A number of years ago I used to get asked by a vendor to their hunting lease north of Fairfield, TX on the Trinity River.  The ranch was 10,000 acres in size, located near a place called Amerada Camp...probably one of the best ranches I've ever hunted.  Some of the biggest bucks I've seen in ETX came from there too - very impressive.  The duck hunting was superb as well.  It was a place where you could do practically any kind of hunting, fishing, or wildlife watching you wanted.  One of the reasons it was so good was because it was so hard to get to large portions of the ranch due to the slews, wetlands, and swamps that dotted the periphery of the river.  In fact, the only way we could get to several spots was on an old timber harvester called the 'pink panther' that had about 4' of ground clearance.

Well, this place was also close to Coffield State Prision, and if I remember correctly at the time it was a maximum security unit (what it is now I don't know).  And, unfortunately before one of my hunts one weekend some of the gentlemen at that facility decided they wanted to sleep somewhere else that night, and escaped into the Trinity river bottom.  It was the talk of the camp as I arrived though no one really seemed to concerned about it.  And, intially neither did I...that is, until about 6:00 the next morning.  

I was going to hunt a ladder stand on the edge of a large clover pasture that day, near the river.  The area was loaded with deer trails, and I had already taken a young 8 pt there.  With visions of trophy deer on my mind, amidst the laughs and jokes of a bunch of hunters trying to wake-up from a hard night's sleep, they let me out of the truck where I'd have to walk about half a mile down a dirt trail to the stand.

As they pulled away to drop off other hunters, the image of the headlights dimmed into the pitch black, and the silence sunk in.  I immediately became aware that I no longer had the company of the jokesters and cut-ups.  Normally I welcomed this stillness and quiet, but somehow after the first few steps down the trail my mind immediately turned to the inmates that had escaped, and my rather close proximity to the river.  My pace picked up, and I looked forward to blending into the silence once quietly on the stand.  In fact, I concentrated a lot more than usual on being quiet.  Fortunately, the forest floor was moist and cooperated as I slinked forward through the night.  As I was about half way there I suddenly heard the movement of leaves to my right.  I froze and didn't even breathe.  After about 5 minutes (yes I did eventually breathe) I took a few more slow steps when another, separate movement of leaves occurred again to my right...then another.  Whatever made the noises took a few steps in the same direction I was heading...three sounds, I thought, could it have been three inmates?  My rifle swung off my shoulder immediately, the safety clicked off, and, having readied to shoot I loudly shouted STOP!!!  Silence....all of sudden, right in front of me not 10 feet away, something else rose up from the ground.  Man, what is this?!!!?  I took a step towards the object just in time to see the white rear-end of a deer...oops.  About that time it finally dawned on me that instead of some bedded-down convicts I had walked into a group of bedded-down whitetails.  I tried to quickly get behind a tree and hide, but it was way too late.  BAAAWOOOMM!!  Deer, jumped from every direction - my right, left, behind, and in front.  It sounded like mass pandemonium crashing in every direction through the trees. No kidding, there must have been 20 or 30 of them.

After the fallout, which lasted 20 seconds or more,  I tried to act covert enough to demurely slink to my stand in the dark - with the safety back on too. 

Funny...didn't see a thing that morning.  Never told my buddies either.