This was the first deer opener I have ever experienced. what a blast it was, despite the little sleep i got due to my alergy of dogs and the house having 2 of them! We got out before the sun on saturday and saw 2 nice does right away. Nahh…we’ll wait for a buck. So we spent the whole day passing up doe after doe after doe until we finally saw a set of horns, though small, peaking over the hill. Well I had a decent shot at him after waiting him out for probably 45 minutes. It was only a 4 pointer but decently bodied. I took the shot, he flopped to the ground and rolled down the steep hill where we heard a thud. We went to the spot of the hit and found no blood, just a little hair and we never recovered the deer after cumulitive 3 hours of searching (went back with flashlights at night). We figured I must have had buck fever and just grazed the deer. Well this morning was absolutely dead and we didn’t see a dang thing! We went back for some food and went to the gas station. There we saw a dude with a 12 pointer and a 23″ spread! That motivated me bigtime to get back out there and put a buck, or at least something, in its grave. We got back out and saw some nice does in the cornfield. I tried to sneak up on them but couldn’t get a good shot because when I tried to get a lane, i spooked them. We got to the stand and were frustrated to find people down in the valley hootin’ and hollerin which we thought would for sure scare off anything around. It didn’t matter to the little doe that came running up the hill. I made a series of grunts with my mouth which stopped the deer right in its tracks and I was able to get the shot. We tracked the deer pretty far actually, probably 150 yards before finding it on the hill side. The worst part was the fact that the angle of the shot put the exit wound right through her gut. We were finding pieces of organs and tissue all the way down the blood trail. It wasn’t such a bad shot, right below the heart, but the exit wound was pretty darn gnarly. I gutted it out nearly on my own and experienced my first successful deer hunt. It was so great. I know I’m hooked for life. I will never forget riding on the tailgate with the deer at my side and seeing that awesome sunset over the hills.
Here are a couple pics from the hunt.
-Cade