Spring buck deer sign, a window without the cold

The scrapes ringed his property like casual provocations.

They weren’t meant to egg him on. They were just the circular patches of Earth, torn up by a whitetail buck’s hooves to mark a place to communicate with other deer.

From his porch my neighbor could point them out along the edge of the young pine, fir and spruce trees that were his livelihood because this man raised trees for Christmas, and for residential neighborhoods.

He pointed to the places he knew the whitetail buck had pawed the ground and left its scent.

One over there, and across the road over there, and back behind the barn, he said, counting them while he pointed with one arm outstretched, his other hand stuck in the pocket of his sagging jeans.

He knew where the scrapes were and that the whitetail buck that made them snuck around at night mostly, and only once or twice did he see the animal at dusk. When he walked out to check for a sign, the buck had often been there.

Sometimes you don’t find last autumn’s buck scrapes until spring.

T.S. Eliot — the poet — called April cruel, but for most North Idahoans it’s bliss compared to the months that came before.

The other day, as the morning sun warmed a glade and threatened to get hotter, I found a place where a buck had spent some time last fall. I noticed the rubs where his antlers had peeled bark as sunlight crested a knoll, shining on the white fir scars thickening with pitch.

When I walked over, I found a scrape as big as a floor mat under a tree. Leonard Lee Rue, a man who spent a lot of time with whitetails and whose books teach anyone who wants to know about deer, measured hundreds of scrapes in the Eastern U.S. and found the majority to be patches of torn up dirt about 3 feet wide, several inches deep and always under a bush or tree with limbs hanging low enough for the buck to lick and hook his antlers.

North Idaho whitetail deer scrapes are about the same.

Elk are different. They churn up dirt and mud and wallow in it, leaving a heavy scent.

Whitetails may urinate or defecate in a scrape, but don’t leave much behind that we can smell.

“I have carefully sniffed a number of scrapes, and the only odor was that of fresh earth,” Lee Rue wrote in The Deer of North America.

Scrapes are often checked by residential deer and others moving through the area. They each learn things about the buck that made the scrape, and the buck in turn learns things about visiting bucks, and does.

When you find a buck hangout in the spring, you wonder about his size, where he dropped his antlers and, if he’s still alive, you wonder where he is.

And you consider the best vantage to catch this deer next fall.

That’s never easy.

Big bucks cruise a lot, and spotting one in daylight at a scrape is rare.

I sat on an overturned bucket once in the attic of our barn where the wide door, made to accommodate hay bales, was tied open with twine.

When the wind blew it bumped.

I waited for a buck that had made a scrape across the meadow under young white pine. I waited there for several hours each day one week, and then he came, moving steadily like he was stuck in a gear, his antlers a heavy and symmetrical set of 4 or 5 points each. He cruised by the scrape, stopping briefly as I raised the .257 Roberts and its Bushnell 3x9. He was behind some fanning limbs, his back to me, then broadside, and then he disappeared.

And that was it.

It was the middle of the rut and I knew that buck would check the scrape eventually, but I was surprised to see him. And didn’t account for my own complacency, the screen of limbs and wind and the deer’s own sense of survival.

He didn’t need to wait around to learn if a doe, or another buck had checked his scrape. He had it figured out in 3 seconds, maybe 5. If I had been given 10, I’m not sure I could have killed him.

Scrapes are like that.

They are supernatural in some ways because what deer, with 300 or more scent receptors, learn from them, and how, we’ll never know.

To walk a deer trail in the spring, ducking limbs, feeling rubs and checking scrapes, is its own kind of education.

And imagination too.

And it’s part of what keeps us going back to the woods.

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Ralph Bartholdt can be reached at rbartholdt@cdapress.com.