I went back along the firelane, found my stand, and hauled it back to where I'd had the close encounter with the buck. It appeared that the spot where the buck had magically sprung from the ground like a jack-in-the-box was in fact a game crossing, and so I set up my climber on a relatively straight pine not far from that spot.

It was a foggy morning, the haze hanging about twenty feet off the ground, and after getting settled in my tree it took me a while to notice that there was another hunter in a ladder stand about 75 to 80 yards distant, along a firelane on the other side of the mature pines.

I was already quite disgusted with myself, and this just made it worse. I had missed my chance at a buck, I was late getting on a stand, and I had managed to set up almost on top of another hunter.

I didn't want to climb down and move, since that would only further disturb the woods. So I brooded. It wasn't long thereafter that a certain indisputable fact hit me like a ton of bricks: I had heard a buck grunt. After the deer had appeared in front of me in the trail, the grunting had been instantly pushed from my mind by much more urgent events like staring ga-ga at a buck rather than shooting him. Well, I started feeling a little better when I realized what I had witnessed. Not much, but some better. At least I had learned something that morning.

And so I sat belching while hanging off the side of a pine tree, performing a sort of internal, closed-mouth burp that produced a fair, though not very loud, imitation of the buck's grunting. I had now learned to grunt like a whitetail buck, taught by the critter himself.

I felt good about that.

Along about then, the other hunter got down off his ladder, started to leave, then waved at me so I would see him. I motioned that I would go, but he didn't understand. I hollered that I would go so he could stay. He waved me off, gestured that all was well, and left.

One hour later, I looked over at the firelane the other hunter had walked down, and what should my wondering eyeballs ID? A wandering reindeer, just like on TV. Actually, it was a whitetail deer strolling down the firelane. I couldn't see its head and the screen of brush was thick and getting thicker as it went - it was about to be gone and out of sight forever, so I let loose one of my newly-learned burp-grunts.

The deer stopped in its tracks, turned 180 degrees, backtracked until it found a trail that led in my direction, and started coming towards me. It stopped at about 60 yards, looking hard for the source of the grunting, quartering towards me. There was no doubt about his gender now - a pair of antlers stood tall and stately upon his majestic head.

I already had the Ruger 44 Magnum Carbine to my shoulder, so I lined up the peep sight and let him have it. Through what I later determined was complete failure of the bullet to expand (it was of a poor design) and shot placement, the slug travelled diagonally through the deer longways without hitting a bone or knocking him down. He stumbled, and ran the way he was facing - towards me.

He zigged, he zagged, he bounced, I missed. He was coming at full speed and I was operating on autopilot. I swung the handy carbine up and past the trunk of the tree I was in, and as the buck sped past broadside to me I brought the little gun to bear and pulled the trigger once more - another hit! The buck kept going, but he was slowing down. My heart fluttered between thuds. My knees knocked. My eyes walled.

Thirty minutes later, after some interesting tracking during which the blowflies helped out by finding one or two specks of blood where I could not, I had my buck. The hard lesson of the day had brought me an almost-instant return on the small investment of time and thought that went into my grunting experiments in that tree. And you can bet I won't forget that lesson anytime soon.