I headed to northeast Oklahoma the day after last Thanksgiving, full or fire. I’ve had some of my best hunts of the last decade in this region during the first week of the December post-rut. My friend Corey Corson, who runs the hunting on Liberty Ranch outside Pawhuska, showed me cam images of three old 8-point target bucks. Corey said that nobody had hunted those bucks all season. As I climbed into my stand near a corn feeder in the chilly predawn the first morning, my only concern was that I would kill out the first hour of this six-day hunt.

As I climbed out of my blind at dark on day three, I was getting concerned. I’d seen several 2-year-old bucks and a bunch of does, but no shooters. But the mature 8-points were still here. They showed up on three different cell cams between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. across the section I hunted.

Okay, I get it, I thought. I’ve dealt with plenty of you nocturnal devils before. I decided to sit from sunup until sundown on days four and five. You bucks can’t stay completely nocturnal forever. Surely one of you will slip up to get a bite of corn or push a doe in daylight.

I snuck into my stand in the dark on day six in a panic. Still hadn’t seen a shooter, but they were still popping up on camera deep in the night. And to complicate matters, now two of my three targets had broken racks! One had lost a G-3 overnight, and the best buck of the lot had snapped off his left beam two inches from the base! I have rarely shot a buck with a missing tine, and never one with a snapped off beam. But this was a damn hard and frustrating hunt, would I shoot one now?

Turns out I didn’t have to make that decision. All three target bucks and any other mature deer in the section stayed wildly nocturnal for the entire week. Remember, this hunt was around feeders, and the bucks had not been pressured.

Lesson: Just as mature bucks may be visible in daylight for a few days (typically in the the rut) there are times of the season (often in post-rut) when they go deeply, deeply nocturnal and seem to vanish. You can’t predict it, and you can’t make them move. During one of these frustrating nighttime phases, the best you can do is keep running cameras to confirm a big deer is still around (he almost always is), and then keep grinding and hunting hard. A ghost buck may or may not slip up and move in daylight, but you need to be there if and when he does. If he finally shows up with a broken tine or beam, well, to shoot or not is up to you.