Photo by Mark Werner

As I drove through the valley, the sky began to darken. Gradually ascending into the mountains, the flurries increased as windblown snow scudded across the highway. By the time I headed up the Monroe County mountain, snow covered the gravel road. Flakes the size of grapes made their way down from the heavens. I turned the windshield wipers on high and locked my SUV into 4-wheel-drive.

Upon arriving at my property in Monroe County (which borders the Jefferson National Forest), I noted that about a foot of snow had already fallen on my mountain sanctuary. After leaving the vehicle, an inline muzzleloader in tow, I decided on two plans of action. The timing was the last day of West Virginia's muzzleloader season, and whitetails were unlikely to be moving. Plan A was to still-hunt slowly across my land, hoping to come across a bedded deer before it saw me. Plan B involved my striking a fresh trail and following it to a bedded or feeding whitetail, with the former situation being the more likely by far.

I had still-hunted about 150 yards when I came to a long linear field, bordered by a pine thicket on the right and a hardwood stand in the national forest on the left. This was the area where I felt most likely to encounter a whitetail, as the field continued for several hundred yards. It is a known late-season feeding ground. In fact, I had killed a doe there with my smokepole several Decembers ago.

As I waded through the snow, a brown blur some 75 yards ahead streaked across the field and entered the national forest. By the time I reached the place where the animal had crossed the field, visibility had worsened and the snow was falling in huge, heavy clumps.

At that junction, I had hoped to find only tracks made from a single deer, but instead I came across prints from at least three whitetails, as well as those of a canine of some sort, and some indeterminate creature. And I found it impossible, as the snow was falling so heavily and quickly, to determine which of the sets of deer tracks was the freshest one. Finally, I selected a trail to follow, and a few minutes later, I entered the Jefferson National Forest.

On and on the tracks continued through an oak grove, down the side of a mountain, and toward a rhododendron copse along a creek. All the while, the snow seemed to be falling more heavily and the sky had darkened even more. Finally, I gave up on the deer and turned to make the long, slow trudge back up the mountain and toward my vehicle and eventually home.

Sometimes when I go afield during West Virginia's muzzleloader season in December and encounter conditions like those mentioned above, I fantasize that I am hunting like the mountaineers of generations ago, frontstuffer in hand. Surely any whitetail our forebears killed under those conditions was regarded as a hard-earned trophy -- regardless of the size of the buck's rack or the weight of the doe's body. Of course, those forebears would probably not have hesitated or guessed wrong at determining which of the trails of those three deer was the freshest one -- as I had done.

OVERVIEW OF THE 2004 SEASON
Last December, West Virginia smokepole toters tallied 14,819 whitetails, a total that was 9 percent below the 2003 harvest of 15,853. The latter harvest was itself 10 percent below the 2002 total. Overall, the 2004 harvest still ranks as the fifth highest on record. The top 10 counties last season (with harvest in parentheses) were Nicholas (572), Braxton (565), Randolph (537), Greenbrier (527), Wetzel (519), Preston (517), Wood (486), Ritchie (482), Lewis (471) and Mason (436).