Deer story for off season reading

[Okanagan]

Ben's story of his deer in the late season snow nudged me to post one.  I enjoy reading stories of what happened on the hunt, what the game did, what the hunter did.  I've told bits of this before but here is the whole story.  Grab a coffee.

On the last day of modern rifle deer season, a blacktail buck came in to my call and I filled my Washington State 2024 deer tag.  It capped a season in which I had called 6 bucks.



On Halloween morning I hiked a third of a mile with a flashlight on an old trail I'd cleared through heavy second growth forest, to reach a wide power line by first light.  In the grey dawn I reached my ground blind.  Salal brush and ferns were shoulder high as  I sat on a tripod stool, facing north and looking across the 60 yard wide power line cut.  A trace of air movement sifted diagonally across the power line strip from the wall of trees on my left front and into the thick woods on my right flank.

It was getting light enough to shoot as I arrived, so I made one brief series of deer calls before settling in my nest.  I had put on camo face mask and gloves and was clipping twigs with pruning shears to improve the blind when I looked out and saw the buck coming.  It was four minutes after I got there.

He was 125 yards away to my right front, strutting toward me across a pasture as open as a golf course.  I'd never try to call anything across such bald open ground! I had expected a deer to sneak along in the edge of the trees. He would pause and crane his neck high to look over the patches of low brush under the power line.  He was looking for me, and kind of swaggering when he walked.  Looking into the pre-sunrise dawn I could see a pretty tall rack and at least one deep fork, and was not going to be picky the last day of season.  I turned my Vortex 1-4 illuminated scope to 4.  I really like the duplex reticle with a red dot center.

The buck came out of the pasture and turned straight up the power line toward me.  I thought that he might walk up the power line right to me, but he kept edging to my right and downwind as he approached so I shot him at 70 yards, just before he got across the power line and into the trees.  He had paused broadside, neck stretched up to look over the intervening brush.  When he looked away I stood up and gripped my wooden walking stick to steady my aim as I held the rifle forend in the same hand. I aimed a bit high on his shoulder and fired.  I wanted him to go down on the spot and not run.  He disappeared at the shot, as I expected.

I folded my stool, stuck it in my day pack and headed down to find my buck.  He wasn't there! 

I didn't know exactly where he'd been standing at the shot, so I wandered through the little islands of brush and weedy grass.  I'd just decided that I had to find where he'd been standing at the shot and track him, when I saw a tiny red leaf in the edge of a blackberry bush.  It took a touch to confirm that it was blood.  There was quite a bit of it sprinkled down through dry grass in a patch over a foot wide, but scattered enough to not notice it at first.

I tracked the buck by sprays of blood every 15 feet or so.  He was bounding and leaving a scattering of blood each time his feet hit the ground.  The blood led a few yards to a creek, and ended.  About the time I decided that he must have crossed, I looked up the creek 20 yards and saw him lying in the water. 


The 105 grain Hornady bullet from the little 6ARC in Gen II Ruger American had deflected on brush and hit him through the hind quarters!  Fortunately it didn't damage a lot of meat.

I texted a pic of the buck in the water to my grandsons and before I asked, one came out to retrieve my buck.

He's a big bodied mature buck with double white throat patches.  I'd already skinned him when grandson Code told me to save the cape since a taxidermist would prize such a pretty cape.  Code had been watching this buck for months and asked right away if he was the one with two throat patches.


His rack is tall for a coastal blacktail with deep forks on his 2x2 frame and an extra point to make him 2x3.  He has small eye-guards, both of them broken and ground down to nubs.  I haven't hunted blacktails much and he is my biggest yet.

[nastygunz]

Great story and pics!

[remrogers]

That is a nice blacktail buck. Congratulations!

[pitw]

"as I expected."

 

[Hawks Feather]

Nice buck and thanks for the story. Having grandsons who hunt and help are a blessing.

[Okanagan]

"as I expected."

 

Yep.  Love your insight and sense of humour! 

[bigben]

congrats on a nice buck