Well, lemme see if I can help, as it so happens that I'm sitting here at my electronic-computational device, snacking on some venison kilt in the year of our lord, 2007, said meat having remained frozen till I got gnawin hungry an cooked the varmint (after I thawed it). Lawfire left out another method. Goes like this.
Hunting season here corresponds to the rutting season (broadly speaking, October through January), during which time the frisky critters like to hook up an shag, baby, which means that the wily hunter will be out looking for sign. What is sign, you ask? It's the bucky buck version of bling. It's the cool car. The nice pad. The gold neck chain. The dance-floor shimmy that sez gimme gimme gimme.
An it looks like this: small to smallish trees with bark rubbed off them down low where the buck has given it a good bullyragging with his horns, the ends of low-lying branches an twigs thereabouts snap'd an crack'd an bent where he's sometimes given them a go, too. This barkless tree is known as a rub.
You'll very likely also find a scrape, which is a patch of ground where the horny devil has scraped away everything down to the dirt so he can go wee-wee on the patch, sometimes leaving a nice batch of what sorta looks like chocolate M&Ms, which are, of course, not edible, but all of which appears to be mighty appealing to the females of the species. Sometimes you'll not merely see these things, but also smell that smelly musky bucky smell at a fresh scrape.
Oh, but observing these things, what's a hunter to do? Take note. See, there'll be a trail of some sort, a path of likely, even habitual, travel to an from the site. Our keen hunter will pick a spot to observe that trail downwind of said rub or scrape. Then he'll do this: he'll get up in the pre-dawn hours, or maybe even sometime just before dusk, an sit in that spot he's picked. He'll wait till he sees bucky buck moving back to his pad, that place where he puts out the bling that makes all the doe ladies sing. An when bucky buck gets close enough, our wily hunter pulls a trigger, twangs a bowstring, clicks open a pocketknife, casts a magic spell, or does whatever it is that he does to drop that critter.
If he's using a firearm, it could be anything of sufficient legal caliber (unless he doesn't give a hoot'n toot about legality), but 30-30 Winchester is widely considered to be the most popular deer hunting rifle round ever. Course he might also use 30-06, 308, or any number of a great, great many other things (7mm, for instance, which is a great round), an he could be shooting these things outta all kinds of actions, too. Single action, lever action, semi-auto, pump-action. Depends depends depends.
In any event, many, many things have been left out of this account, but thatsa sorta 'nother way to do it.
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