Gun Week Finale

 Creigh was out for the week and his Dad, Bruce, came out for the weekend.  

One morning when it was just Creigh and me, I decided to go for a walk.  My plan was to sneak around in the woods, hopefully spot something, and eventually to check a camera down there in the valley.  It turns out that frozen dry leaves sound like walking on crinkly paper.

So I was making a tremendous amount of noise and then I came across a blown down tree across the trail.  It was so rotten that it broke into 5' pieces.  So I picked them up and threw them off the trail and down the hill - making more commotion.

I was convinced that I had cleared out the whole woods so I gave up sneaking and just tromped down the trail.  After about 50 yards, I stopped, stepped off the trail and looked down over the hill.  I spotted a buck calmly walking on the lower atv trail about 70 yards below me.  This is my view and Creigh is down there re-enacting the spot where I shot (he's in orange).

This is zoomed in a little and Creigh is standing directly in the spot where I shot at the buck.  I didn't study him but his right side rack had 8" to 10" G2 and G3's.  He looked symmetrical. Not a Booner but a very nice buck.

So, I took the shot, thought I saw him kick, and then he slinked away angling uphill.  He went out of my sight and I thought he was down.  Then he emerged and continued on a cross-hill line. I never got a second shot off at him.

Long story short, Creigh and I searched for several hours and never found any sign of a hit.  My second buck chance of the week and I blew it. I'm going to try to hide behind the possibility of a brush deflection (but I thought I had a clear path).

I thought it was a sure thing with the kick.  But after that, he didn't run and he headed uphill at a fairly calm pace.  That doesn't seem like a shot animal.

One of the many pretty sunrise/sunsets.

Bruce came out Saturday and we were all in stand in the afternoon.  We started seeing does around 4:00 and I shot another doe at about 4:20 (she was staring at me too).  She did a loop from the field back into the woods.  I saw her leaking blood as she ran and I heard her crash.

Shortly after my shot, Bruce shot a doe and dropped it right in his field.  It was still early so we waited before tracking to see if Creigh could get a deer down.  I got down with 10 minutes of light left and followed the obvious trail.

While I was doing that and finding her under a log, Creigh took a shot near last light and hit a buck who bolted into the woods and straight downhill.

We gave it some time, recovered the two down does, and then went to track the buck.  Creigh found blood at the shot site and we began to track.

We found the "double crab" buck about 100 yards straight downhill.

All smiles until we started to think about the recovery.  Our choice was 200 to 300 yards cross hill to a atv trail or 100 yards straight uphill.

We decided to use the winch on the Ranger and pull him straight up.  We used the winch cable and two sections of rope that were laying around the barn.  Creigh and I dragged him uphill and over logs to get where the rope reached (ugh).

It took a while to pull in the cable, unhook from the rope, extend the cable, rehook to the rope, pull up the cable length and then repeat again.  But eventually we got him up and into the tractor bucket.

We got him back to the barn with the does and started the field dressing work at 8pm. Dinner was late.

I did the does and Creigh did his buck.

I think that he's starting to get the hang of it.

His buck was 190 pounds field dressed in December.  He was probably 250 when we were dragging him and he was probably 300 before the start of the rut.  He also broke my scale.  It fell apart when I was moving him to load out for the processor.

Doing our duty for population control

We decided this might be an overload for the hitch rack and took one doe off to haul inside an SUV.

Creigh and I checking the closest camera to the shot on his buck.  Not close enough to catch the act.

Anyway, I had two chances on bucks this week and blew them.  I took 2 does and could have had more.  We needed to knock the population down a bit.  Four total deer for gun week - one buck and three does. My does were nice and healthy (110 and 125 pounds field dressed). Bruce's turned out to be a button buck and was 75 pounds,