HUNTING -- It ain't over 'til it's over, as the saying goes.

The whitetail rut might be winding down in some areas, but it's still a positive factor for hunters who have tagged big bucks in the past couple of days.

Bowhunters in eastern Washington's late archery season are effectively using calls and scents for bucks on the prowl.

Before climbing into his stand for the afternoon on Sunday, Joel Enevold said he freshened nearby scrapes with Tink's 69 doe-in-rut buck lure. He barely got settled in his stand at 1 p.m. before he spotted the "split brow-tine" buck he'd been seeing in the trail cam photos. The bruiser was working a scrape. The buck slowly but surely kept coming in, sniffed the air below Enevold's stand and posed for a storybook archery shot that dropped him five yards from where he was hit.

"This buck is the largest I have taken since the age of 15 and I feel very fortunate to have had the chance to harvest such a great animal," he said.

Meantime, his brother passed up two 4x4 bucks that afternoon. "Both bucks were grunting up a storm, and one buck decided to stop 20 yards away and shred a tree for a few minutes," Brandon Enevold said. "Bucks seem to be actively searching for does and traveling with their noses close to the ground."

He's confident his time will come before the season expires.