Today was the opening day for all of the deer seasons south of town. So, needless to say, I spent the day on check station. Checking licenses and stamps, checking and pulling teeth (from the deer, not the hunters), and poking holes in the deers' backs.

One of the earlier vehicles coming out was a friend and his two young sons. Rather than coming in on the highway or the county road, they came down from one of the canyons near town, just south of the check station. They were dressed in camo, with orange on top.

No deer.

But they had tried hard. He advised they had spent the night in the canyon, throwing their sleeping bags out on the ground. The boys looked like it. Not a gentle night.

Yesterday, besides being the day before the deer gun season, was also the last day of the deer archery season. So he had gathered up his boys and headed out to see if they could find a buck to stalk in the evening with the bow. If that failed, they would simply stay the night and hunt with a rifle in the morning.

They didn't even get three miles south of my check station site (just barely out of sight of town) before spotting a really nice four-point buck (western count, not eastern) standing just a couple hundred meters off the road, beside one of the highway snowfences.

No way to sneak up on him, but everybody has seen the bucks that hang around this ridge, and he knew their habits. They normally feed by the road and then head over the ridge into the next canyon to bed. (With the full moon, that means feeding all night, and bedding during the day.)

If a person set himself up right and camped out in the canyon, he could ambush that buck in the early morning when it came strolling back.

At least that was the plan.

Didn't work. No buck.

Never showed.

I was pretty sure I knew why, but I wasn't going to say anything until I knew for sure. And even then I probably wouldn't.

When one of my wardens stopped by, I asked her how their night went.

See, they were planning on setting up a decoy, a stuffed, mechanical deer, along the highway to see if they could catch any violators spotlighting ("jacklighting" to you easterners) or trying to open the season a few hours early.

They didn't catch anyone.

But I asked where they had set up their dummy buck deer. The one with the four-point antlers.

"Just over the first ridge, in a gap in the snowfence."

I'm not going to tell him.