If you're lost in heavily wooded country, the angles at which logging trails join can show you the way out. Logging trails branch out from the main stem. The sharp angle formed at the junctions points to the route loggers use to haul timber to the road.

Anytime after the hunting pressure starts and particularly during the late season, it pays to check small pockets of cover. All deer instinctively try to avoid human contact; mature trophy bucks practice this with a honed skill. They quickly learn where hunters don't go. Most everybody heads for the big woods and true enough, some big bucks tough it out there, hidden deep in the toughest cover. Other bucks vacate the hard-hunted woods for isolated chunks of cover where no one disturbs them. Many a big buck has lived to get bigger by spending the daylight hours of hunting season in a sumac-choked gully on the edge of field or in a cattail swale beside a marsh. They have even been known to lie low in the high weeds of a fallow field. It would be impossible to categorize all the nooks and crannies a wily whitetail might choose for his hidey-hole. Use your imagination; go places other hunters don't go. You may be surprised. -- Brenda Valentine

The bigger the better doesn't always work with decoy spreads, especially late in the season. Scout remote sloughs and backwaters ducks are using and then work them with small spreads of a dozen or less decoys.

Late-season waterfowlers need to remember to bring plenty of variable (warmth, thickness, weather resistance) layers of clothing. An old duck hunter once said: "It's easy to take off an extra layer, but you can't put it on if you ain't got it along."

Use common sense on the water when picking baits. If fish are whacking mayflies on the surface, stay away from the nymph. The closer you match their feed, the more you'll increase your catch.