Doe hunting legal for hunt's final four days

It's Thanksgiving Day and hunting season. How lucky we are to live in America and the wonderful state of Montana.

After a delicious Thanksgiving dinner and good times with family and friends, many of us will pursue our passion for the priceless Montana tradition of hunting. It's also a good way to work off some of those Thanksgiving dinner calories.

Whitetail deer are in full rut and there are four days of hunting season left to bag your trophy buck. Last Saturday afternoon I came through the U.S. 2 game check station. There were five trucks ahead of me in the "game" lane and no vehicles in the "gameless" lane.

All the trucks had whitetail bucks, all four pointers and larger. I had two good bucks in the back of my truck.

I don't remember the tally on the check station scoreboard, but whitetails likely accounted for over 90 percent of the animals registered.

Northwest Montana is definitely whitetail country.

Starting today, and for the remaining four days of the general rifle season for deer and elk, hunters can again shoot whitetail does. This will greatly increase the deer harvest. Hunters who have been holding out for a nice buck will likely take a doe on Saturday or Sunday to ensure a little freezer meat.

I found the mid-part of the hunting season to be slow, not seeing many deer. Then late last week, with a cooling trend, the bucks seemed to really turn on for the rut.

One day I was out in good deer country and didn't see a whisker, even with rattling.

The next morning it was about 15 degrees cooler. That morning I saw three bucks and a doe. First, I saw a small spike buck while hiking into my stand. I don't think those small spikes could even meet the four-inch minimum antler length to be legal.

On my first stand, I rattled several times, but only a lonely doe came walking by. I waited anxiously for a buck to follow the doe, but no buck came. So I moved to another vantage point overlooking a mix of small meadows, aspen lowlands and scattered pine trees - really great-looking deer country.

My first rattling sequence proved fruitless. Then I rattled again. Within five minutes, a nice buck came trotting down an old logging road headed straight for me. He stopped behind a berm in the road, looking straight at me.

All I could see was his head and throat. But that was enough. I shot and he dropped in his tracks. A clean instant kill on a nice four-pointer. While I was cleaning my buck, another buck came in to my rattle, even after my shot.

Then the work started. I was hunting alone and was about three-fourths of a mile from the truck. After dragging him for a hundred yards, I knew I'd have a heart attack if I continued dragging.

So I cut off the hind quarters and packed them out. I had a plastic sled for dragging out the rib cage and front quarters. That worked pretty slick.

The previous afternoon, my wife bagged a dandy five-pointer. She arrived at our cabin just an hour or so before dark. She dressed in her blaze orange clothes and headed for a favorite spot to watch for deer.

Within an hour, this dandy buck came sneaking through a narrow neck of timber. Her bullet shattered its heart. But without tracking snow, she had to search for an hour before finding the buck, even though it ran less than a hundred yards.

So if you still have a deer tag in your pocket, get out this weekend. Since the bucks are in the rut, they will be hanging around the does. Find good low-country doe habitat, set up where you can see a little real estate, and then do some rattling. That should bring in the bucks. Good luck!