But in the early spring you can get down on your hands and knees, look out across the barren woods and sometimes pick out wending lines of still-gleaming rubs. You'll be able to visualize how bucks once traveled from their beds to fields, oak flats and the like. If the local food sources and cover remain the same, deer will run roughly the same routes this October. And you'll be waiting for them in a nearby tree stand. Most guys go gaga over the first dank, musky scrapes of November.
Trouble is, they typically find only a segment, maybe two, of what is an intricate scrape pattern.
Which means that hunters often end up placing their stands over scrapes that a big deer might work only at night. In moderate climates, many of the previous fall's scrapes remain visible into early spring. Up north, they reappear after the snow melts. When you cut an old scrape line, follow it for a mile or more. Note where bucks scraped and rubbed at the intersections of doe trails.