As a vagabond whitetail hunter, I don’t have a home farm I hunt year in and year out. At times I’ve been able to hunt the same farms or ranches several years running, and each year I learn a bit more about the nuances of the local deer herd. Often as not, though, when I travel to hunt whitetails I’m on unfamiliar ground, be it a private ranch or large tact of public land. That means I need to be able to ferret out exactly the right spot to sit rather quickly.
I’ve done it a lot, but it’s always a slog. Here’s one example that typifies the process, in general terms. Hunting in southwest Kansas, the property I had access to was cut by a giant cottonwood river bottom about a mile long and a quarter mile wide set among some low sagebrush-covered foothills. On one end was a large private ranch that grew corn and alfalfa and was totally off-limits, the other a government-owned riparian park that
