It was mid-December, and the area bordering the Tensas River was extremely inviting.

Active scrapes were seemingly everywhere, and everyone in my five-member cadre of hunters was excited over the prospects of scoring on more than one whitetail over the weekend. After all, we were hunting a southern parcel of the Tensas River National Wildlife Refuge, which lies in portions of Madison, Tensas and Franklin parishes.

Chosen for a two-day lottery gun hunt, my group had set up a stand line on a hardwoods ridge paralleling the Tensas River. At nearly 7:30 a.m., my brother's gun spoke sharply. Little did I know that he'd just scored on a Boone and Crockett-class 8-pointer checking out a scrape near his stand.

As he walked up to the fallen buck, he grew somewhat worried at what he was seeing: the broken shaft of an arrow protruding from the muscle just below the backbone. He inspected the old wound, which had already healed, and the worry vanished. No infection was observed in the buck, and its weight of 210 pounds confirmed that this deer was a very healthy animal.

In my neck of the ridge, I sat comfortably on my ladder stand until 9:30 a.m. Shots rang around the area, and I was alerted to the possibility that deer were moving.

Immediately I spied walking on the deer trail a spike buck followed by a rather large doe. It was rather odd to be seeing a large doe following a spike, but the hunting pressure along the ridge was probably enough to make the unusual occur with regard to deer movement.

I made a management decision to aim at the doe instead of the spike, and shot the animal directly in the heart with my .30-06 at 45 yards. The ritual at the weigh station subsequently revealed the weight of my kill to be 150 pounds.

We all congratulated each other and headed back to our makeshift camp to begin skinning and preparing the deer for transportation. Next afternoon, we were again hunting in proximity to the ridge -- but this time a little closer to the point at which our ATVs were parked on the trail. The day before we had observed that deer had actually come out on the trail right near the ATVs.

At approximately 1:30 p.m., one of our standers scored on another deer along a trail in a palmetto thicket. The trail was one used by whitetails in the area to reach the acorn ridge near the river. My friend's buck was a solid 6-pointer weighing a respectable 170 pounds. We blood-trailed the wounded deer to an area just east of my stand location as it ran behind my setup into another dense thicket of palmettos.

Three deer for five hunters makes for a successful public-land lottery hunt in December by anyone's standards. On our return to Opelousas, we portioned the venison out among ourselves. Of course, my brother retained the high-grade 8-pointer's cape and rack, which now adorn our southwest Louisiana camp's wall.

Truth be told, nothing else is like hunting whitetails during the rut in Louisiana. In areas of adequate deer concentration, signs of scrapes and fresh rubs indicate the elements of a possible successful hunt during any time of the day at the peak of the mating season.