Gus Engling Deer Hunt 2023
My entries into the Texas Parks and Wildlife draw hunt season won me four hunts in 2023-2024. The first of these was the last hunt of the season at Gus Engeling WMA near Palestine. The dates were December 12-14 and this was hunt six of six on the property for the year not including youth hunts. So while I was excited to go, my expectations were low. Public deer hunts are hard by definition and when the woods have been full of hunters for a couple of months, they are even harder.
I went down Monday, December 11th to camp overnight so that I didn’t have to worry about being on time for registration and orientation. Gus Engeling WMA is one of the best I’ve been to in regards to infrastructure. They have good roads throughout and a good campsite on Highway 287 with level pads for RVs, a bathroom and water available in a central location. I was the only one who showed up Monday so I got my pick of the sites.
Tuesday morning, I got up for a walk to the conservation center. It’s always a slight shock to the system to be in the woods after a long time in the modern world. The birds, the air, the open space above your head, all contribute to a sense of disarray until you get used to the sensation of it again. All the gates were closed so the walk was a short one. They have several informational signs throughout the WMA that provide information on the conservation activities that go on there like strip clearing and management hunts.
At registration, it looked like a full hunt. As usual, it was almost entirely men. There were two boys under the age of 10 with their fathers and that was great to see. You are given the option to choose some compartments that you would prefer. However, since I had never been to this WMA and there was no scouting allowed, I let the biologists pick my compartment. Gus Engeling is a large WMA, over 11,000 acres so the chance of randomly picking a good compartment was low. I ended up in compartment 3. Orientation was mostly about safety and process. This was an antlerless/spike hunt but the head biologist was pretty clear he’d prefer we didn’t shoot any spikes. At 12:30 or so, we were sent out to our compartments.
One of the many hard parts about these hunts is you show up one day and are handed a section of land that could be 200-500 acres. Figuring out what to do with that size property in a couple of hours isn’t easy. I had brought both a climbing stand and a popup. I started out with my climber as the biologist that gave me information about the compartment said that was probably the best option. However, I never found a location with a tree straight enough and no lower limbs that I thought was good. Tuesday night I found a spot on a clearing with quite a bit of deer and hog sign that I thought would be good for the popup so I went back to the truck to get it. Unfortunately, it broke as I was trying to put it up. So I just tucked a chair back into a cedar bush with the idea that I’d hunt there in the morning hoping anything would enter the clearing from the opposite side of where I would be sitting.
I returned to the truck and took the climber on a long hike to the far east end of the compartment. There, I again found a lot of sign, especially of hogs and territory that looked great. However, none of the trees surrounding the area were at all suitable for a climbing stand. Frustrated at this point, I put out some corn and scent and propped up against the base of a cedar tree with very low expecations.
About 4:00 PM, I heard a pretty solid rustling sound 75 yards behind me. Turning around, three or four yearling pigs moving along the edge of the clearing towards me. Before I could get turned around with the gun, they had moved back into the woods. However, they hadn’t smelled me and I heard the sounder moving just off to my north in the oak leaves. There was a large briar thicket between their position and me. I decided the only chance I had was to belly crawl east with the hopes they’d come out of the woods near the edge of the clearing and a fire lane.
Surprisingly, this is exactly what happened. After crawling about 50 yards, I laid down in the middle of the clearing and 5 minutes later, the sounder appeared directly in front of me about 40 yards away. This was so surprising that I was completely unprepared. My experience with large game hunting is that unless you’re at a corn feeder, they don’t tend to stick around long. Laying prone on the ground, heart beating out of my chest, I didn’t have a good position to really see their behavior. The piglets and yearlings were running around a lot which added further distraction. I finally picked a large white hog. However, in my rush, I didn’t consider range or take time to calm down. When I pulled the trigger, I’m fairly sure I jerked on the gun. The sounder scattered and ran off south. I waited about about five minutes knowing I’d made a poor shot.
Searching for a blood trail produced nothing. I walked increasingly larger circles around the area where I thought the hog was and found no evidence of any blood. In the end, I resigned myself to the evidence that I’d made a terrible shot from 40 yards and completely missed the target. With little chance of something else showing up at that point, I sat under a tree until last light and made the long, empty handed walk back to the truck.
Wednesday morning, I hunted from the chair I’d set up in the clearing. I got there in the dark about 5:30 and settled in for the sun to rise. While there were lots of birds singing and flitting about, little else happened for most of the morning. About 10:30, a decent six point buck walked around the same corner where I had walked in and we both shocked each other as we made eye contact at the same time. He immediately bounded off and wasn’t legal for this hunt anyway.
My compartment had a raised box blind in it over a feeder that was used during youth hunts. With a broke popup and not much luck finding a good place to use my climbing stand, I resigned myself to hunt from the blind both Wednesday night and Thursday morning, knowing the odds of something coming through was minimal. I did put out quite a bit of corn around the feeder and sat there from 2-6 on Wednesday and 5:30-