Photo courtesy of Pete Schoonmaker.

When I first saw the advertisement and the photos accompanying the description for hunting whitetails on Wolfe Island, I was a little skeptical. It was only natural because over the years I have been on many whitetail hunting excursions with outfitters, and I've seen the good, the mediocre and the really ugly.

Wolfe Island, Ontario, is a 7-mile- wide by 23-mile-long island located at the point where Lake Ontario flows into the St. Lawrence Seaway. The much larger Anticosti Island, located some 650 miles to the northeast in the St. Lawrence Seaway where the seaway empties into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, has long received most of the attention from whitetail hunters.

But the rich history of Wolfe Island goes back to the original American Indian occupants and the whitetails that sustained them. From there it encompasses the earliest French explorers in 1603. Later, in 1792, the island was named after the British General James Wolfe. The first settlers found fertile soil and an abundance of fish, waterfowl and whitetails. They cleared the land for cultivation and dairy farming.

Jump ahead to the present and the scenario remains much the same today except for the introduction of plains bison in 1995 and wild turkeys in 1999. What sets the whitetail hunting apart on Wolfe Island, beside the fact that the entire island is a perfect mix of agriculture and woodlands, is that these free-ranging deer have never been exposed to an open gun season (at least in modern times). The only way you can hunt Wolfe Island whitetails is by bow.

Brown's Bay Hunt Club, a whitetail outfitting service on the island, has been in business for 10 years. The club operates out of Brown's Bay Inn and hunts 4,000 acres with over 30 stand locations. The waterfowl hunting here is also second to none. The inn limits its bookings and runs a first-rate waterfowl and whitetail operation ranging from quality habitat, to well-placed duck blind and tree stand locations, to excellent accommodations, staff and dining -- all at one inclusive price. (The nightly sit-down dinner of chef-created meals is excellent and definitely not your normal camp fare.)

Brown's Bay Inn owner who Ron Otto, who has hunted extensively across North America, told me, "I wanted an outfitting business to be run as if I were the client. Limited hunters, quality game to hunt, good food and lodging at an all-inclusive price. No surprises."

And he wasn't kidding! It's obvious that his formula works. In the past, I've made three trips to this whitetail island.

Trip 1:
Windy Whitetails
As one old-timer bluntly put it, "To live on Wolfe Island (the windy island), you have to be psychologically capable." I had a hunch by the geographic location of this island that it probably was a little breezy, and it was! The whitetails have learned to live with it. The heaviest buck ever taken by a hunter on the island was 340 pounds (not field dressed), so they must get plenty to eat despite the constant wind.

During my first trip to the island my hunting partner Don Robbins and I saw, from well-placed stands, 26 bucks and 85 does. The stands are comfortable, quality-built ladder stands, or hanging stands -- "pin-ups" as the guides refer to them, all constructed by the expert staff.

I rattled in one buck that must have urinated a gallon as he pawed the ground 15 yards away. The varied tones of a True Talker deer call reeled in numerous bucks and does. And my doe estrous deer lure enticed one doe to lick the lure completely off every twig and plant I sprayed it on as I walked to my tree stand. It took that deer a good half hour to finally complete the job at the foot of my tree.

But as luck would have it, the big bucks were just going nocturnal on the eve of the rut. I did call in one 10-pointer, but he was with three does and I couldn't entice him those last few yards for a clear bowshot. The biggest buck I saw stood up at last light after having bedded in a patch of red dogwood. His high, white 10-point tines could be counted with the naked eye as they stood out in the dusk. But according to my rangefinder the big-racked buck was an unfortunate 327 yards away.

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