Rattling and calling?

I've never seen anything about calling or rattling in the period. 

Their hunting methods were quite different than today. They would all be locked up in today's world. There are too different descriptions of what they call "fire hunts". One involved building a bright fire in a boat and moving along the bank of a stream, shooting deer staring at the light. In the second they set fires in a huge circle, shot the deer that tried to escape the circle. They also used candles to "spotlight"  deer, two methods described. In one, they put a candle in an apple tree deer were feeding on, hid and shot them by that light. In another they created a man-made salt lick and when the deer found it they climbed a tree near it, fastened a candle on a long pole, held it out over the deer and shot them.

Our seasons are generally in the fall during the rut, so calling and rattling are appropriate. If they were shooting them for food they shot them year round, maybe rattling and calling wouldn't work except in the fall. Also, I think I've read that the market hunters after deerskins concentrated on spring and summer seasons because of a difference on the skins during the different seasons, so, again, calling and rattling not really helpful.

I have the impressing deer were so thick on the ground that finding one to shoot was not usually a problem. In 1784 Johann David Schoepf said that deer were already getting scarce, but it was still not unusual for a man to kill 10-12 in a day, and in 1822 Wm. Blane told of two men who killed 16 deer and wounded several others on a two-day hunt. There are a lot of similar reports.

So, maybe many of the methods we think of as an essential part of deer hunting were just plain not needed in the day.

Spence