from the locals. 197 and 202 they dressed and all they said was "pretty good bucks, boys". Anyhow, we struck up a friendship with old Harley and he told us that, from now on we could use one the many cabins, he constructed, over his 50 years of logging, as long as we replaced the firewood. We used "Camp 13" for a few years, enjoying some wonderful hunts, often with 5 or 6 friends, but mostly just Charlie and I. We learned the hard way that you need to find the beechnut stands and when you do stumble upon a fresh scrape, you'd best sit on it, cause there ain't many! I'll scan a few pics of our trips and put them up tomorrow. They won't be of very high quality though, as the cameras we had in those days were not the best. | |||
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Old Harleys' Camp 13 Hard earned bucks. Early Camps Aroostocks' ancient logging trails can get you in "deep", in more ways than one, should you fail to trailmark key junctions for 360 degree viewing. Throw in the usual low cloud cover and a total lack of reference landmarks and you'll get turned around in a hurry. No place for beginners. | |||
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quote:Wouldn't have been me but have a great week of black powder season. John | |||
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quote:Ain't that the truth ... as I found out last year! We met a colorful gent who put it a colorful way -- a local guy from Allagash, where there are some old Irish families that haven't lost their accents yet. To set the scene, he had a sheath knife in his pocket, a head-shot partridge tied to his belt loop and what looked to be a truly ancient BAR slung over his back by what looked like the leg of a pair of long johns, and his pants sagged because he was using his belt to drag a spike buck out of the woods. He described how he'd tracked it all morning, jumped it 6 times and finally got 2 shots into it. After field-dressing, he'd started dragging and found himself making a big circle. As he put it in his downeast brogue (I won't spell out the key word but he pronounced it "fook"), "I got so f***in' turned around in there, I wanted to turn me f***in' gun on meself but I couldn' reach the f***in' trigger!" John | |||
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John, No "BS" ... long before we ever heard of Larry Benoit, we'd push early morning bucks for the best part of the day, when unfamiliar ground or impending dark brought things to a halt. Once in a while we'd connect this way but more often we'd jump a too small buck or just snap a photo of a bedded buck that never saw us. At any rate, it was a welcome change of pace and lot more exciting than watching a scrape all day. While the Benoits' knowledge of the land certainly contributed to their success, all of them were great hunters, in my book. | |||
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You guys are giving me heartburn just thinking about all those days of pounding the Maine woods and feeling real lucky to have seen A deer period. As a Mainiac from the coast I did those God awful hunts for 25 years. Until I moved to AK 20 years ago I didn't realize that the deer hunting in Maine is probably as difficult as it gets. Yet somehow a very few of those guys end up with a big buck each year. Personally I feel any deer that a hunter takes in Maine is a trophy. I hunt whitetails in TX now and it is hard to imagine that I am even hunting the same animal. If you do ever get a big buck in Maine you can take my word for it that you earned it and then some. | |||
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quote:This year was a good year -- in Maine a "good year" means that on the third Saturday of the season, the checkpoint people for an area half the size of Delaware tell you they saw 6 or 7 deer come out! We saw a few incredible deer on the local game poles, including two in the 150 B&C class that will probably make the state record book, and one with a smaller rack, a gray-faced 245-pounder as I recall, that had no neck to speak of -- just a straight taper from the point of his noise to the shoulders. In my case, my friend was lowering my trophy expectations in his carnivorous deer tales -- from "John raised his rifle to smite the mighty 10-point" to "John quivered with anticipation as the spotted fawn came into view ..." | |||
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Mark H. Young, Glad you posted, Mark, as I had all but given up hope of drawing out any real Mainiacs ... sort of like huntin' a big Maine buck. Yes, every year, we'd drive up, always stopping by L.L.Beans to get our licenses and buy one good pair of pants, a shirt or whatever, on the way up. Invariably, we'd spot a monster whitetail atop a returning hunters car or, if we were real lucky, at some eating establishment or local gas station. God, how we would pysch' ourselves up. A wonderful and challenging place to hunt. I recall a trip up near Lubek, at the end of Route 1 (?). Maybe 1972 or 3, I guess. We hunted a group of farms where the heavy woods went right up to the ocean. You could hunt a primeval swamp while listening to the pounding surf. Rolling fields, dense woods, sand, surf and big bucks. My idea of paradise. | |||
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quote:Jeez that sounds nice. I've hunted around Island Falls a few times, saw one legal buck ( the day I had peep sights and could not tell whether I was looking at antlers or birch branches - lucky for him ). | |||
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TomP, Were you residing on the east coast at the time? How about the Island Falls Hotel? Ever go in there? An amazing place. | |||
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Northern Maine is the only place that I have not got my deer. We hunted in Patton one Thanksgiving weekend. I never went back as the woods are not as pretty as I am used to with the slashings and low lands. The land around Hartland is nicer and West Paris is really nice. Maine is big country. | |||
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I'm not up on 2002 percentages but, not too far back I read that Maine was still 80% wooded and that's a lot of woods! | |||
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