Second Chances While Whitetail Hunting in November

It was a warm and windy Sunday evening in late November. My 9-year-old son, Anse, and I were slipping along the edge of a Tennessee creek drainage toward a ground blind where we planned to hold vigil for a few hours. I feared a slow sit. Balmy weather aside, the whitetail rut was fizzling. The frenzied chasing of early November was over and the peak breeding was coming to an end, too.

But the boy was looking for a good buck, and we weren’t going to kill one by sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon. Our route to the blind took us along the edge of a pasture where, the season prior, I’d killed a big deer with a muzzleloader. I stopped to regale Anse with a tale of my conquest, which maybe he’d heard before. To my dismay, he wasn’t listening at all.

“Deeds, be quiet, there’s a doe!” he hissed.

I turned just in time to watch the doe lope across the pasture at 150 yards, and it was obvious she wasn’t alone. I hurriedly unfolded the legs of our BOG tripod and secured the rifle in the vise. Anse was already on his knees and brushing my hands away as I picked at the magnification ring on his scope and the adjustment knobs on the tripod. “Deeds, quit, I know how to do it!” he said. I kept my hands to myself and grabbed my binoculars instead.

The buck emerged a little farther down the treeline than I expected, but his eyes were locked on the doe’s path. He was a big 8-pointer but, despite my urgent bleats to stop him, he was out of sight before Anse could get steady enough for a shot. I unlocked his rifle from the tripod and we picked up and shuffled forward, crouching low as we went. Another 100 yards ahead and I spotted the buck again, now standing next to the doe, 400 yards away, across the pasture.

Anse had left his usual .300 Blackout at home, opting to shoot his mama’s Browning X-Bolt chambered in 6.5 Creedmoor instead. But this shot was more than we’d practiced, and the terrain didn’t allow us to slip closer without getting busted. We waited, hoping the doe would bring the buck closer, but that didn’t happen. Instead, as the evening shadows darkened, we watched the 8-pointer fend off three smaller bucks, and return to the doe’s side each time. The hunt ended without a shot fired, but we’d seen a great show and a hot doe was obviously still in the area. I told Anse we had little choice: He’d be forced to skip school the next morning.

Trickling Out

Traditionally, my favorite time to be in a treestand has been from about October 28 to November 12. In most of the country, including where I live, that’s the “seeking and chasing” phase of the rut, when maximum numbers of bucks are on their feet and searching for the first receptive does of the season. The anticipation is half the fun. When you haven’t hunted rutting whitetails in a year, seeing the first chase of the season makes it easy to stay in the woods, daylight till dark. I also enjoy the calm of those last few bowhunting days before the firearm seasons begin.

Things change fast in mid-November. Gun seasons open, and they last for weeks to months in the southern states. Hunting pressure can be intense. Combine that pressure with the “lock-down” behavior typical of the peak breeding phase of the rut, and the action can slow to a crawl.

For most of my hunting career, I didn’t worry much about late November because I’d usually punched my buck tags by that point and was shifting my focus to waterfowl. But life throws changes. Anse killed his first deer at age 6, and it was pretty clear after that he expected to fill a few tags himself each season. I also got my outfitting license, and I quickly learned that clients kill more bucks with rifles than they do with bows.

As a result, I’ve spent a lot of time hunting through the doldrums of gun season recently, from late November and well into December. And my eyes have been opened. Over the past three years, we’ve killed almost twice as many bucks after November 16 than before it. Sure, hunting more often with rifles skew the average. But I’m also becoming more convinced by the year that the odds of seeing a mature deer while hunting are just as good—and perhaps even a tad better—from about November 20 to December 10 as they are during my traditional favorite time frame in early November.

Quality Over Quantity

No doubt, I do see more deer on average early in the rut. And there’s no doubt that I usually have to endure a few particularly slow hunts in mid-November, right after the gun opener, before things pick back up. I attribute some of that slow spell to lock-down behavior, but far more to hunting pressure. But that fades dramatically after opening weekend. By the second and third week of season, the woods are almost bow-season quiet again. Does again become comfortable venturing into open food sources. Many of them have been bred already, but not all of them. Whether it’s a later cycle, a second cycle, or some of both, the rut trickles on for weeks following the primary event. But you have to be out there day in and out to see it.

Point is, maybe Anse and I shouldn’t have been expecting a slow sit on that late November afternoon. We certainly had high hopes for the following morning. It was raining and cold when we woke up, and the ground blind would’ve been more comfortable—but we agreed that we needed to sit on the edge of the pasture where we could see a long way, and hope that a hot doe was still in the area. We saw a couple young bucks slink across the pasture shortly after daybreak, but the tempo had definitely lowered since the evening before.

A few hours into the morning, about the time Anse should’ve been in math, I spied antler tines emerging from the treeline, precisely where the doe had disappeared the evening before, maybe 80 yards away. “Buck coming,” I whispered, as Anse loosened the tension on the tripod’s ball head and shifted into position. “Don’t shoot, bigger buck coming behind him,” I said.

The second deer in line was a tall and gorgeous 3-year-old 8-pointer, not the buck we’d seen tending the doe the evening before, but one that I knew was in trouble soon as I heard the click of the safety. I could see the deer from the base of the neck up, and I whispered to Anse that he’d have an easy shot within seconds. “No, I’ve got him right there,” he said, and the rifle cracked, startling me. The buck was killed instantly by a 143-grain ELD-X in the throat patch.

I couldn’t argue with the results of any of it. The non-traditional shot placement worked quite well, as had the decision to let the kid skip school and go hunting on a rainy morning in late November, when the rut was almost over—but not quite.

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