Published with permission from AHuntersTales.com
“Scotty” was my first vehicle. A 1978, the pickup was in remarkable shape in the early 1990s when I started driving it. My grandfather had purchased the truck new and it sat many years after he passed away. It was a Chevy Scottsdale model and picked up the nickname from my baseball teammate Lenny, who rode with me most days from school to the ballpark.
As you might imagine, I have enough memories with Scotty to fill an armored truck.
Summer nights, though, were some of the best. We spent most evenings during the hot Western New York months looking for whitetail bucks feeding throughout the rural county I grew up. Long before trail cameras were delivering real-time photos of deer to our phones, traveling and putting miles to the pavement and the woods were how we found deer.
I loved it.
While the passengers along for the ride varied, Scotty and I were the mainstays. We burned gallons of gas looking for big bucks.
Searching for these bucks had nothing to do with early-season scouting for the actual hunt. I very rarely hunted anywhere other than our family land – never needed a reason to. That didn’t stop me from knowing many of the giant bucks that roamed throughout the area though.
Finding bucks during the summer was almost like having an additional hunting season.
Most evenings, my parents’ old-school video camera was in tow to document deer sighting via shaky hand-held footage. I ran across a VHS recently with a compilation of highlights from one summer in 1994. There were several great bucks around that summer, but even more fantastic memories. None remain stronger in my memory than the night I videoed four mature bucks feeding together only 85 or 90 yards from the road on the Knapp Farm. One was a great buck, pushing 140″ as a 10 pointer. That’s a giant deer in our old neck of the woods.
These days, gas prices make it much more difficult to hop in the car and go for a long drive to check out deer. Ironically, it’s one of the reasons my family chooses to live in in a rural area instead of closer to Charlotte. We love the agriculture-rich terrain it affords us to be away from the city. Those crop fields are not far away.
I’m going to make it a point to go “hunt for deer” more as we close out the summer. I am certain it will be fun – a good thing to do with the family.
It will also be different – just not the same without “Scotty.”
