Driving game animals is as old as man himself, and depending on the size of ground to be driven it can be successful with as few as three or four hunters, or as many as a dozen and sometimes even more. Driving game gives the hunter a tremendous advantage in this sense: It puts animals on the run, fleeing from the danger that put them out, yet moving head-long into riflemen on stand someplace up ahead.

Successful drives require three major ingredients: careful timing, stand selection, and advancing in unison.

By timing I mean that all participants are "on the clock" in their proper place at the appointed time.

Standers, what my hunting sons and I call being in the "gunner’s chair," should carefully choose locations in which bucks will try to sneak out when pressured by those driving them. For example, side canyons that go all the way up to a saddle or ridge, where deer can sneak over then drop down into another drainage, are always solid choices on which to position a rifle. These can be anywhere along the line of the drive wherever they’re found and not in just one specific place or at the end of the planned drive.

Dry creek or stream beds deep in canyon bottoms always have deer trails following them because of sheltering natural cover, and a gunner should be situated here at the end of the drive waiting until pushers come into view. Someone on stand should cover small gullies or draws lined in oaks, madrone, bay trees or just tall brush angling up from bottoms. Blacktails on the run will use any and all of them trying to escape unseen.

I know a family of dedicated hunters who make the same drives year after year through the same series of canyons, and they tag bucks almost every season. They’ve done so literally for decades, and it points the way to another important lesson about successful drives: Once you find a piece of country with bucks in it, it’s likely you’ll find other antlered deer there in following years. The conditions, elevation, location of water and density of cover all make certain places "natural attractors" that will draw wary deer. The opposite is also true: There is a good bit of country in which deer rarely spend any time at all or just travel through heading for someplace more to their liking. Learn the difference and find that gem of a hotspot. It will produce for you for years.

TIMBERLANDS
Take another step up in elevation and we find ourselves hunting in timberlands. This is marked by yet another change in temperatures, the types and amount of cover (or, in some instances, the lack of it), and how deer live and move through it.

Because of moderating and often even cooling temperatures, blacktails in timber country can be found out still feeding or moving much later in the morning than in lower, hotter country. Water does not take on the importance it did earlier because almost every canyon has a small stream or creek running in its bottoms. Deer here also tend to leave bedding areas earlier in the afternoon to move out and feed, so literally seeing game is also generally somewhat easier.

In this more expansive land of big canyons, broad side hills, deep bottoms, and pine-studded plateaus, you’ll discover one of the finest hunting grounds anywhere on earth. One productive way to hunt on foot here is with two or three riflemen paralleling side hills but on opposite sides of a canyon from each other. Now each can literally look cross-canyon at the other’s progress, often see into cover because of the steep angles, and see deer moving ahead that the man on that side cannot see because of cover or pitch of the ground. In a real way you could say each hunter is driving deer for his partner.

Timber bucks like to bed down after a night of feeding in what I call "cover breaks," and not just timber for timber’s sake. I try to get above my targeted area, then move along searching for such spots as little side hill terraces where the land levels briefly in stair steps, or where tall timber and small openings meet. Bucks like to lay up in cover but where they can look out onto more open ground up high or catch the scent of intruders on rising thermals.