Rattle in Whitetail Bucks and Fill Your Tag

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Since its republic days, Texas has been a place to experiment with autonomous government, barbecue, barbed wire and deer hunting.

So, it made sense that I learned more about rattling whitetails in the Lone Star State than just about anywhere else. While its deer density, relatively low hunting pressure on big ranches, and patchy cover might not be replicated everywhere, what I discovered about rattling rangy Texas bucks has served me well from the Midwest to the Great Plains, and other twangless notches of the Whitetail Belt.

On my most productive day of rattling, nearly two-dozen Edwards Plateau bucks came running in to my stand, eyes wild and nostrils snorting, and one juvenile brush buck came in so hot he ran smack into the photographer who was documenting my hunt. These weren’t spooky low-light whitetails, either. These bucks came in on a string in the skillet-hot middle of the day, convinced they were about to either participate in or witness an ass-beating.

If you only experience the most trip-wire whitetails, the ones that will blow out when the wind shifts a few degrees, flare at a strange pickup on the county road or seem to vanish a week before hunting season, then you owe yourself to experience the opposite side of deer season. That’s the week or so every year when bucks throw caution to the wind and run, stiff-legged and bristle-backed, to danger, rather than slinking away from it.

Like financial investments and skeet shooting, timing is everything. Rattling is at its best in the 10 days or so before the rut’s lockdown phase, which varies by latitude. In my homeland of eastern Montana, Halloween is a pretty good time to rattle, but it’s well over by Veteran’s Day. It’s best on damp, calm, foggy mornings when sound carries but visibility is limited. While it can work all day and into the evening, I’ve routinely had my best luck rattling from sunup to mid-morning.

In local areas where the rut kicks off early, the witching week for rattling might be mid-October. Last year, I rattled in a Kentucky hardwoods buck on Nov. 16. If you’re not sure the time is right where you hunt, just observe a group of young bucks. When you see them start to spar and give each other the side-eye, it’s time to dust off your rattling horns and start bashing bone.

RATTLING SCENARIOS

You can confirm that rattling is right if you take a few minor risks. We’ve all experienced the situation when a buck comes in view, whether we’re in a stand or moving through a landscape, but we want him to be closer. We have a choice. We can either play it safe, staying silent and stealthy, and hope that he comes toward us. Or we can get aggressive, understanding the risk that we’ll either blow him out of the county or that we’ll hook him closer.

Most of us, fearing the prodigious alarm response of whitetails, choose to stay quiet. But I always have either a grunt tube and rattling bag or rattling antlers with me from about mid-October through Armistice Day, and this is the time—with a buck that’s about to fade from your life—to use them.

The best scenario is if you’re in a position where you can watch a buck’s reaction to your rattling. If he’s alone and seems to be strolling, does he stop when you crack your antlers? That’s the first good sign. Does he run away (universally bad), or does he come closer (good)? If he stops, looks your direction, and throws his head around, crack your antlers again. When the time and situation are right, this is the astonishing moment that bucks will sprint toward you, barely giving you time to get ready to take a shot.

One reason Texas is such a rich laboratory for rattling is that the prevalence of feeders gives you plenty of opportunities to watch deer and gauge their reaction to your commotion. In the wide-open West, you can often sneak to the edge of a field undetected, and then rattle from cover, watching how bucks respond. If you have a decoy, all the better, because it gives a real buck a visual cue and distracts an incoming deer’s attention from you as you lift a gun or swing a bow.

More frequently, though, there are no bucks to watch. You must then rattle blind. In these cases, I start softly, in the hope that there’s a callable buck nearby. That rarely happens, so if there’s no action for five minutes or so, I start to escalate both my volume and intensity in the expectation that I’ll pull in a buck from a nearby woodlot or field edge.

This approach requires all your senses, your ears tuned to crunching leaves and snapping branches, your skin on the direction of the wind, and your eyes scanning every direction for an incoming buck. The wind is important, because incoming bucks—especially mature bucks—will almost always try to circle and cut your wind, and if you don’t see them, they’ll often slip out of sight with only an alarm snort to let you know they were there.

Rattling also puts a premium on preparation. When they come, deer will be coming straight to you, eyes peeled and flight instincts honed to a sharp edge. Motion must be kept to a minimum, along with a good sense of which frontal or quartering-to shot you can take and which you should avoid. When you can, rattle with a buddy. With the caller located a few yards behind the shooter, the shooter often has a few extra seconds to detect an incoming buck, field-judge its antlers and prepare for a shot.

KENTUCKY CALL-IN

I had one of these spastic moments last November in western Kentucky. I was the guest of Will Brantley, HUNTING’s whitetail columnist, who rightfully should be writing this story. He had set me up in a treestand just off the spine of a hardwood ridge that funneled deer from a field to a deep oak-and-hickory ravine. After a couple days of enough deer movement to know it was a good spot, I also realized I was about 75 yards too far downhill, so I climbed out of the stand and set up at the base of a grand old ridgeline oak.

Will had told me to be on the lookout for a couple mature bucks he had seen on trail cams, but early in the hunt I had seen only seekers, yearlings and 2-year-old bucks that were running around the woods aimlessly. This is the age-class of deer most vulnerable to rattling. They’re naïve, responsive and unguarded. The trick, when you’re rattling, is to avoid getting busted by the junior varsity as you’re waiting for the upperclassmen.

But rattling isn’t just knocking horns. Done correctly, there’s a whole pageant devoted to selling the notion that you’re a couple of gallant bucks fighting for the attention of a damsel doe. Or just a pair of smash-mouth bruisers squaring off in the whitetail equivalent of a back alley.

First, there’s your footwork. You want to kick dirt, creating a localized dust cloud. If you’re in leaf litter you want to crunch and scatter leaves to replicate the sound of a couple bucks churning the ground as they spar. Then there’s the soundscape. I add a grunt tube to my repertoire, blowing sharp, emphatic grunts to sell the idea of one buck landing body blows on the other. And, of course, there’s the rattling itself.

You can get by with wooden dowels in a bag or a sock. Or synthetic antlers. But I like real antlers, mated sheds of a mid-sized 3- or 4-point (that’s a 6- or 8-pointer for you Easterners), with the brow tines sawn off so they don’t poke my wrists as I rattle.

TICKLE THE TINES

My rattling sequence starts with the sort of meet-and-greet I’ve observed real bucks exhibit in the field. Bucks don’t immediately start to go all Drake-and-Lamar. Instead, they often make a few tentative swipes at one another, touching antler tines and lightly engaging. That’s how I start my rattling, with light, almost playful, clicking of tines combined with some light grunting.

But pretty soon I start to engage the main beams of my rattling antlers, cracking and scraping bone. It’s probably a little unrealistic – the bucks I’ve seen in full-on combat typically don’t enter this phase for 15 or 20 minutes. But I don’t have that kind of time. I want to see if a callable buck is in the neighborhood, and I’ll combine my bombtastic rattling with deep, chesty grunts and plenty of footwork.

Most of the time, all that play-acting results in nothing more than me getting frothed in sweat and self-conscious about making so much noise. Sometimes a juvenile buck will cruise through, checking out the local drama. But the truth is that most of the time rattling doesn’t work. No deer, fake or real, are usually harmed. But when rattling works, it is like spirit-conjuring magic.

That was the case last November in Kentucky. I went through a couple of sequences of escalating intensity, then watched and waited, and ripped off a couple more. I was in the send-it phase of one sequence when I spotted motion down the ridge. Damned if a good buck wasn’t sidehilling through the timber, and in the middle of the afternoon. I had just enough time to throw up my binocular and establish that he had three good points on his near side as he closed to within 60 yards.

I was shooting an excellent mid-range, big-woods combination, Winchester’s XPR in 350 Legend topped with Leupold’s 1-6x24 Patrol scope, dialed down to 2x. I laid my open palm on the trunk of that red oak, placed the rifle’s forend on my wrist, and tracked that buck as he angled uphill, shifting between a trot and a fast stiff-legged walk. I could tell he was trying to get upwind, but when he gave me a shot at 40 yards between trees and vines, I took it, threading a 160-grain Winchester Power Max bullet into his shoulder.

After all the commotion of the shot and the impact, and after I had shucked one straight-wall cartridge and prepared to deploy the next, I took stock of the moment. I still had my grunt tube in the corner of my mouth, big as a banker’s cigar. My rattling horns had fallen at my feet when I traded them for my rifle, one antler on either side of my boots, my feet wrapped in the hemp twine that connected them.

This, it occurred to me, is why I’m devoted to rattling. Because after all the planning and expectation and busted scenarios of a deer hunt, it can all come together in just a few intense seconds. I unwrapped myself from the rattling antlers, ensured I had a fresh cartridge in my chamber, and walked into the woods to find the blood trail.

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