Mobley Pond
Sixty million years ago, give or take five or ten million, some theorists believe the Earth either struck a small comet or passed close enough to it to create a massive meteor storm that struck most of what is today the Southeastern coast, leaving strangely shaped craters from the coastal lands of Georgia all the way to Nebraska. Or, some 175 thousand years ago, give or take five or ten thousand, hydrologic, soil and geological conditions along the same path shifted and flowed in such a way as to cause the same effect. Either way, what we got was some 500,000 wetlands from the size of backyard bathing pools to 24,000-acre behemoth swamps called Carolina bays, named not for the water that may or may not stand or have stood within them but for the bay trees that often line them, especially in the South. What makes Carolina bays unique—and mysterious, not to mention controversial—is that they are shaped like teardrops, the fat end of the tear facing southeast.
From this tower stand I can peer out across one of the largest of these tears, though not one of the best known as it sits on private land. Locally, this Carolina Bay is called Mobley Pond, named for the man who first tried to tame it more than two centuries ago. Or maybe somebody else. Depends on which local lore you choose to believe, just as its origin depends on which scientific theory you care to believe. Being a fellow who loves a good fireworks display, I go with the comet.
Mobley Pond isn’t a pond, not in the way you think of a pond: a depression full of green water, lined with cattails, shallow at the back where the basses and other sunfishes congregate to make their lives and provide you sport. In fact, nowhere in Mobley Pond will you find standing water, but it is home to monster alligators, not to mention panfish, coyotes, fox, rabbits (cottontails and their larger cousins, the swamp rabbits), weasels, opossums, bobcats, the late-coming armadillo, songbirds too numerous to enumerate in this space, wild turkey, ducks, geese, bobwhite quail, mourning doves, wild hogs and deer, not to mention for a fleeting time during late December and early January, woodcock.
But it is the deer that bring most folks to ask for an invite back. Big-racked bruisers, the kind that make a hunter’s pulse race when seen from a distance; close enough to shoot, they can give even the veteran hunter a bad case of gun-quivering, mirage-making buck fever.
That kind of deer. And shooting one looks as though it would be so easy. Mobley Pond isn’t home to a tree larger than a scrub. Not one, except for the alders and bays that line the old alligator-inhabited drainage canals and the odd pine sports growing short in wet loamy soil where the aquifer kisses the surface. It is just approximately five square miles of natural grasses and boggy black dirt, crisscrossed by deep-rutted deer and hog trails and 155-year-old canals dug by W. W. Starke, looking to turn a swamp into cropland. Except at the edges, none of these labors amounted to much. And nobody’s tried to tame it since.
Interesting thing, that lack of trees. Early histories speak of some large cypress, but those are long gone. Instead, as you sit in this tower you see almost a mile of waist-high brown grasses and briar heads to the front, with a few agricultural fields creeping tentatively into the crater from the sides. Behind is a 40-foot “hill” that rings the entire crater/sink with tall hardwoods and, at the top, massive pines, where the wet black loamy soil ends and turns mostly to sand.
Hence, the plethora of wildlife. There is vastly more cover, feed and browse than a casual tourist could ever comprehend, from wild grasses and the shoots thereof to the weeds and seeds and berries that grow with them. Normally you hunt deer at Mobley Pond two ways: from stands in the fields above when the deer come out to feed in the green patches, and from stands in the pond itself when they pass into and out of the pond to the same green patches. More does are taken here every year than at any other location on the farm. Bucks, however, are, as they say in the nearby town of Girard, a whole ‘nother story.
It’s enough to drive you crazy. Hunting in Georgia, even in a bean field, isn’t really all that much of a long-distance project; down in the forests and swamps, shooting is so close that, unless you just love your rifle so much you can’t do without it, a shotgun is often a much better tool. But in Mobley Pond, the bucks know the routine much better than the humans, and they prove it almost every season.
It is true, I suppose, that deer seldom look up, hence our love for stands. But with only that waist-high grass to impede vision for up to half a mile, it’s easy from a deer’s field of view to see a stand and the fellow wriggling around in it from a long way off. Second, the agricultural ditches are three to five feet below the waist-high grass, which means the ten- to 14-pointer you’re looking for can walk past fewer than 50 feet from the best setup and the hunter will never know he was ever closer than New York. Third, and the cruelest deer trick of all, is seeing through your binoculars a huge rack attached to a hidden body making its way nonchalantly through the grasses, always—always—600 or more yards distant. This brings on the commonly heard whine back at camp: “Oh, Lord, you should have seen . . .”
Four years ago, a hunter took a very nice ten-pointer in one of the green patches at the pond. Another shot one at dusk seven years ago along the very edge of the wild grasses. An eight-pointer fell at dawn three years ago in a fallow cornfield. And that was the end of big bucks after 15 years of hunting the pond for one week every year. You can almost hear that old big-racked Boone-and-Crockett champion laughing from the bottom of a canal. No, you can hear him.
On the other hand, you come to appreciate his victory over our high-tech tools. You can bet the Native Americans had only slightly better luck, unless they burned the grasses and forced the deer out, and the early settlers, once the canals went in during that fruitless battle against Mother Nature, probably didn’t fare much better than us. Mobley Pond has fought the plow, pollution and well-armed men. It has protected its wildlife well without the help of a government or the first tree hugger.
So another season comes around and again it all looks so easy, though you know come Sunday the chances of having Old Mose in the cooler are much smaller than not. But you love the red sunrise over Mobley Pond. Maybe you ponder on that comet while glassing the seemingly empty, yet, you know, so full terrain. Here the animals win almost every time, even against you. But ask yourself: Does it really get any better than this?