As the opening day of the 2006 deer season approached, I looked forward to getting in the woods more than ever.  After a good bit of time at the rifle range, I had chosen to use Federal Premium 160 grain Barnes TSX bullets (identified on the cartridge box as P7RN) for my safari, and I was anxious to try these bullets out on some whitetails to get a feel for how they would perform in a hunting situation.

I'm a member of a deer club in Kershaw County, South Carolina.  We lease 1,800 acres just across the road from beautiful Lake Wateree.   With only about a dozen or so members in the club, this is one of the best places to hunt that I've ever had access to.  Our deer have fantastic genetics for this part of South Carolina, and the buck to doe ratio on club lands is the closest to perfect that I've seen.  The deer season would be the perfect opportunity to put these Barnes X-Bullets to the test.

Another thing I like about my deer club is that us members are permitted to bring guests hunting as often as we like.  That being the case, I often bring my buddy Ted along with me, and this year my new friend Pete Tschantz would be joining me several times to try to get his first deer.  For the first few hunts of the season I would be alone though, with neither Ted nor Pete being able to find time in their schedules to get into the woods until late September.

On the morning of September 21, I was hunting in a ladder stand looking way up an old logging road.  My rifle was locked and loaded, and a little after 8:00am I saw movement on the edge of the woods about 200 yards down the road.  Raising my binoculars, I saw two does coming my way.  As I watched, they made their way down the logging road, heading my way.  When they had closed the distance by about fifty percent, they stopped briefly in the road to look around.  Seeing my chance, I traded my binoculars for my rifle, centered the crosshairs on the shoulder of the largest doe, slipped off the safety and fired.  When I had recovered from the recoil, the deer were gone. 

Without raising my head from the rifle, I looked through the scope and began to look for a landmark near where the deer had been standing.  I chose a young gum tree on the side of the road.  Making a mental note of this, I lowered my rifle and began to wait.  New hunters take note:  when you shoot a deer you will often not see which direction it runs off in.   If possible, try to pick out an object close to where the deer is standing before you take your shot.  If this is not possible, do it after the shot, but do it.  It makes your tracking job much easier if you have a known starting point to look for blood.

I waited about 20 minutes, then climbed down from my stand.  Taking only my rifle and a roll of surveyor's marking tape from my backpack, I headed down the road to the gum tree that I had picked out as a landmark.  As I approached the tree, I began to look for blood or scuff marks in the road.   On my first pass, I saw a couple of places where the deer could have scuffed the dirt as she leapt away, but no blood was to be seen.  I turned around and began to walk slowly back to the stand, and within a few yards I found a huge splatter of blood in the road.  A solid hit, and bonus points for the X-Bullet. 

I began to follow the blood trail, and although it was not particularly heavy, I had no trouble tracking the doe, and soon found her not 60 yards from where I shot her.  More bonus points.  Inspecting the wound, I saw that I had hit her right where I was aiming.  I was pleased.

A week later Pete joined me for a day of hunting, and that afternoon I was in another ladder stand with a great view of logging roads, a cutover, and a pine forest.  As an early fall thunderstorm started to approach, movement in the woods to my right caught my attention.  Using my binoculars, I saw that it was a doe.  A bit younger than the one I had taken the week before, I decided that this would still be a good deer to shoot, so I raised my rifle and waited for her to emerge from the thicket that I had spied her in.

She got closer and closer to the edge of the woods, and when I had a clean shot opportunity I slipped off my safety and fired.  The deer jumped, then stopped and looked around for the source of the shot.  A miss!  I jacked another round into the chamber, re-centered the crosshairs and fired again.  This time I could tell it was a hit, and with the storm getting closer and closer I called Pete on the radio, told him that I had a deer down, and that we needed to call it a day before the lightning made it too dangerous to be outside.

While I waited for Pete to arrive, I walked down to where my deer had been standing and saw that she had only run about 10 yards after I hit her.  Although I was happy to find here so quickly, I was perplexed as to why I had missed such an easy shot.  Could I have flinched?  I didn't know, but some range time was indicated.

The Sumter National Forest is just 45 minutes south of where I live, and there's a nice shooting range there that I like to shoot at whenever I get the chance.  I headed down there one day after work to check my rifle.  The first shot, made at 100 yards, was several inches to the right.  A second shot confirmed that my scope needed adjusting, and it wasn't long before I had the bullet hitting the center of the target.  I was quite relieved to find out why I had missed my first shot at the deer a few days before, and now I could be confident that the next round I fired would go where I wanted it to.

The following Thursday, my buddy Ted was able to join me for his first deer hunt of the season.  Having hunted as a guest on my lease with me during the previous season, Ted was quite familiar with the area that he wanted to hunt in.  In the pre-dawn darkness I dropped him off at the stand of his choice, then drove on up to the ground blind that I had picked for the morning hunt.  As the sun began to break over the horizon, I saw that there was already a deer feeding in the grass out in front of my stand.  I determined pretty quickly that it was a doe, so I contented myself just to sit back and watch her eat.

The doe fed for at least a half hour before slipping back into the woods.  I kept watching, and within 15 minutes I saw another deer crossing way out in front of me.  Thinking that it was just another doe, I raised my binoculars and was shocked to see a gnarled set of antlers on what was obviously a mature buck.  I raised my rifle as quickly as I could, found the deer in the crosshairs, slipped off the safety and fired.  In the aftermath of the shot I was pretty sure that I had seen the deer stumble, but he leapt away at top speed and I couldn't be positive that I had hit him.

Shaking with excitement, I called Ted on the radio and told him the situation.  A possible hit on a big buck.  I told him that I was going to go ahead and look for the deer; I was too keyed up to wait the usual 15 to 20 minutes to start the tracking job.  Ted acknowledged my plan and told me that he had a spike buck feeding out in front of him and that he was going to keep on hunting and hope a doe showed up.

Taking just my rifle and some trail marking tape, I walked way up the logging road to where I figured the deer had been when I took my shot.  I made a couple of quick passes back and forth looking for blood, but saw nothing.  With a bit of worry beginning to creep in, I slowed down and looked more carefully, this time not just looking for blood but also for any kind of scuff marks that the deer might have made if it had in fact stumbled when I shot.  Within a few minutes I had found a small scuff in the dirt that might have been nothing.  Or it just might have been where a deer hoof had marred the ground at the beginning of a leap.  I walked from there over to the edge of the woods and on a single blade of grass I found a tiny drop of fresh blood.  One drop.

I called Ted again to update him on the situation, then quickly marked the location of the blood with a piece of orange surveyor's tape.  Walking into the woods I was relieved to find a large patch of blood followed by a fairly decent blood trail.  I followed the trail deeper and deeper into the woods, sometimes going downhill, sometimes up, always with the blood becoming sparser and sparser.  As it petered out altogether, I paused to look around trying to figure out which way the deer might have headed after making the last splash on a pile of pine needles.

As I looked to my left I gave a yell of delight.  The deer was laying on the top of a little knoll just a few yards away.  I ran to him and found that I had killed the largest whitetail of my life.  Again I called Ted, delirious with joy, and told him the news.  Looking at the deer and knowing how far we were going to drag it, I reluctantly asked Ted to abandon his hunt and come help me get the deer out of the woods and get him to the taxidermist.  Ted had no problem with this, and once we were standing in the woods together looking at my deer he understood why I wanted to get it taken care of as soon as possible. 

Once Ted and I had taken pictures of the deer and had gotten him to the taxidermist, we headed back into the woods for our afternoon hunt.  I only got to hunt with Ted a handful of times that season, so it really was great having him along with me as I killed the biggest deer I'd ever taken a shot at.  On his last hunt of the season, Ted killed a beautiful doe.  I was grateful to be a part of that as well, and was glad to see that Ted wasn't skunked for the season.

As for Pete, we hunted together a good many more times before it was his turn.  On a mid-December afternoon, I picked him up at his house and we headed down to the lease for an afternoon hunt.  By this time I had killed another doe and a second 8-point buck, so I decided to predator hunt that day while Pete deer hunted.  I sat in my stand at the far corner of our property and called in a grey fox, which I managed to miss at 60 yards. 

Within minutes after taking a shot at the fox, I heard the "crack-WHAM" of a rifle.  From the sound of it I could tell that it came from Pete's direction and that he had made a hit on whatever it was he had shot at.   I grabbed my radio and waited for Pete's call.  When it came, all he said was "I got one."  I told him to stay in the stand until I got there; I didn't want him to make the mistake of pushing a possibly wounded deer into the deep woods.

As I gathered my gear and walked back toward my truck, I heard two more shots from his direction.  Wondering what was going on, I called Pete a couple of times on the radio, but he never responded.   As I pulled into the field he was hunting in, I saw what had happened.  His first shot had broken the spine of a young spike buck, and it was laying in the mud struggling in fear.

Pete yelled to me that he was out of bullets, so I grabbed my .40 pistol from the back of my truck.  Approaching the deer and talking gently to it, I raised the pistol and took aim.  When I had a clear shot I squeezed the trigger and watched the deer collapse.  It expired just as Pete walked up to look at his very first deer.

Although it was a shame for Pete to have to watch his first deer suffer like that, we were able to dispatch it pretty quickly.  The animal wasn't in pain for long, and after talking with Pete a little bit about how these things happen, and we have to move on from them, he was able to relax and enjoy his first kill.

As you can see, it was quite an exciting season for me.  I got five deer that season; the most I've ever killed in one year.  My wife and I ran out of venison a bit early last year, so five should easily get us all the way through the summer and into the next season.  I was quite happy with the performance of the Barnes X-bullet, and could tell that I had made a good choice for my ammunition for my safari.