How to Hunt Mature Bucks in Wolf Country

That only gets exacerbated by the feeling that, as an individual, you can’t really do anything about either topic except fight with strangers online about it, which is about as healthy as eating gravel for breakfast. Neither issue is going away, and for many of us, the apex predator roaming the big woods in packs of deer-chomping alphas and betas has changed the landscape of modern deer hunting.

Not for the better, either, I might add. All that negativity aside, the thing about hunting in wolf country is that it can suck, but it isn’t a lost cause. Wolves and deer have found a way to coexist for a long time. Figuring out how the local deer avoid being on a canine’s menu is really the key to the whole thing, and it starts with a heavy dose of reality.

The up-north, hunting-shack tradition is withering on the camo vine. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one that’s commonly cited is that wolves took over and the deer moved out. I feel for folks who don’t have the hunting they once did, but I’m also always a little suspicious when I hear this sentiment.

You usually don’t have to dig too deep to find out that there is almost no effort to hunt the deer differently in any way. A common theme is that once productive stands and blinds become inactive, then the dead zone is sort of set in stone due to the wolves’ presence. Pair this with dead trail cameras and a real or perceived lack of deer sign, and the whole thing can look pretty bleak.

I get it, but I’ve also tried hard to view deer hunting not through a totally negative lens. We have a lot of advantages, and if we use them correctly, we can find the deer in wolf country. It just takes a willingness to switch up your strategies and go looking.

In late-October, I sat on the ground next to my 13-year-old daughter as we waited on a big woods forky to wander past. He didn’t, and at sunset, we heard a whole pack of wolves light up. The area of Wisconsin where we were hunting is on the fringe of real wolf territory. They are always around, but that was the first big pack I’d ever heard.

Trail camera images, tracks in the snow, and occasional sightings over the years have definitely clued us into their presence, but it always felt like we hadn’t hit the tipping point. This year, it felt very much like we did.

My camera intel dried up, and I could barely see a deer. Most days, I wouldn’t, and most long-weekend trips would end with at most a deer or two showing itself. I knew this when I drove back over there in mid-November to try one last time to meet up with a good one.

What I had going for me was one camera, on a crossing between two wetlands, that not only showed occasional daylight buck movement, but a weird amount of daylight coyote activity. What I did when I got there was to run into the swamp, and hang a few cameras. Then, on a whim, I hung a camera over a small scrape close to a two-lane highway in a spot I never hunt.

The swamp cams showed almost nothing, but the other camera showed a little bit of activity. That haunted me while I sat in the swamp for three days and saw nothing, so on the afternoon of my fourth day, I carried a stand, some sticks, and a doe decoy out to a tree close to the scrape cam. It was a desperation move, but my thought was that maybe the deer and the coyotes had moved out closer to the road, closer to civilization, to avoid the wolves.

I was so not confident in the setup that I didn’t even bring a deer call, or my pack. I figured I might lay eyes on something, or have a buck lay eyes on my decoy. But I didn’t think my odds were great.

An hour before dark, when I heard something running, it took me a second to realize there was a deer close. He was all of 140 inches, which is huge for up there, and was chasing a doe hard. The patch of cover they came out of would be a good place to hunt rabbits for 10 minutes, and not much more.

They ran out of my life, and almost instantly, I spotted a solid two-year-old type of buck on the edge of another patch of rabbit cover. I tried to call him in with my mouth as hard as I’ve tried to call in any deer, and it was frustrating. Then, I looked to my left and saw a third buck, which was a really nice eight-pointer.

It took a lot of home-grown snort-wheezes, grunts, and bleats to talk him in, but he did come in and swing downwind of the decoy. When he piled up not 50 yards from my bow stand, I was shaking from adrenaline. It was one of the coolest hunts I’ve ever had.

Throughout a lot of years of hunting public land and just generally pressured ground, I have come to believe that pressure is pressure. If something is trying to kill the deer, human or otherwise, the deer will react. How they do, will usually involve reducing their overall movements, relocating, or a combination of both.

When wolves move in, this happens. But the deer still produce sign, you can still see them if you go looking, and they are still out there waiting to be found. The key is to try to factor in where they’d feel most secure, and then scout.

But there is a catch. To avoid us, deer are far more likely to move into areas where we just don’t want to go. Like tamarack swamps, and just generally nasty, hard-to-travel areas. Wolves and other predators often do just fine in those places because they are also avoiding us. Now the deer have to avoid the wolves and us, so they’ll choose option three. Try to envision where that might be if you hunt wolf country, and then use your cameras and a little sweat equity to figure things out.

If you do, you just might have an amazing hunt in an unlikely spot.