Our Outdoors: Plot Fever

I can tell that last year’s successful whitetail deer hunt, which resulted in the biggest buck of my life, spawned a bout of buck fever that wasn’t just a passing fancy; it is a feeling that has stuck with me to this day.

There was that moment a few weeks ago, around 3:30 a.m. where I awoke bolt-upright in bed, with cold beads of sweat on my brow – but strangely enough, smiling. The dream played out as a walk through a twisted and gnarled shelterbelt with my brother and some friends, and as I looked behind me a gray-sided ghost with gnarled non-typical antlers stealthily slid in and out of the briars. I got out one whisper-shout of “hey guys” which I’m sure I said aloud as I broke my REM-cycle and opened my eyes to the haunting memory of another outdoors dream.

Then there was this weekend, where Mother Nature opened a window just large enough and warm enough to allow a trip into the back forty where my future hunting plot sat under half-melted piles of coarse snow and fall-browned grasses.

As my future brother-in-law and I cut through the saplings and small shrubs that had grown into the old clearing, I pictured a doe and two yearlings feasting on a carpet of green clover that replaced the brush. There were moments I smiled thinking I could almost reach out and touch the soft meadow floor, smell the wafting pollen and hear the buzz of honeybees of summer.

I saw the barren spring trees alight in the golds and yellows of early fall as I sat quietly in the large poplar tucked in the southeast corner of the plot. Time and again I sized up the trail entrance points and envisioned a lone eight-pointer cautiously enter the opening, curling his lip to taste the November breeze for anything out of the ordinary before lowering his head to poke the ground for ripened brassicas. The plot had become a time machine, flash forwarding to moments of wonder and success, spurring on my toil in the half-melted opening until the last log was packed on the wood trailer and hauled out by ATV. After dinner, I marked off step one of the plot project as the Kansas Jayhawks rolled over the highly-touted Tarheels and the first flakes of a 30-inch snowfall fell on my father-in-law’s front porch.

The blizzard, the likes of which I have never seen, made me thankful for the day when the sun shone down and nature allowed for the first preparations in a project that will undoubtedly affect how I view whitetail hunting. Now, as I trace the outline of the plot on a legal pad during a coffee break, adding in asterisk-pine trees, circular stand trees and suspected entrance points in the form of curving arrows, buck fever sets in again and I already begin looking forward to fall…in our outdoors.

Editor's Note:  Nick Simonson, is an avid fisherman, hunter and writer from Valley City, ND. As many of you know he has been an outdoor journalist for years, writing his column "Our Outdoors" for his hometown newspaper, the Valley City Times-Record and offering the same writing to viewers of the Total Outdoor Network as a Field Staffer for Fishing Buddy Outdoors.