Hunters have the option of a warm chair in front of the fireplace when things turn frigid and nasty -- not so the creatures of the wild. The combination of low temps with precipitation and/or high winds will often see deer lie up in the thickest cover that they can find. Photo by Tim Black.

Last year I hunted the last three days of the December muzzleloader season inside White Rock Wildlife Management Area, the huge parcel of public hunting land lying roughly between Clarksville and Fayetteville in the northwest part of Arkansas.

On the second morning, I was waiting for daylight when I became aware of something moving along the trail I was watching. About 75 yards away, the early-morning fog still swirling, I could tell it was a deer, but that was about all. A few minutes later the trail cam flashed from where I had set it up over some nearby deer scrapes. Whatever was walking along the trail unknowingly posed for the camera.

I didn't think much more about it that morning until I climbed down from my stand about 10:30. I was hunting a remote area and hadn't checked the game cam in a while, so I headed down the ridge in the camera's direction -- the same direction in which the deer had gone earlier.

When I plugged in the viewer and started scrolling through the images, I found mostly does, along with a ton of immature bucks -- mostly fork-horns and 3x3s -- until, that is, I came to picture No. 41. Standing just beyond the camera's lens was a buck much like some that I'd seen in Kansas a few days earlier: a burly 8-pointer with the shoulders and neck of a bull, signaling this was the monarch of the woods and undoubtedly the same buck that had been leaving huge tracks in the area for more than a month.

I know near-misses don't count, especially in deer hunting. But just the opportunity to see a buck like that in the Arkansas Ozarks, where food sources limit the trophy potential of our whitetails, was more than worth the five fruitless hours that I'd just spent in a tree stand.

During that same three-day period I saw only one other hunter, and he was sitting in his truck drinking coffee from a vacuum flask. That's not unusual at this time of year. In fact, I find this situation to be about par for the December seasons. Whatever the reasons -- NFL football, honey-do lists, the call of the couch -- armed humans become scarce in the deer woods when Arkansas' modern-gun hunting season closes.

If you enjoy deer hunting in solitude (which I do), this is a good thing. The overwhelming presence of hunters reduced to nearly nothing, resident deer quickly return to basic travel patterns, which at this time of year revolve primarily around food and cover. By late season the acorns are largely gone, pastures bare and crop fields harvested; thus, deer foods are at a premium, and virtually anything green can become a deer magnet.

Whatever the reasons -- NFL football, honey-do lists, the call of the couch -- armed humans become scarce in the deer woods when Arkansas' modern-gun hunting season closes.

In the Ozark uplands, where I hunt, honeysuckle thickets, spots of greenbrier, young clearcuts and the occasional planted field and food plots become deer magnets. If you hunt southern Arkansas or the Mississippi Delta, deer foods may well differ from those in the northeast Arkansas, but the same rule applies: Any patch of vegetation palatable to deer can lure in your quarry.

At year's end, Mother Nature plays a dirty trick on deer, particularly the bucks. They have just come through the dual rigors of the breeding period and the hunting season, and their physical condition is at its lowest ebb of the entire year. Compounding the problem, the dead of winter looms, and deer foods are not only diminished but also unlikely to regenerate for a couple of months.

FIND THE FOOD,FIND THE DEER
Wherever you hunt during the late season in Arkansas, finding the food almost unfailingly means that you've found the deer. And that statement could well be truer this season than most, at least here in the Ozarks.

The late-spring cold spell that gripped the state in April killed a large percentage of the oak blooms. Deer will suffer from the loss of the acorns that those blooms might have produced -- and that could bode well for late-season hunters. First, deer will have to forage over more land than usual to find food. Second, deer numbers will be high in the vicinity of those food sources. During the last couple of years, the reverse has been true: Heavy acorn crops tended to concentrate deer in one place to feed.