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After many, many hours in the woods this season, I finally took a deer with my bow this past Tuesday, Election day. I’d taken off from work for all of the opening week of the season, hoping to shoot a deer early on and enjoy the rest of my time off. While I hunted all but one day of my vacation, the weather was miserable, I saw a mere five deer and didn’t get a shot the entire time.

Due to the Marine Corps Marathon, I wasn’t able to to hunt the second weekend of bow season, but did get out to the woods for the third. That first Saturday back, I saw five deer in one day. I thought things were starting to look better, but the Sunday of the same weekend I only saw one. Of the deer I did see, they were all too far to shoot. Between the lack of a shot, the amount of time I’d spent in the woods & the fact that my buddy shot one early the first day after sitting in a stand I’d done the scouting work to place, I began to get frustrated.

This year I moved one of the stands at the hunting grounds towards the rear of the property, where I’d seen some deer come from last year & spotted four doe from during scouting this fall. The stand was located at the top of the hill, giving me a great view of the woods below. (I may move it back for rifle season.) I spent the majority of my time this fall there, but much to my disappointment, the deer I saw all seemed to cross in the flat below the bottom of the hill. While I stuck it out at the top of the hill, I finally decided the Sunday before election day to move the stand half way down the hill – three days later was when this deer walked past me.

The shot to the left here was taken from the spot where I hit the deer. Just to the left of center, you can see a black bag – this is the top of my tree stand, where I shot from. The distance is approximately 20 yards. With daylight’s saving time, sun-up was getting pretty close to 7AM. Officially, it wasn’t up until 6:52 this day, so I took my time & got into the woods around 6:45. When I sat down in my stand, I realized there was already plenty of ambient light & was a little angry at myself for not having gotten up earlier. Fortunately, the deer came through shortly thereafter at 7:15, sneaking up behind me. When it came through, I first heard the distinctive sound of leaves crunching from about 15 yards behind me. I was playing solitaire on my iPod Nano at the time – since the tree my stand was propped against was only about 8 inches in diameter, I didn’t dare turn around to look (for fear of spooking the deer). I carefully put the iPod in my cargo pants pocket & peaked out of the corner of my eye toward the direction of the crunch, confirming it was a deer.

The deer continued forward, but I suspect it either saw or smelled me, because it veered slightly off the path under my stand it’d been heading on & continued 5 yards up the hill. When it came into my full view, it was about 15 yards away. I waited until its body was even with me, then slowly began to stand up & raise my bow. For some reason when I drew my bow back, I did it across my body – and struggled to get the arrow back. Thinking I was going to miss my opportunity, I nearly panicked, but fortunately came to my senses, realized what I was doing, put the bow in front of me & then was able to pull straight back without any issue.

I waited for the deer to step foot on the old logging road my stand was just off of and then let out a soft bleating sound. The deer stopped still ~20 yards out, quartering away, so I let my arrow fly. I knew right away when I released it I’d taken a good shot & watched the arrow hit the “driver’s side” back of the lungs. The deer bucked up & bolted forward, following the path I’d seen a couple take prior to moving my stand. 15 yards from where it stood when I shot at it, it disappeared out of my site through a thicker part of the woods.

I tried to relax & stay in the stand – I sent my hunting buddies a text message saying I thought I’d hit a doe & posted a message to Twitter. I waited a little longer. A couple more minutes in the stand I couldn’t take not knowing for sure if I’d hit the deer, so I climbed down.

When I got to the spot where the deer was, I found my arrow sticking out of the ground. Unlike previous shots where the arrow had been covered in blood, this one contained a limited amount on the feathers only. There wasn’t any blood in the area immediately surrounding the arrow. My heart sunk a little & I began to doubt what I thought was a solid shot.

I marked the spot of the arrow with some sticks & took a couple steps forward. Ten feet down the path the deer headed I saw blood. Lots of blood. I had no problem following it to the thick part of the woods where I lost site of the deer. At that point, the blood was on trees, three feet off the ground. All doubts about the quality of the shot disappeared from my mind.

The tracking was very easy for the next 30 yards, but because of the hills it went through, it was difficult to see far. ~75 yards total from where I hit the deer, I saw it down. As I approached, I thought to myself “wow, that’s a big doe”. When I circled to the head of the deer, I was shocked to see antlers and discover it was a spike buck.

While I’d shot a button buck two years back, this was actually my first “real” buck. I was glad to get the monkey off my back, but a little disappointed that I had to use my buck tag on it, knowing from deer I’d seen in person and my trailcam pictures that there were a fair amout of bucks with large sized racks in the woods. That disappointment was shortlived when I realized how little of bow season was left & that I stood a good chance of catching one during the rut with my rifle.

After processing, I ended up with 43.5 lbs of venison, in various cuts. I have the head back at my house and plan to do a European mount with it. While I’d love to take one with the rifle, I can’t complain on bit about getting three in three years with the bow.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 9:42 am and is filed under outdoors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.