One of my most memorable confrontations with whitetails occurred on the shore of Clifford Stream on a cold and frosty Veterans Day morning. It was still dark, but a streak of pink showed on the eastern horizon when I beached my canoe two miles from my remote camp on the shore of Musquash Bay in northeastern Maine.
After securing my watercraft to a shoreline fir, I entered the dense blackgrowth cedar swamp and took up a trail I had previously hacked out of the thickets. A short hike brought me to the first of a chain of knolls that lined the stream. I had never hunted the area before, but I had scouted it thoroughly after the previous hunting season.
At the stream, I picked up an archaic logging trail and began still-hunting. Slowly and surreptitiously, a step at a time, I still-hunted my way along the ancient logging byway — now a heavily used game corridor. I scrutinized the cover in all directions at each step, first from a standing, then kneeling position.
I hadn’t
