North Carolina hunters should take advantage of the last few weeks of deer season.
A lot of North Carolina hunters store their deer rifles when December arrives, in part because many have filled their tags — especially during the November rut — and because big bucks seem to disappear in the final month of the year.
But die-hard hunters don’t surrender until Jan. 1, especially if they’re still trying to put a trophy in their crosshairs. They’ve studied deer movements through the long season and know what tactics work as hunting days wane.
One of those hunters is James “Nick” House from the Randolph County town of Sofia.
“I’ve been a deer hunter since I was 8,” said House, 36. “I learned just about everything about deer hunting from my uncle, Leon Oakley, and my cousin, Bobby (Oakley). Bobby is a really hard-core hunter; he’s hunts here and in Canada.”
The first place to start on a successful late-season deer hunting is having access to land with suitable habitat, which can be anything from small woodlots in suburbia to public lands to small and large farms. House hunts a small, Guilford County property that requires little attention.
“It’s got some green fields and a cutover,” he said.
House’s only real work is to clear shooting lanes before archery season opens in mid-September.
“It’s a farm that’s got a pretty new cutover section, and a lot of green stuff grows along creeks and in bottoms, and it’s surrounded by farms that also have green winter crops,” he said. “The cutover is a bedding area. The farm also has a few hardwood, bottomland thickets and field borders with green stuff that grows in winter for deer.”
In 2014, the rolling property’s cutover had grown up in 5- to 6-foot weeds, so House cleared shooting lanes from top to bottom and set tree stands in strategic locations. He also bought a .25-06 barrel for his Thompson-Center Pro Hunter.
“I bought (the gun) it about five or six years ago and fell in love with it,” House said. “I killed several bucks using a muzzle-loader barrel.”
With some shooting lanes through the cutover extending 400 to 600 yards, he wanted a flat-shooting caliber, so he added the interchangeable .25-06 barrel to his arsenal.
House has several trail cameras on his property, and they paid off last season.
“I knew a big buck was in the area because I had all kinds of nocturnal pictures of him chasing does, but none during daylight hours,” said House, who started to get daylight trail-cam photos of the buck after Thanksgiving. “I don’t know exactly when the first rut occurs, but I think because there are so many does, the bucks didn’t get to all of them the first time. I’m almost certain when I shot him, it was the second rut.”
On Dec. 6, the weather was cool and cloudy with misty rain, “perfect big-deer weather,” said House, who was hunting with his wife, Janna.
“She was in the stand where I’d got all the pictures of this buck,” he said.
House sat in a Loc-On stand in a sweet gum tree in a hedgerow near the top of a large cutover about 300 yards from Janna. He used his binoculars to scan down the shooting lane.
“There were two bucks 400 yards (at the bottom), but one didn’t have brow tines,” he said. “I hit my rattling horns hard for a minute or two, and the bigger one looked right at me. I waited a few minutes, then started grunting, then did a couple of can bleats and some snort wheezes.”
After a few minutes, he repeated the rattling sequence, hit the doe call twice, grunted and snort-wheezed again. The buck began walking up the incline but stopped 125 yards away, quartering toward House.
“The wind changed, so I knew I’d have to shoot him in the neck,” he said.
With a good rest, he sent the .25-06 sent a bullet between the buck’s chest and shoulder.
“It demolished him,” House said. “He went 8 or 10 yards and folded up.”
The 18-point, 170-pound buck’s wide rack grossed nearly 140 inches and was the fifth buck he’d taken in two years at this spot, including three 8-pointers, a 10-pointer and a 12-pointer.
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