Strange folks met in the woods

About 12 years my family used to keep a lease of about 1,500 acres near Olustee. The northern border of our lease was I-10, the southern end was Hwy 90. We didn't share it with anyone else, it was purely family. We had a decent camp on sight with good amenities. We left a lot of expensive equipment in camp year-round, including multiple ATVs and a woods truck. We also left tractors in for much of the year. Outdoor TV and satellite in the cook house. Ect.

Back in those days I wasn't a senior attorney. Vacation time was hard to come by and I had to really strain to get time off to hunt. That bow season I was able to take off several days to bow hunt during the week and have the lease to myself. That was the year I started doing a lot of off-the-wall experimenting with lures, decoys, and scent-control methods. That was also about the time I was able to start mapping deer movements against the barometer and a bit later patterning mature buck visits to pawings against the moon positions. So those years were formative to me to how I transitioned to how I used to hunt to how I hunt now. I remember them well.

But that one week in bow season I remember more focusing on decoy use and watching a lot of doe and immature buck interactions with a couple of decoys I was experimenting with. One morning I was particularly tired and after watching some interactions with my decoy after daylight, I decided to retire early and go sleep mid-morning. So I walked back to camp (I was only hunting a few hundred yards from the camp), stripped down to my underwear, and went to sleep. I still had my camo face paint on (I used to prefer facepaint to a mask because most masks back then fogged up my glasses bad and were just one more thing to worry about). I crashed for a couple of hours.

***Here's where it's gonna get weird.

Late morning or noonish I got up from my nap. I had remembered that I had brought my ant farm with me. I had seen a lot of crazy ant colonies around the woods off from camp and I wanted to dig up a queen and raise some crazy ants in the ant farm (crazy ants are the yellow ants that make a single hole and surround it by a yellow or orange sand mound). So I quite naturally found a silver spoon from either the cook house or my camper and marched out down the road from camp until I found some crazy ant colonies. I'm naked except for my underwear. My face is still painted, and my hair is sticking up from my nap. I proceed to get on my hands and knees and start digging up an ant colony intensely with the spoon, stopping every so often to examine the dirt pile I'm making to look for the queen. I go on for about an hour digging up various colonies, moving down every so many yards to the nexy colony. There's now a line of holes in the road.

After I've worked down the road a ways, I'm on my hands and knees digging away and someone calls out to me. "H-E-L-L-O!" a strange woman yells from down the road. "Can you help me?"

So let's stop right here. At this. point in the story, it appears I'm the weird one that someone is about to meet in the woods. I'm a 30 something year old man, with a green face, hair sticking up, in my underwear, digging small holes in the ground with a silver spoon and intently examining the dirt.

But no, you'd be mistaken.

The weird one is the woman who is completely comfortable walking up on me as if I'm the most approachable human being in the world. Today I would say she clearly had meth-head vibes. Back then meth wasn't the big drug everyone was using, so I could best say she had a way about her that reminded me of a criminal defendant. She was way too comfortable and friendly as she rapidly approached me. All smiles. Not at all giving any indication that she was put off by my appearances or actions. It immediately put me on edge. No normal woman would walk up on me like this I figured. I figured she had a man with her waiting to jump me. But, she also had a very pretty, well groomed, German Shepard. I decided that some who seemed to take such good care of their dog must be ok. I can't remember if I introduced myself, but I remember offering to help her and I walked her back to camp. She had walked up to camp in a roundabout way. Her vehicle had ran out of gas on I-10. Had she known those woods, she could have walked straight to camp via the main road that ran between the gate and I-10. There was a cell tower on I-10 and she was near that cell tower. But as it was she had walked much of the perimeter roads of the property and randomly walked up on me. I offered for her to use my cell phone when we got back to camp. I got dressed in my camper, and also quietly pulled my handgun and got it within concealed reach. She used my phone to call her boyfriend. When she talked to him, she started describing all the stuff we had in camp. The 4 wheelers, tractor, ect. It was clear they were talking about knocking the place over. When she was done with the call, I offered to take her to the closest gas station to wait for her boyfriend. She said no, she was going to wait in camp for him. I told her no, that wasn't an option, her options were either go to the gas station or back where she came from. At one point in her wandering before finding me, she was only 300 yards or so from the gas station and she just didn't realize it. Whether she walked there at my direction or I drove her there, she could not stay in camp. She thanked me for my help and walked back the way she came. She meandered back to her vehicle and in a few hours, she was gone. Throughout the day I slipped up to her vehicle where I could see it to make sure she got off both ok for her sake but also to make sure she wasn't still lurking the property.

I pulled several cameras from the woods and positioned them around the camp. I thought for sure the camp would get ripped off over the next 2 weeks. It never happened. I think they couldn't find their way back. Had I took her to the gas station, the route back in would have been more obvious and simple. Some time later the cell tower got burglarized, but I have no particular reason to suspect it was her.

Bullfrog, that may have been my cousins old girlfriend Jan. What you describe is exactly her. Not a meth head, but drank enough to be a little out of sorts even when she wasn't drinking... I grew up hunting on Olustee creek in Lula just north of 100. I now hunt in southern Columbia Co, and northeastern Alachua Co.

On the old forum there was a sticky where I reported my moon findings from over the years. I cannot recall how detailed I went with my barometer findings. I’ll do a writeup one of these evenings.

I quit with decoys. They gave me a few shots on does or immature bucks that I passed on, but they spooked more deer than they lured in. I don’t think they look like deer to a deer’s eyes. I even glued a real deer hide on one of them and added a twitching tail. I think that decoy had about a 100% spook rate.

I learned much about lures and scent control that I’ve never shared except in private one-on-one conversations. I am convinced I can beat a deer’s nose at will and lure them in by scent with reasonable success. I’m reserving the knowledge for a later time.

I put out a turkey decoy in a 40 acre hayfield that I hunt. I have found a single hen near the feeder will always make the deer feel comfortable and they come right in. Never had one spook either. Just an FYI...

I believe a decoy would work if you ever could present one that looks right to a deer’s eyes. They not only see normal colors differently than us, they also see in the UV spectrum. There’s probably visual, color, or light cues a living deer gives off that can’t be mimicked with a plastic decoy. That’s how turkeys are. I have not tried a top-of-the-line plastic decoy, but cheap decoys often spook them while a mounted turkey hen decoy brings them in every time. In part in the case of turkeys, its the feathers that cannot be replicated. Feathers likely glow in the UV spectrum that turkeys can also see in. When I went to dressing my plastic decoys with feather vests, the turkeys started treating them better. Then when I switched to a taxidermy hen, interactions became intense such as gobblers breeding my decoys and hens attacking it, always attaching the snoot of the decoy.

about 25 yrs ago wife and i walked away from a stuck vehicle - got about 6.5 or 7 miles and an old guy and grand kid pulls over. Asks her why such a pretty girl is walking w a muddy guy. Told him where vehicle stuck and he says i know that spot, hop in. We gave his grandson $50 or $100 and old feller popped us clear.

We had been clear for < 5 minutes before next truck thru shows up. Funny how that works. The grandkids were going to dizney w “$50 or $100” for goodies.

God bless him. One of the reasons wife and i got married - no-one killed the other during our mudscapade. A good adventure.