Stories...

I was hunting Coon Valley near the Kickapoo river in western Wisconsin about 20 years ago, one deer hunting season where there was 1 foot of crusty snow on the ground. Opening morning my partner shot a nice 8 pointer just after sun up with his .303. Unfortunately the buck was moving through tamarack and be it a deflection or bad timing at 70 yards the shot hit just behind the ribs. He waited 15 minutes and then stomped down to my stand and ask if I would help him track his deer down. It wasn't the tracking that was hard, spotting blood splatter on snow, but taking each step and going 8 inches into soft snow underneath was torture. We tracked him for almost a 1/4 mile and found where he had laid down and must of heard us coming so up he went again. The second time we found his lay, we decide to stay seated for a while and see if he wouldn't bleed out. Problem was 1/4 mile away was a public hunting ground and we didn't want to push him across the road. After tracking this deer for over 4 hours we finally found him. What seemed to be close to 2 miles of tracking, the buck circled around in the woods and ended up not more than 50 yards from where he had been originally shot. I said I thought only rabbits did that!

Animals aren't always graceful.

Last year I was easing along an old logging road to get to a spot where I planned to hunt. It had been raining and the ground was wet and quiet. Suddenly not 10' to my left a does head popped up. She had been feeding and with her head down I couldn't see her behind some brush. And she didn't see or hear me. We saw each other at the same time. She turned quickly to run and slammed hard into a tree. She was stunned and went down for a second before slowly staggering off.

Roughly 20 years ago I was driving on a rural road while my 11 or 12 year old son was riding with me. We rounded a curve to find about a dozen juvenile turkey in the road. All but 2 flew off into the woods. For some reason 2 young Jakes decided to run on the road. I followed slowly thinking they would eventually get off the road and out of the way. But after about 100 yards I decided to give a friendly toot of the horn to encourage them.

Both birds took flight, but after getting about 15' off the ground the bird on the left decided to turn to the right. The bird on the right decided to go left. They collided in the air and landed in the road with feathers flying everywhere. We both laughed almost to tears.

Yes, they are not always gracefull. One of my most memorable successes was a big 8pt running a large doe full speed across a cut corn field about 200yds away from me. I shot the doe first, she folded right up and the buck smacked into her and cartwheeled right over his rack. I dropped him as he was staggering back to his feet with mud stuck to his rack.

At least that guy has half an excuse, age. I have no excuse, was in my late 20's when that happened to me.

Reading about dropping off to sleep made
me think of a few years ago when I was out
hunting. I was already pretty fatigued, and
sitting in the quiet in a comfortable chair
out of the cold wind made me doze off,
but I didn't realize it. I woke up about 9:30
- 10 PM and it's perfectly dark and quiet
and my body is stiff with the cold and my
arms and legs are asleep. My first thought
is dang it, I've done had a stroke and I
have no idea where I'm at

The first year my son finished Hunter Safety(and I took it too and scored highest on the test) I took him deer hunting. Opening morning a herd of 15 doe walked under us 30 ft. off of a hill top. My son had a bad case of buck fever and just sat there and smiled. I nudged him several times, but then I decided to shoot first picking out the largest doe. As I pulled the trigger a running fawn crosses my line of fire and goes down. All the rest scatter. Though it was custom for the "new guy" to gut all the deer, he didn't want to screw anything up, so I walked down and started in. About half done, that big doe comes back to watch me. My gun is 4 feet away with an open bolt and I'm up to my elbows inside the cavity. My son finally comes to his senses and pops the big doe with a single shot. Later at the registration station the warden walks up to me and says, "I see your son got a fawn." "Nope" I said proudly, "that's mine." The warden turned away all red in the face, not saying another word. My son is now 41 and we still laugh about that day at deer camp.

Now I've seen all sorts of items that can help track deer, like blood sniffing dogs and UV tracking lights, etc. Though not in law enforcement, my son has been trained in police science. Last year I shot a nice buck just before closing but couldn't find it only 60 yards away after sunset. My son came upon the scene and after showing him the POI blood on corn stubble, he walked with me a little but started to veer away. At 60 yds., he was some 20 yards south of me and said "here it is dad!" He said he can identify direction by angle of blood splatter at POI.

It had been a long day for my buddy Sky. We were camped on Bryant Creek in Southern Missouri in my dad's 5th wheel. Sky was a cop at the time and had to work the night shift. He had driven 40 miles after getting off of work and had slept 2 hours in his car at the gate to the farm that we were to hunt. I had scouted the day before and had found a scrape line on a big flat at the far end of the 1600 acre farm. This property was a mile wide at the front and tapered to 40 acres at the back property line. The flat was about 2 miles in from the gate. Sky had never been back there and has always had a phobia about getting lost. He did it in Colorado and a couple of times at home, so he was a little worried when I told him where the flat was. I dropped him off at the scrapes with instructions to go east to the road and then turn south to take him back to the truck. I have seen him walk around with a compass in his hand and I am sure that is what took place this time. I can picture him walking around mumbling, "I gotta remember to go east. I gotta remember to go east".

Then the sky opened up. It rained, and rained, and then it rained some more. It rained hard without let up all day. That evening around 10:00 Mr. Smith who owned the mill where we were camp told us to pull the campers out. The creek was on the rise. It was midnight by the time we moved everything to high ground. Then we helped Mr. Smith box his items in the mill's second floor store and move it to the attic. It was 2:00A.M. by the time we got to bed. Sky passed out immediately having been up for over 32 hours with 2 hours sleep. We had friends parked next to us at Mr. Smith's house. He had let us park by his porch and hook our electric up. I heard Ralph working on his camper and rolled the window open to see what was happening. That woke the Sky up.

Sitting up in bed he blurts out, "Who's that out there?".
"It's Ralph working on his camper," I answered.
"Well what's this over here?" he said pointing at the yellow light shining through the diffused window of the front door.
"That is the front porch".
Slamming his head back onto his pillow he said, "I have to remember that the yellow light is the porch".

I fell out of bed laughing. Dad came in wondering what was going on with me laughing like hyena. Wiping the tears from my eyes, I told him that Sky was the only person in the world who could get lost in a 32 foot 5th wheel.

BTW, the mill that we had been camped by had 2 1/2 feet of water on the second floor. About a 15 foot rise.

I have another one where I wasn't exactly successful. When I was a young boy
I lived on a 500acre farm and my grandad didn't give a crap about hunting seasons and such. I think I was about 13 on summer break when my grandad told me to get us a deer. So I took his old 1873 30-30 and walked along this logging trail we used a lot when we cut wood. About 1/2 mile of woods then it entered the edge of a bottom field briefly to climb a ridge then re-entered woods at the top and circled back to our house in a different section of woods. It was a foggy morning and I was ascending the ridge as the fog was lifting. When I got about 50yds from the top I spotted a deer with head down eating honeysuckle in the fence row close to the top of the ridge. As I got closer the fog lifted enough to see it was a nice 6pt buck.
If you've never stalked deer, you might not know that they wiggle their tail just before lifting their heads when grazing. Every time he wiggled his tail I stopped and didn't blink. When he put his head down again, I would very slowly advance a few feet. We did this dance at least a dozen times. About 20yds away , the fog is now just over my head and I'm standing there with rifle pointed at him, hammer back, lever squeezed, and slack pulled out of the trigger. He finally decides something ain't right and he needs to investigate me. He walks up to his nose being about 2 feet from the muzzle of my rifle. He cants his head from side to side and flips his ears back and forth for what seemed like an eternity. If he had charged me, I would have blown his skull apart at that distance, but he didn't, and I couldn't bring myself to pull that trigger. He finally lost interest in me and walked up the hill into the woods and I just let him go.
Grandad said I probably did the right thing, but I still needed to get a deer. A few days later I did get a spike, he was probably better eating anyway.

I had a fun one several years ago. Hunting mature hardwood timber with a pretty open understory. Small parcels, I was maybe 200 yards from a heavily hunted neighboring woods. After a flurry of 5 shots, a large doe came my way at a trot through the timber. I tried to whistle stop her, but she picked up speed instead. My first shot appeared to have no effect, but she piled up hard on the second. Assuming a shoulder DRT hit from my. 300SAV, I started to climb down to get my deer, and she jumped up and crashed off into heavy cover while I was halfway down the ladder. A short blood trail led to the thoroughly dead deer. The 5 shots had broken her LF leg low, and my second shot broke her RF high just below the brisket, causing her to take a header into a large black ash knocking her out for a moment. I could see deer hair, a blood smear and bark knocked off where she hit the tree. Fortunately, my first shot was through the back of the lungs.

A friend had some family property with a host of pecan trees and. Tree rats. We set up on top of a hill next to the stand, under a shrub covered with poison ivy. We didn't see the poison ivy until after we set up our table and chairs for an afternoon of shooting tree rats.

We ran back to his grandparents house and got cleaned up then went back with a couple bottles of roundup to clean up the ivy. When we returned a few weeks later we made a record haul in a couple hours, with no itching or ugly rash. His grandmother cleaned and prepped those squirrels faster than we could ever dream of and made a great squirrel stew that night.

My last deer hunting trip was an effort in suck. The morning started out clear and cool...in the upper 30's to lower 40's. The afternoon went to the mid 80's with an evening downpour that brought the temp to the mid 50's. And I forgot to bring my rain gear so my walk out was NOT FUN. I wound up with a cold and I didn't see anything worth shooting that entire weekend.

I have several stories about my late dog, Nyssa. She had a superior nose and could find almost any wounded or dead bird or mammal.

I invited a friend to dove shoot on my place. At the end of the hunt he told me he had shot another dove but it flew into a thick patch of woods and he couldn't find it. I boasted, "Don't worry, Nyssa will find it for you." I sent her towards the woods with the command, "Dead bird! Hunt dead." She ran to the woods and while my guest and I were talking, she brought the bird back quite alive but with a broken wing. He took his bird and later I heard he sung Nyssa's praises all over the county.

She did the same on lost birds and deer many times in her 15 years and I miss her dearly ... and probably always will.

I can’t even remember how long ago it was, but one year there were so many deer around here that we were allowed to kill two of them - as long as one was a doe. I’d already killed a buck early in the season, so I was looking for a doe in the hills east of here on the morning after we’d had a few snow flurries.

I was sitting on the side of a clearing near the top of a ridge when two medium sized deer walked out - maybe a hundred yards away. I put my scope on them and could clearly see that neither of them had antlers. So I put the crosshairs on the side of the chest of one, and squeezed the trigger - BOOM!

I don't know which direction the other deer went, but the deer I shot “hunkered up,” and kind of frog hopped downhill a little ways before disappearing. I waited a few minutes, then hiked over to where I’d last seen her. Lo and behold, there was a dead, two-point mule deer buck laying there!

I was almost sick. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen those antlers in my scope. That was until I looked at that dead deer a little closer - the darned thing had about an inch of snow on him, and he was cold! Someone had probably shot him a couple of days before, and when they discovered he had antlers, just walked away.

After a quick look around, I spotted a fresh, bright red blood trail in the snow not 10 feet from the dead buck. The blood trail led downhill 40 or 50 yards, and at the end of it, I found the doe I’d shot through both lungs piled up in the sagebrush.

About 10 years ago I shot a nice-for-public-land 8 point buck. He was on a pipeline clearing near the private Boundary so I shot him high- neck...DRT. While he was doing his last leg kicks in the open, another slightly smaller buck charged out of the heavy cover and began savaging him with antler and hoof. He tossed my buck up off the ground twice. Not wanting to take another buck off this land, I gave him 2 warning shots to drive him off. Even then he hung out within 100 yards while I dressed my buck. He had impaled the abdominal wall of my buck in 2 places and left a 3" antler tine behind.

Maybe I should call these stories, The Adventures of Sky.

Many moons ago my buddy Sky shot a small 8 point one week after I had taken a big. one. Of course I had to gig him a little by saying things like, "I'm really proud of you, Sky, but if you had waited a couple of years that buck could have been big like mine. (Yeah, I can be a jerk, but it is fun.) I rode him pretty hard all of the way home. Upon arriving one of his co-workers drove up to show us his deer. Looking into his truck bed we saw a 30# bambi. This was a Missouri deer and had cost $50 for a non-resident license. Turning to Sky I had to apologize, "I take back everything that I said about your little deer."

While sitting around the campfire while on a Colorado hunt the subject of missed shots came up. Of course, Sky made the comment that he had killed every deer that he had ever shot at. To be honest, he had only taken 3 or 4 at that time. Karma has a way of sneaking in and did the very next day. While slipping along a snowy road Sky came face to face with a nice mulie. Unfortunately they saw each other at the same time. The buck reversed direction and ran around a curve in the road. Sky took off over the top of the hill and arrived in time to see the buck hit the brush. Now we are lowland people. Our home is 800' above sea level and we were hunting around 7000'. Sky sat down to catch his breath and while huffing and puffing saw a bull elk on the other hillside. Raising his rifle he breathed on the scope and fogged the lens. Wiping the lens with his hanky, he took a rest and sent a 180gr on it's way. Then he came looking for me.
"I just shot a big bull elk," he blurted when he had finally found me. "It was about 300 yards and I had a rest"
Now I have seen Sky shoot and he is pretty good. He shot on the rifle team in ROTC and had been on the local police force where he took 2nd place at the police academy. I had little doubt that he had missed, but upon arriving we found no blood. It was easy to track the bull for several hundred yards in the snow. No blood, no hair, no nothing. Returning to the seen of the miss, I asked Sky where he was when he shot. Pointing up the hill to a rockpile by the road., he said, "Right from that rockpile about 300 yards". Now I am not the best judge of range but there was no way that the distance was 300 yards.
"Where did you hold on that bull?" I asked.
"About a foot over his back." he answered. "I am sighted in at 200."
"Ok, take a rest and hold dead on that white rock at the base of that aspen."
He dead centered it.
I haven't let him forget about it. He hadn't missed any deer but he missed the biggest bull elk that he has ever seen.

We had a guy who was a rabbit magnet. If there were 10 rabbits in a swale, 9 of them would run to him. So one day as we were reloading shot shells we got the idea to load a box up with sawdust instead of shot so we did. Next day we gave him the box and went huntin’. There was a lot of gunfire from that side of the swamp but no rabbits. When we fessed up he said, “I was wondering why the snow was turning brown in front me.” We still laugh about it now and then.

Killed my first big buck in November of 2000.

A few days prior, I listened to an old timer tell a story that if you whistle or yell at a moving buck, he’ll stop long enough for you to get a shot off.

So there I was. In my stand, freezing to death, and watching the sun rise good and high in the morning sky. I saw movement in a pine thicket about 150 yards out headed toward an old logging road. There was a cutover just on the other side, and I knew my window to shoot was the width of that old logging road and about a half second… maybe.

Sure enough, Muy Grande stepped out. My heart was pounding like a nine pound hammer. He was moving and I was about to miss my chance. Without thinking, I yelled out “Hey deer!!” And in all truth…. he stopped walking, looked in my direction for a split second and that gave me just enough time to calm down and put one through his boiler maker.

That old timer was right.

md7 said:

Killed my first big buck in November of 2000.

A few days prior, I listened to an old timer tell a story that if you whistle or yell at a moving buck, he’ll stop long enough for you to get a shot off.

So there I was. In my stand, freezing to death, and watching the sun rise good and high in the morning sky. I saw movement in a pine thicket about 150 yards out headed toward an old logging road. There was a cutover just on the other side, and I knew my window to shoot was the width of that old logging road and about a half second… maybe.

Sure enough, Muy Grande stepped out. My heart was pounding like a nine pound hammer. He was moving and I was about to miss my chance. Without thinking, I yelled out “Hey deer!!” And in all truth…. he stopped walking, looked in my direction for a split second and that gave me just enough time to calm down and put one through his boiler maker.

That old timer was right.

Click to expand...

I've never yelled at one, bt I've whistled a few to a dead stop. Get ready to shoot and whistle. Nothing to lose, so any slowdown or stop is a bonus, and makes for an easier shot!