My dad had made the six-hour drive from New York to hunt with me over opening weekend of Maryland's deer season, which falls in the first half of September, and I was dying to put him on a mature velvet buck.
"If you don't sit there, I'm going to," I told him, offering up my favorite stand. Between trail-camera recon and countless summer hours behind the binos, I had spent a great deal of time scouting, patterning and preparing for the whitetail season and felt I had the deer pretty well dialed in.
Sure enough, like clockwork on the evening of opening...