PICKING POCKETS

The year was 1978, and I was a 20-something Californian making his first out-of-state deer hunting trip to eastern Montana. Hunting the head of a brush-lined creek in some sagebrush foothills, I shot my first-ever whitetail buck, an old 10-point that some pheasant hunters had unwittingly driven right past me. I was hooked and still very much clueless about whitetail hunting.

Since that time, I’ve hunted whitetails in Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Washington, Oregon and Colorado. I’ve also hunted them extensively throughout the Midwest, East and Deep South. What I’ve learned is that the basics of hunting rutting whitetail deer are the same regardless of location, but that terrain and land access make pursuing western whitetails a somewhat different game. Hunting the heavily timbered forests of eastern Washington, Oregon, the Idaho panhandle and western Montana requires vastly different techniques than hunting the open prairie and sagebrush foothills of other western states where whitetails thrive.

RUT-HUNTING BASICS

As the rut approaches, whitetail bucks