[From Dr. Nordberg’s Whitetail Hunters Almanac, 10th Edition]

It’s 5 AM. We got up at 4 AM and we’re now about to head out in the dark for a morning of buck hunting, following fluorescent tacks glowing brightly in the beams of our flashlights that were placed on tree trunks weeks earlier to guide us to our distant stand sites. It’s day-one of the of the first 2–3 day period I call “phase one” of a hunt — the short period during which most whitetails do not yet realize they are again being hunted by humans. Our stand sites for this phase were selected during 3–4 days of scouting 2–3 weeks earlier, our goal then being to find one promising stand site for each hunter for each day or half-day of hunting during our first 2–3 days of hunting. Locations of these particular stand sites are almost always written in stone, meaning, during this period we only plan to hunt at these particular stand sites (unless on the way we discover something more promising).