On Nov. 17, I drove to North Dakota. The lack of road-killed bucks during my trip shocked me. By mid-November, they’re usually piled up everywhere. On arrival, I hunted the first evening at an area littered with steaming-fresh buck sign but saw no deer. I tried the same spot the next morning, even rattling and grunting. Despite hundreds of yards of visibility, I saw nothing.

Around midmorning, I scouted a few public parcels before stopping at one that had been on my list for months. I referenced the HuntZone feature in my HuntStand app, which showed a steady southeast wind all afternoon. It was 1 p.m., and it seemed that deer were bedded, because I didn’t see anything while hunting or driving. Time to shake things up. I slipped toward the downwind edge of a thick bedding area with a plan to grunt and rattle.

About 100 yards from where I wanted to rattle, I ran into dry, crunchy weeds. Instinctively, I role-played a buck, grunting, raking an antler on saplings, and kicking away leaves like a buck making a scrape. Then I paused. I repeated those antics four more times until I reached the spot where I wanted to rattle. Suddenly, a twig snapped, and I caught movement. A buck came charging out, and I struck him with a well-placed arrow when he stopped 8 yards away. He was a mature, big-bodied Pope and Young-class 8-pointer. I don’t know if he was bedded alone or with a doe, but my grunting and raking sealed the deal.

Back in Wisconsin on Nov. 20, I was still-hunting along an oak ridge in gloomy weather when I bumped two does. They fled, but stopped when I grunted. I knelt in case a buck was with them. Sure enough, a mature buck ghosted out of the misty timber onto a logging road, disappearing just as quickly. The does went back across the logging road, and he followed. I didn’t get to study him with my binos, but with my eyes from 125 yards, I saw that he sported a bruiser body and large white antlers. Regardless, he ignored my grunts and snort-wheezes.

The first two nights of the Wisconsin gun season, I observed deer feeding in my food plots. On the second evening, more than 20 of them were out feeding, and two were great bucks that need another year to grow. Other than two buck fawns sparring, every deer was focused solely on feeding.

My sister experienced a mixture of feeding and waning rut behavior on Nov. 23 while hunting in South Dakota. Her target buck entered a picked cornfield that afternoon. Then, he began cruising across the field, likely looking for does. She stopped him 250 yards out and anchored him. Her hunt suggests that feeding areas with doe activity could be dynamite as November winds down.

Brooks Johnson, a property consultant of Bartylla’s Whitetail Plans, shared some promising news from Minnesota.

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“New does are still cycling,” he said. “I saw two younger bucks dogging a doe that they had been on for a few days. Gun season is closed across much of the state, and area bowhunters are back in the woods and seeing some big bucks out searching. A hunter I know killed a great buck the morning of Nov. 22 while it was looking for does.”

Joe Caudell, a deer biologist with the Indiana DNR, said the state’s peak rut was about two weeks ago, but there’s still plenty of activity unfolding as the rut spirals downward.

“This is a good time to rattle,” he said. “Fewer does are in heat at this point, and the bucks that are out looking to breed will be competing more heavily for them. We have a fairly balanced sex ratio, and while a lot of does have been bred, some have not, and the bucks are still actively looking.”

The HeadHunters TV team of Nate Hosie and Randy Birdsong capitalized on a couple of bruiser Missouri bucks while gun-hunting.

“The rut activity in Missouri seemed like a mix of lockdown and some mature bucks breaking loose and looking again,” Hosie said. “We were fortunate enough to capitalize on bucks that we believe were back out looking.”

If you’re still packing a buck tag in the Midwest, now is a good time to hunt downwind of doe bedding areas during the morning and midday hours. Watching a winter food source such as corn, wheat or beans for the afternoon shift is also a hot bet.

Finally, Joel Burham has been grinding it out all month in Iowa, passing on some nice bucks while waiting for something special.

“The last of the available does are cycling out of heat and working their way to feeding areas in the evenings,” he said. “The occasional cruiser is still on the move to find a doe that hasn’t yet been bred, though daylight movement has been cut significantly. While I’m seeing fewer deer, I know that the one deer I might see could be a giant. If you still have a tag in your pocket, push on. The last week of November has historically produced some big deer.”