DALLAS — Clark Coleman was deer hunting in Hamilton County, Texas, early in the season when he decided to do his part for management and take a doe off the range. A likely candidate came along, and Coleman, a Gunter resident, dropped the doe no more than 30 yards from his blind.

Coleman was watching the doe to make sure she was down for keeps when he noticed a movement. It was a buck that had apparently been close on the heels of the doe that Coleman had just shot. As Coleman watched, the buck approached the fallen doe, sniffed her and proceeded to circle the dead deer for about 10 minutes.

"Finally, I needed to retrieve the doe, so I made some noise in the stand," said the deer hunter, who expected the buck to run away. "The buck just looked in my direction. I opened the door to the stand and he continued to look. I got out and stood next to the stand. I started talking to the deer, and he just looked at me."

Coleman wisely decided that the buck was guarding the fallen doe and might attack him if he approached. Luckily, a lively doe soon came along and the buck shifted his attention, allowing Coleman to retrieve the doe he'd shot. Coleman had heard of such bizarre behavior from a wary whitetail buck, but he'd never witnessed it.

What he described was classic hormonal overload associated with the rut (whitetail breeding season). Deer have a relatively small window of breeding opportunity, which occurs at just about the same time each fall. The rut is a mature buck's Achilles heel. It's the one time of the hunting season when bucks throw caution to the wind, move around actively during daylight hours and sometimes outright ignore hunters.

When asked about his favorite hunting strategy, pioneer Texas deer manager Murphy Ray Jr. said, "I'll take the rut. You can have everything else."

From longtime experience, Ray knows rutting bucks that are nearly invisible at other times may stand in a ranch road at high noon and ignore a truck load of deer hunters scrambling for their rifles.