Unless they enjoy being human metronomes, deer hunters in Nebraska and Kansas - the two windiest states in the U.S. - do not scale skinny trees. Nor do they sit in elevated blinds or tripods, if the legs aren't sunken or staked into the ground.
The wind must be relatively tame for Lonnie Hermann of McLouth, Kansas, to channel his inner squirrel. The exception is the arrival of a cold front. If he gets both gales and ice, he's going to be aloft, even if he has to hang a stand in a timbered bowl to escape Ol Man Winter's teeth.
"The deer are off their feet during a high wind, unless it's really cold," the 47-year-old pipefitter told me. "When the wind has a bite, though, they're going to be moving."
The first week of November 2014 was unusually warm in northeastern Kansas. That's probably the best month of the season to catch a buck out of its bed while the sun is shining, but that doesn't mean they're eager to break a sweat.
They'll often wait until dusk to travel from point A to point B.
Lonnie took off a week from work as soon as he saw the forecast for Nov. 11. The high on Monday, Nov. 10, was 71 degrees. The overnight low was supposed to be 33, and the high for Tuesday only 36.
Thirty-five-mph winds be damned.
He saw five bucks in the first four hours. No. 6, a respectable 140-class animal, came past at 9:50, and that sighting stoked Lonnie's furnace enough for him to stay in a tree at least one more hour.
At 10:30, he saw this buck at 75 yards, traveling a path that would take it downwind of him. Lonnie couldn't see the rack's right side, but the left beam had numerous points. "Extras," he called them.
"All I could do was hunker down in my Scent-Lok and hope," he said.
The buck never smelled him. Or if it did, it paid no attention to the foreign odor of a wide-eyed hunter trying to retract his head like a turtle.
The 30-yard shot was a piece of cake.
The 15-pointer's BTR composite score is 204 3/8 inches.
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