I spent the first two days of the Zone3A season “guiding” two friends who had never hunted the bluff country of SE MN. I had let them know that we practice QDM on the farm and that from the trail cam pics it seemed to be paying off. From the pics and the 30 deer we almost smeared on the highway on the way down Friday night, they were pretty pumped for Saturday morning’s hunt.
We sat in three different stands along my favorite ridge. The other side usually gets pounded on opener and the deer come pouring over to our side. Unforetuneatly the bum-rush of deer from the neighbors drive never happened. However, we still were treated with a typical SE MN experience minus any buck sighting. We each saw a few does, a lot of turkeys, and a couple of grouse. I saw the same beautiful red and white coyote twice. I have shot other coyotes down there with quite a bit of reddish fur but I have never seen one without any brown or grey on it like this one. We all passed on shooting does (and the coyote) because we each expected a buck any minute and we didn’t want to scare it away with a loud shotgun blast.
After lunch we headed back to the same ridge for the last five hours of the daylight. I thought that I had them in good spots, but I was the only one to see deer the rest of the day. A basket eight and a basket ten walked by ten minutes before legal shooting time ended. Considering we only saw two deer between three people, that is one of the slowest afternoon/evenings that I can remember down there. 
One of my buddies left that night to hunt with his family up north. I am sure he thought that SE MN was over-rated, but that is what can happen when you only hunt one day. 
On Sunday, my remaining buddy and I set off to a different part of the farm. I set my buddy up on the edge of small ravine and a small overgrown hay field on top of the ridge. I set up 200 yards across the field where the ridge drops down a couple hundred feet to a trout stream in the valley below. I remember noticing how bright the moon and the stars were. After what seemed like forever waiting for the sun to come up, I realized that we got up an hour early due to daylight savings time ending. I had set my cell phone alarm to wake us up, knowing that the cell phone automatically changes time. Now I know that it only will change the time if it has a signal from a tower, stupid bluffs 
Oh well at least we were early, not late. I figured that my buddy is either sleeping in his stand, or he thinks that I am a real die hard hunter to drag us out to the woods this early.
The morning started out pretty slow, nothing but more squirrels and more turkeys making a racket somewhere down the hill from me. Finally at about 9:30 I hear what sounds like a heard of buffalo running straight up the hill. The hill is so steep that I can only see about 30 yards into the woods before it drops off out of sight. The hoof beats continue up the hill until a doe and a tall narrow 3 1/2+ year 8 pt stop panting like dogs directly under my tree. I normally would have taken the shot but I had some recent trail cam pics even bigger deer from the area emailed to me so I held off. He chased the doe around the field a couple of times and then she took off towards my buddies stand. The ridgetop field had enough curve to it so that both deer dropped from my sight as they neared my buddy. 30 seconds later I hear the blast that I was hoping for, and it was a single shot which is usually a good sign. I got down out of my stand to congratulate my friend. On my way to his stand, I saw the deer laying out in the field so I walked over to it before he got there. It was the doe. In his excitement he never even noticed the buck following her. 
He didn’t have any bonus tags so I offered to tag it for him so he could continue hunting for a buck, but he said that he would tag it. He was happy to have some meat for the freezer and he was done in time to watch the Vikes beat the Chargers. 
While I was unsuccessful in guiding my buds to the bucks that I all but guaranteed, I still had 2 ½ days to hunt so I had not given up on finding myself a shooter. That evening I hunted the edge of a corn field. I had 3 does, a spike buck and a 2 ½ year old eight walk by before dark, no shooters. Where were they?
That night I came to the conclusion that the bucks have to be with the does, and the does were feeding the corn at night so I should hunt the edge of the corn in the morning and hopefully intercept a buck on the way back to bed. I climbed into my stand the next morning and the wind was unbearable. The tree was swaying back and forth so much that my backpack came unhooked from the bow holder it was hanging on and dropped to the ground. The wind ripping over the bluffs, across the corn, and through the trees was as loud a jet engine. It didn’t take me long to conclude that there weren’t going to be any deer out in the open in winds like that. I departed to another stand a ways back in the woods but still on top of the ridge. It was still blowing like crazy. I sat there for an hour until I had enough. Even the squirrels couldn’t hang on.
I grabbed my climbing stand that I had stashed on top of the ridge and crept down into a sheltered ravine. The roar of the wind was still loud overhead, but barely a leaf fluttered down at my level. A hundred yards down the ravine I spotted two does bedded down on the opposite side. I back up twenty yards so that they were out of site around a corner and proceeded to climb a tree. Thankfully the roar of the wind up top covered the noise of my stand. I settled in for what could be a long wait. I figured that the deer wanted to avoid the wind as much as I did so I determined to stay put until the wind died.
Here is the ravine:
I had been reading a book for about hour when I saw a tail flicker out the corner of my eye. Normally I can hear dear before I can see them so I often read to pass the time. A doe had snuck with fifteen yards of me. She looked over her shoulder just as I heard a deep grunt behind me. I set book down and craned my neck. It was the beauty 10 point (actually 11 points with the extra 1″ browtine) from a trail cam pic taken 10 days before! The doe walked right below my stand with the buck trailing 30 yards behind her. He was headed directly towards me at my 3 o’clock. I had no shot but his spine until he turned to go around a tree and presented me with his left shoulder. My 3 inch magnum sabot hollow point went in one side and out the other. He jumped and ran a semi circle around in front of me before collapsing 20 yards to my 9 o’clock. If I hadn’t seen where he crashed it would not have been a problem trailing him because the blood trail consisted of two parallel lines of blood, often two feet up on the trunks of trees:
I had to wait until I stopped shaking before I climbed down from my stand. I admired him and said thanks for a few minutes and took a couple of pictures of the deer and self portrait with automatic timer on my camera:
I field dressed him and drug him half way up to the overgrown hay field. The hay field on top of the ridges is a 1 mile away from the farm in the valley so I took off for the farm to grab a four wheeler. On my way back from the farm I was stopped by a friendly CO. He saw that I didn’t have a gun and asked if I was trapping. I told him I had a buck down up top and he followed me with his truck up the logging road to have a look. He even helped me drag it the rest of the way out of the ravine to where I could load it into the four wheeler. He snapped this picture of me and we joked that it would make a great Polaris advertisement:
I washed the deer off at the farm and took some more self timer pictures up in an alfalfa field below the ridge we hunted Saturday. The view of the valley from up there is spectacular:
I love how dark he is, parts of his chest are almost black. He definitely will look great on the wall up at the cabin.
After this deer, I have a feeling that my friends will want to return next year for another “guided” trip. Maybe this time they will stick around a little while longer.
Which picture should I submit for the IDO photo contest?
I say it’s the same deer in the trail cam pic.
