*Due to a few comments I received last year regarding how savage I must be to shoot a deer and be holding its bloody head in a photo (by the way it has to come off in the butchering process) I have shown the black and white - less bloody photo first. For those of you squeamish you may want to avert your eyes from the color photo at the bottom of the post.As I crack the first Sam Adams Oktoberfest Beer of the season and watch Roy in the backyard keeping an eye on Canadian Geese flying over (I am positive he's thinking boy they look like they must be a heck of a lot of fun to fetch) it’s fitting that I am writing about this years Muzzleloader Deer.
The hunt was not as long this year as last year, 1 day rather than more than a week – aided in part by a few different things…
1) A 30 minute conversation with a black powder fanatic at the local gun shop that I am pretty sure translated into a 10 years of knowledge,
2) Some time actually spent shooting that pretty little gun – thanks for taking me to the range when we visited Lucas – the bruises have finally disappeared,
3) A neat little thing called a fiber optic sight that my lovely wife gave to me for my birthday (ever tried to line up dark gray and black open sights on a grayish-brown object in a grayish-brown background at dusk? – it’s a lot easier to line up a red dot in the middle of two green ones and place them on the gray object let me tell you), and
4) A recoil pad that extends my guns stock about ¾” to make it a nice snug fit. I seem to have longer arms than most folks…
This year’s trip started with everyone’s alarms not going off at 5am but instead a bunch of hollering when it started getting light at 6:30 and we started waking up to the realization it wasn’t 5am . No big deal though-The first deer was on the ground before 8:30.
My father-in-law Jon and Tom a fellow we have hunted with the past few years headed for the top of the basin a little after 7. As we crested the top of the ridge I spotted some elk about 300 yards away moving up the hill and into the trees after eating all night and we watched them work their way toward the trees and higher ground before we headed on down toward a spring and draw that we see the animals move through during the year. As we came onto the point above the drainage we were going to push we decided that Jon and I would head down the drainage from the side and push the brush working our way up the drainage to the spring. About halfway to the bottom I spotted a deer at the mouth of a canyon a few hundred yards away, signaled to Jon and we headed in that direction. We worked our way toward the deer using the cover of some trees until we were close enough to get a shot off. Jon was in the right spot to take a shot, lifted his gun, pulled back the hammer and squeezed off a shot. The deer was hit and a second shot finished her off, a half hour into the day. Jon stayed with the deer and I headed up and down the canyon to see if a fawn was around and none were to be found. When I got back to Jon he said she looked dry and we got her behind a bush in some shade. Tom headed down the ridge on a 4 wheeler to haul her out as I was heading out to walk some canyons and ridges for the morning.
No Luck, walking except for running through some quail.
Jon and I headed out around six that night to see what we could come across with Sadie riding shotgun on Jon’s 4wheeler. She knew what we were up to; she was hunting from the back of the 4wheeler as we were riding along the side of the canyon. After an hour or so of riding, some purely recreational, we came around a bend at the end of a long run where the trail climbs to the ridge and on the top of the ridge I spotted a pair of big ears, maybe a few hundred yards from the spot I took last years deer. In what felt like one fluid motion I dismounted, pulled my gun from its case and knelt down with a steady rest – she was a little over a hundred yards. Jon was behind me encouraging me to get a steady rest and then spotted a closer deer 75 yards out, I shifted my focus, pulled the hammer back, lined the sight up green-red-green and pulled off the shot nice and easy.
You don’t see much when you’re the one pulling the trigger with black powder until the smoke clears but I didn’t see anything taking off and I thought I saw something dump over. She did; one shot-one kill as they say and then a stout barrage of punches to the shoulder and Jon saying that was a hell of a shot.
As we headed up the hill to take a look Sadie was off to check things out too. We came up on the deer and she hadn't taken a step – shot in the neck. We stood there and looked at her and Sadie watched as we went to work gutting her. After we were finished we turned around to see the sunset over the mountains. Sunsets like these make you understand why the line “purple mountain majesties” was written. Over those purple mountains was a fiery orange to red to pink sky with a few cirrus clouds floating along surrounding a bank of clouds running diagonal like a wave through the center. We had the doe - another dry one cleaned out, strapped to the 4 wheeler and enjoyed the sunset and talked about how we should have had a video camera running and we could have been on a hunting show – everything was picture perfect. We headed down the trail, strung her up in the garage and called it a day and a good day at that…
Labels: Deer Hunting, Hunting
