Chris Kolbert

A pair of eyes gleamed in the darkness ahead as I shined my headlamp down the wooded trail that I was following. A young doe stood just off the trail, curious to know what was entering its living room.
As I neared, the doe bounded off and I continued to my treestand, set along a ridge deep in the woods. When I arrived, I hooked my climbing harness to a safety line attached to the tree, then tied my shotgun with a heavy cord, and climbed into the stand.

A stiff southeast breeze was blowing through the woods as I reached back in my treestand to grab a facemask from my backpack, which was hanging from the side of the tree. After multiple days of rain, the leaves on the forest floor were soft and waterlogged, deadening any critters sounds.
Between the wind and the rain, it probably shouldn’t have surprised me when I looked behind me and saw a mature buck standing 15 yards away.

The drone of my subcompact tractor echoed up and down the river valley as I dropped my rotary tiller to the ground and began to cultivate the wildlife food plot that has been a labor of love for the past 10 years.
After maintaining an acre of clover for a couple summers, I was preparing to plant sorghum and a pea/soybean mix on a half-acre to create habitat for whitetail deer and upland birds. My property is small by most standards, consisting of a field and a few acres of woods.