The small buck tiptoed into the corner of the woods so quickly and quietly that the hunter in the Ol' Man climbing tree stand 30 yards away almost didn't notice him.

It was barely daylight, just legal shooting time. The buck sniffed the ground where some liquid C'Mere Deer attractant had been squirted, then slowly edged around the hunter, scooping up the occasional acorn from the forest floor.

The little buck was just the first of a parade of deer the hunter saw that morning before arrowing a large doe that walked along the exact same track the buck had taken earlier.

I was the hunter perched in that tree, and this exciting early November hunt took place on the Jackson County Waterfowl Management Area in northeast Alabama three years ago. I had not seriously bowhunted in a couple seasons, but my pal, Andy Beasley, talked me back into it.

He helped me get my gear ready and even scouted out the public land where we were hunting. It turned out to be one of the most enjoyable hunts of that entire season for me -- except for maybe the long drag to get the deer out.

That hunt perhaps illustrates the opportunity that is available on the state's wildlife management areas scattered throughout North Alabama. Thousands and thousands of acres are available to hunters, all for the price of a $16 WMA hunting license.

It's the cheapest hunting club -- and the largest -- you'll ever have the opportunity to belong to. Once you break free from the idea that private ground offers far better hunting than public ground, you just may wish you'd gone public years earlier.

My friend Beasley grew up hunting in clubs and that continued well into adulthood for him. As good hunting leases got harder to find and prices went up -- and as Andy matured as a hunter -- he turned exclusively to archery. He still has some private ground he hunts, but public-land bowhunting is a big part of his game plan every season now.

Instead of finding public ground confining, he has found it liberating. Private hunting lands might be no more than a few hundred acres. Beasley likes the idea of having much bigger spaces to roam on the state's network of WMAs. If he doesn't like where he's hunting, he picks up and finds a new place. That's easy to do on a public ground where there might be 45,000 acres of land. The opportunities are seemingly endless for an enterprising hunter who doesn't mind a little walking.

Beasley has had to make some equipment changes to get into this new form of hunting, but we'll talk more about that later.

Thousands of acres are waiting for you, too, if you're willing to do a little more work and a lot more bowhunting.

A TALE OF TWO SEASONS
If you spend much time on the WMAs, you may find the hunting to be a little crowded when bow season first opens in October. For the first month of the season, lots of people flock to these public lands.

But that changes once gun season opens. The typical WMA has a gun hunt every couple of weeks. But in between those hunts, the WMAs are nearly empty.

"From mid-November to the end of January, you can have a lot of these WMAs to yourself if you're a bowhunter," said Deer Studies Leader Chris Cook of the Division of Wildlife and Freshwater Fisheries. "A lot of hunters have more than one WMA they visit and they like to travel around for the different gun hunts. They hang up their bows once gun season opens."