Well, after a year that had been to date, a continuation of 5 years that have been a pretty low point in my hunting career, everything turned around in literally a matter of seconds. It happened so fast, that I’ll give you some back story so this isn’t a “saw deer, shot deer, the end” post.
Since The Wife(tm) and I moved to Idaho from British Columbia in 2014, we haven’t exactly had a good run of hunting luck. We’ve spent piles of money on gas, burned all my allotted time off from work, and worn out several pairs of boots, mostly while not seeing anything much other than moose and other hunters (north Idaho is littered with both). True, we’ve shot enough does to keep ourselves in deer steaks, but after hunting the Kootenay valley in BC, seems to us that pickings down here south of the border have been slim indeed.
So far this year, we’d tagged a couple of does, both of which had turned out to be smaller than expected once we had them on the ground. Our freezer was still empty enough, that we ponied up the $199 (each) for second deer tags (that’s how they do second deer tags in Idaho). Since then, we’d put in a lot of time, and seen nothing, like usual.
Finally it came. Nearly late November, and we got our first snowfall. I hiked around in the snow until my feet swelled up and a toenail on my left foot is probably going to fall off from the way my cheap snow boot was rubbing it. Mostly saw 0 deer tracks, and the few I dis see were tracks of deer just passing through on the way to somewhere else. Then finally, after what seemed like forever (my feet and knees certainly thought so), I eventually found some area with enough tracks both coming and going to make me think it was a good spot.
The Wife(tm) and I hunted it hard two days in a row. I bounced a few does while walking around exploring the area, but they were all crashing brush and white tails vanishing into thick stuff so fast I never had a chance. Then, right in the last ten minutes of legal shooting light of the second day, I missed a shot at a doe. It was about 120 yards out, which isn’t that big a deal for me, but it was getting to be pretty dim light, and it ran off apparently uninjured at the shot. As I walked up to where it was standing, I figured out along the way how I missed. There was small twigs and brush sticking out over the place between me and where it was standing that I hadn’t caught in my scope in the heat of the moment. There was 0 blood in the snow at the point it was standing, and I easily trailed it’s tracks in the snow for 60 or 80 yards, and not a speck of blood anywhere. Clean miss. Depressing.
On the third day of hunting that area, the weather breaks nice and clear, so I figured to head in mid-day and get setup on a high spot in a lawn chair to watch a big clearing that adjoined the tree line where I’d seen the most deer tracks. I head in about 1PM, with a water pack on my back, a folding chair on my left shoulder, and my favorite rifle on my right. I’m being a little cautious, who knows what I might jump on the way in, but I was cautious on a mission to get to my spot so I could set up and spend the afternoon glassing and waiting, which meant I was moving a little faster than I probably should have been. I had hardly got out of sight of the truck, when I saw some moose. I waved at them as I walked by, and they stared back in that odd way that moose do.
Moving on up the trail, I was probably half a kilometer/500 yards along, when out of nowhere, without warning, it happened. A buck comes trotting out of the thick brush on my right, and comes to a halt roughly 40 yards down the trail. Any legal deer is a shooter deer to me, and this looked to be a decent buck no less, so there was no decision making process to go through. Ninja-fast, I spun the rifle off my shoulder and into my hands and had it up and the safety off and crosshairs on him in less time than it takes you to read this sentence. He had just wheeled around and was crouching for a leap back into the brush he’d come out of when I pulled the trigger. I saw him flinch at the shot, and then he crashed into the brush and was gone from my sight. The whole event took less than 5 seconds.
Shaken, I took a few deep breaths and just sat down in the trail to wait a few minutes and let my heart rate drop. He was either dead just inside the brush line, in which case there was no rush, or he was not there, in which case he might not be dead, and I did not want to push him. I was confident I had crosshairs on his chest when the gun went bang (or I would not have pulled the trigger), but it had happened so fast, the sheer speed of it all left me a slim whisker of doubt. I waited about 5 minutes or so, and then headed carefully up to go see if I could find blood at the spot where he was standing. Nothing… I followed his tracks a dozen steps or so into the thicker cover, and…. what was this? A chunk of bloody bone laying in the trail. A few yards more and some heavy bleeding started. I was feeling good about then. I felt even better when I realized that the blood trail was on a relatively straight line track headed directly back towards my truck!
Then… the good feelings started tapering off.. 50 yards… 100 yards… 150 yards… 200 yards… still finding plenty of blood splotches, at intervals that made me think he was bleeding out of an artery, but no deer. Concerned, I called The Wife(tm) on the radio (who was hunting only about 400 yards north of me) to come help track. She did, and we carried on together, her tracking, and me watching alertly in case he was still mobile and we bounced him. We found a few more chunks of bone along the way. Finally, about 300 yards from where I had pulled the trigger, we found him. As we had predicted from the fairly prolific blood trail, he had lost too much blood to carry on. The shot placement was too low to get his vitals properly destroyed, but the 180 grain Nosler Ballistic Tip had done what Nosler Ballistic Tips do, and his leg was basically amputated at the upper ‘knee’ (not sure the proper term for it), and he had bled out through where his leg had used to be. It wasn’t pretty, and I wasn’t at all happy with it, but it had gotten it done. I consoled myself over the shot placement by reminding myself that bow hunters (of which I am also one) kill animals by causing them to bleed out all the time.
As I looked him over, I quickly realized, that this wasn’t just a ‘decent buck’, this was easily the biggest hunk of whitetail deer meat that I’d ever personally taken down. He only had a stubby little fork antler on one side, and the other side, while much larger and more impressive, still did not do his body size any justice. He was easily as big as a big as a mule deer, his body thick and heavy in every respect. The Wife(tm) and I knelt down and gave thanks to God, our hearts that weird combination of heavy/sad/humble and elated/happy/joyous that most of us hunters feel after killing such a beautiful animal.
We took a few cell phone pictures, which you can see below (one of them unfortunately a bit blurry). Then it was time for the hard work to commence. After field dressing, The Wife(tm) went off to hunt until dark (her back is too bad to help with heavy lifting anyway), and I set about to drag him out of the woods. It was only about 200 yards back to the truck at that point, which was a huge blessing. If it had been any farther, I might have died from exertion, I think. Even after field dressing, I swear he weighed near as much as I do (250lbs). I can throw 120lb bales of hay around without hurting myself all that bad, and even pick them up and pack them around for short distances or stack them 3 high without a second thought. But with this guy, giving it all I could give er, it was all I could do just to drag him 10 or 15 yards a time between having to sit down and rest and rehydrate. But all big jobs eventually get done if you keep at it, and eventually I got him back to the truck, just before sundown. The Wife(tm) showed up shortly thereafter, backed the truck down into a ditch to ease loading chores, and that was that.
So, that’s the story, hope you enjoyed sharing our adventure(s). Here are the obligatory pics:
