Making Scents of Things

Good Arkansas friend, Mike Widner, quite a few years ago bowhunting

       There is a special place I visit to bow-hunt and get away from people and this awful world.  It is on a lake and I get there by boat.  I know that bass fishing is often very good on the nearby lake while I sit in a tree-stand watching squirrels.  Or I might be reeling in crappie close by, if I got down out of the tree. 

 

    The thing that makes fishing so much easier than deer hunting is scent.  A bass doesn't care how a spinner-bait smells but if the wind is right, a deer can tell you what kind of cheese you have on your sandwich from a quarter mile away.

    And that is the problem for me.  I have mastered everything that has to do with the outdoors except the art of using scent. I know almost everything… but there's that one problem I have worked on for years and I still can't it figure it out.  I'm afraid everything in the woods can smell me and they act accordingly. I do my best to counteract the problem of smelling bad. I have put my hunting clothes in a bag of dirt and moss and leaves like some of my bow-hunting friends do and I soak a pair of rubber boots with deer scent before I go into the woods.

    This scent thing befuddles me, I think, because I can't smell a thing myself.  I've got eyes like a hawk, and I can hear great.  I can hear people talking about how bad I smell during the deer season from 15 or 20 feet away.  Years ago I had a friend who invented and marketed a scent which was carried by bubbles on air currents.  When I first heard of him sitting in a tree-stand blowing bubbles from a bottle and a bubble wand, I near about rolled on the floor I laughed so hard.  And then he killed a buck a week or so into the bow season that had antlers like the handlebars on a Harley-Davidson.

    I've got to do something, but I don't know what. I don't have any friends that will let me come to their house for the next two months because the scent of a 'doe-in-heat' stays with you even better than Dial soap.  I have one hunting shirt still buried out there in the leaves at the edge of woods because I was trying to give it an earthy smell and now I can't find it.

 

   One veteran old bow hunter says I should switch to a more natural scent, like corn.  He says that he puts several piles of corn around his tree stand and the scent of the corn draws deer like nothing else.  You have to keep replenishing it because the deer keep eating it, but it works better than anything else.  Of course the local game warden might consider that baiting but it wouldn't be if you were just depending on the ‘SCENT’ of the corn to draw the deer.  And besides that, if putting out something good to eat is taking an unfair advantage of a deer, what the heck do you call putting out the scent of a doe?  How many men do you know who would rather smell a steak dinner than "Evening in Paris".

    I'll let you know next week if I see any deer.  Actually I might rather get a picture of a big buck rather than killing one. I hate gutting a dead deer because of the smell, and the photos of big buck deer have made me some big bucks with outdoor magazines who buy them. Until Christmas, when I start smelling like a cedar tree or whatever new shaving lotion I get for Christmas, you might ought to avoid me if you see me in town. I often smell like a red fox scent post!

        If you smell someone in the sporting goods department and see  someone  who has leaves hanging from his faded old hunting shirt, that's probably me.  

Please read some material I put on my website this past week.  Just find it on the computer under larrydablemontoutdoors.  And there, you can read some things I can’t include in this column, that every hunter needs to know.