I pull up to one of the dozen or so parking lots scattered widely around the Holly State Game Area in northern Oakland County, planning to be the first guy in the woods. No dice. Two trucks are here already. Yes, it is 5:45 a.m. on November 29 and the sun’s first light is over an hour away. Yes, it is 10 degrees. But no, I am not first.

So now what? I know this little piece of public hunting land pretty well. The trails, the openings, where the deer sign is consistently found. I could move on to another parking area and hope to find a spot where I can be the first one in. But this game area holds a few thousand acres and I only know this small part. I park and go in, packing my ground blind in on my back. It’s quite dark but with 6” of fresh snow and a little moonlight, it’s not hard to see the footprints of my fellow hunters. I walk about half a mile in and see that I am now leaving the only prints. Relieved, I keep moving in toward an open area of an acre or so where a few rows of corn have been planted. I clear a spot a ways off the trail and set up my blind. I work quickly but the cold air makes the blind fabric snap, crackle and pop, and I imagine a fellow hunter seething somewhere further off the trail. Have I set up in his shooting lane? Are we going to be seeing and shooting at the same deer?

I get over my little insecurities and settle in to watch dawn come up in the woods. Nothing but a few squirrels and jays are moving. After a couple of frigid hours I can’t feel my feet, and by 8:30 I am packing the blind back into its bag. Now that it’s light, I’m even more paranoid about disturbing somebody’s actual hunt. I’m relieved that there are still no tracks other than mine, and I head back to the truck. The same trucks are still there in the lot.

I never saw the other hunters. I don’t know if they saw me.

This episode has had me puzzled about the etiquette of hunting on public land. I’m a newbie. I took up hunting after age 40 when my teenage son expressed an interest in it, so I have no background in the finer points. Our deer-hunting experience has been mostly confined to 80 acres of private land way up in Michigan’s sparsely-populated upper peninsula. You can hunt for days in the U.P. and see no one. But here in the northern reaches of metro Detroit, it’s a whole different gut pile. I wanted to find out if there are rules for getting in and out of the woods when you have to share them with a few (dozen) strangers.

A Google® search on Michigan hunting etiquette turned up some good information in a hunting forum. JeffH had concerns like mine:

I don't want to be that turd that everyone talks about on public land, but I still want to have a decent experience of my own. My friend has good luck tracking deer and walking around, with is new to me. I always just sat in a stand.

So using public land - what time do people generally head out? I mean, if you are going to sit in one spot, you'll want to be in position before sunrise. If you want to get away from everyone, you'll want to go a half mile in or more - that's a long way to travel in the dark on foot over rough terrain, isn't it? Considering the distance - do most stay out all day rather than come in for a bit mid-day (in the past, I tend to come in at 11 and go back out at 3)?

Here’s the link to JeffH’s discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.hunting/browse_thread/thread/5707f7b6d757c2c7

JeffH was clearly onto something. Several helpful hunters responded. Here are a few of the rules they shared:

•Scout the area beforehand so you’ll know your way around.
•If you can’t scout the area before your hunt, don’t go in the dark. That way you can see other hunters and they can see you.
•If you encounter other hunters, avoid them. If you stumble into their hunt, apologize with a waive and move away.
•Plan to hunt all day so you’re not moving around and increasing your odds of disturbing others.

All good, common-sense advice. But I wanted more detail. More hard and fast rules. If you discover there’s another hunter in the area, are you bound to go back to the truck? Obviously, you shouldn’t use somebody’s tree stand or pop-up blind. But can you sit down and hunt from a brush pile that was obviously man-made? What if it looks like no one’s used it all season? If I build a ground blind/brush pile, is there an accepted way of signaling that this is my blind?