Shallow-draft johnboats and canoes can put hunters in country where few others tread; they're handy for bringing bucks out, too.

Thanks no doubt in part to the fact that he spent his final 27 years in and around the small town in North Carolina's Great Smoky Mountains where I grew up, Horace Kephart has always been one of my favorite people associated with the outdoors. For starters, he was a literary figure of considerable repute. His book, Camping and Woodcraft, ranks as one of the 10 bestselling outdoor-related books of all time and has never been out of print in the 101 years of its existence.

"Kep" was also widely recognized as the "Dean of American Campers" and along with Theodore Roosevelt was a charter honoree in the American Camping Hall of Fame. Add to those qualifications a remarkable knowledge of woodsmanship, pioneering studies of ballistics, gunsmithing genius and camp cookery expertise, and you have an outdoorsman for all seasons.

Yet the thing about Kephart that probably has the most appeal to the modern hunter was his consuming passion for remote places. He coined the phrase "back of beyond" and was never happier than when in a cozy camp built entirely with his hands. He lived off the land, savoring every minute of the wilderness life, and left all of us a tidbit of wisdom we should remember every day: "There is no graduation day in the school of the outdoors."

My introduction to hunting far from avenues of asphalt and armies of orange came through a staunch son of the North Carolina mountains named Joe Scarborough. Joe had done three tours of duty as a sniper in Vietnam, and he credited his deer hunting experiences with allowing him to survive. When he returned home, he renewed his love for the hunting ways of autumn with a will, and sharing some of his approaches should be informative for anyone interested in this adventurous approach to hunting.

"I want to be at least five miles from the nearest road," Joe was fond of saying, "and 10 is a lot better. Most hunters won't get much more than a mile from the nearest highway or maintained trail, while deer are in many ways just the opposite. If they can get away from hunting pressure and still have plenty of food, that's what they are going to do."

His approach was simple enough, although it isn't necessarily recommended as the best one. Joe would stuff a few essentials into a light backpack--some dehydrated food and high-energy snacks, a couple of space blankets, water treatment tablets and rain gear--and head off into some little-traveled section of one of the million-plus acres of land embraced by the Nantahala and Pisgah national forests.

All across the country there are similar opportunities awaiting hunters who harken to the call of adventure, are reasonably fit and don't mind the rigors of long walks and rough camping.

For the most part, these situations involve national forests, but there are also other situations--especially in some of the more sparsely populated states and in regions of extensive wetlands--where it is possible to get away from it all on private land (with landowner permission, of course).

The whole idea is to hunt whitetails in places seldom if ever visited by other hunters. One advantage is that bucks have the opportunity to live longer in such situations and thus grow bigger racks. Another is that deer in remote areas are more likely to feed and move during shooting hours and are perhaps a tad less wary--in marked contrast to highly pressured deer that are always on high alert and move mostly at night.