UPDATE: It finally happened, tag filled at last!
I went out this morning to the same clearcut where I saw that disappearing deer the other night.
I was late leaving the house and only got the the parking spot 10 minutes before sunrise, drinking my coffee in the way there. As soon as I got there, nature called. Perfect timing
. I grab my TP, and find a tree to lean against. I tell you, I need to do squats or wallsits or something, because afterwards my knees were aching and my legs were shaking (this will matter later).
I grab my pack, etc. and head down the road. As I’m nearing the last bend in the road before the clear cut, I look to my right and see a little deer maybe 12yds away. Can’t tell if it has antlers, but I don’t care as I have a doe tag, too. As soon as I raise my rifle, it bolted. I have a short half hearted chase, but the trees were dense, and it went straight down a steep incline. I looked for it for a moment, then moved on. As I’m about to round the corner, I decide I better pee now, so it’s on the back of the cut bank of the road, and not blowing into the cut.
As I’m halfway into the process, this buck rounds the corner. I think I startled his as much as he did me! I pinch it off, and go after him, squeezing off a shot as he was fleeing with my bits still hanging out. I missed, and worse, that was reckless. Luckily I knew the terrain a bit, and I was the only one parked at the only access road, so there wasn’t anyone else there…but still.
I fixed myself, and went around the corner, and he was slowly trotting towards the next corner, 97yds away (I checked it with my lrf afterwards). I got down into a kneeling position, lined up my crosshairs center mass above his legs and shot.
Yup, right after chiding myself for shooting at a moving target, I did it again. Foolish.
I see him do a kind of double step/limp kind of thing and go bolting off around the corner he was rounding, followed by a crashing sound. I started to run after him, but remembered the lessons learned from that spike the other day. “Thoroughly examine the spot where you shot him for any blood, hair, etc.”
I slowly crept up the that spot, all the while listening for any more crashing in the timber. No sounds. No blood. No hair. I’m thinking “great, I missed again and blew it…but at least he’s probably not wounded”. Nonetheless, I followed the path I saw him taking to see if maybe it just took a while for him to start bleeding. 23 yards up the road, in a pull off area to the left of the road, there he lay. Dead.
Holy hell, it happened!
I get him gutted, and call a few friends to see if anyone wants to help drag him out of there. No takers. Ok, gotta do it myself. I wrap him in a contractor bag, zip tie it on, grab him by the and start pulling. The cars about 1000yds away, and the first 200 or so are up hill. By time I got back to the car I could hardly stand. Definitely going to invest in a pack frame for next year. I don’t know how much he weighed, but when I got him home I hung him from my fish scale; the scale goes to 110lbs and he maxed it out.
Super excited and grateful to have harvested my first deer. No tag soup for me this year!
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