Some of you have seen the photo I posted in the Trail Cam thread of a nice respectable 5x5 whitetail buck. I have spent the last 2 months moving my one and only trail cam around a large tract of the Black Hills National Forest in order to define this feller's movements and haunts. I have really found only one really good spot to set up a hide where I have a good shot at him. It's on a saddle where several trails converge and on the route to the one steady source of water in this watershed. Even in my most deluded pipe dreams, I did not believe I had a brass railroad lock on this buck. He did NOT get to this size by being stupid, but I had a chance.
Then Sunday morning I went in to move the trail cam to a trail leading onto a nice little benchtop meadow. When I got to the "honey hole", I was confused to see a dark brown round stone in the deer trail. When I got closer, I could see the plants around it, dead and withered. I immediately spun around, looking up. Sure enough, I found three tree stands, and two more salt blocks. The ground is baited with salt and that is very much illegal in South Dakota.
Not only can I not hunt this now, I have to wait 30 days after the bait is removed before I can legally hunt here again. Burned, then the fields were salted.
I text messaged a Conservation Officer friend of mine and made plans to meet up in half an hour. I had a bloody hard hump across rough ground to make the meeting, but I felt pretty driven by bitter anger at this cheater or team of cheaters. When we hiked in, he asked if I had seen cameras. Honestly, I hadn't thought of it. When we approached, it was very slowly, binoculars scanning every tree for sign of a game cam. We circled twice and eventually uncovered the approach of the poacher(s). They had come in on four wheelers in a motorvehicle restricted area. They even chainsawed several trees to improve their access and shooting lanes.
This now makes it a bit more serious because the Forest Service certainly did not approve their logging activities or offroad driving. Tomorrow they will be out there to document and do their own investigations in cooperation with the Conservation Officer. Little do they know, those lazy filthy slobs, but they have a meaner predator on their trail now.
If they had put up treestands, I would have understood. I would have tried hard to hunt around them, share the land, share the opportunities, but this is doesn't cut it in my view. The C.O. said he would inform me the moment the salt blocks were removed and he would not bother me if I resumed hunting right away. But I can't. That buck is too cool for that, if I made the shot while he was wandering around looking for the salt block he knew he had found before....well it would just spoil fair chase for me. I would rather fail on my own merit than win on the merits of someone else's cheating.
I don't do a lot of hunting. I don't cover thousands of acres over large swaths of this 1.25 million acre National Forest. What I tend to do is concentrate on a half square mile and learn every tree and rock in that area, to know intimately where to be when the morning sun starts that upslope breeze, where to be when it snows or rains or the wind blows like mad. I like to know where they loaf, where they browse, where they scrape and where they hide. So when someone burns my field, I am left at square one again. My last half square mile was burned the same way two years ago with the EXACT SAME SITUATION. And it leaves me heartsick thinking what are the odds? How prevalent is cheating, how low are the average ethics, how far are my fellow "hunters" from a fair chase creed? I know I am going to listen to what more anti-hunters say from now on. Hate to say it, but they are not far from right anymore.
