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The morning after I killed the doe on the
power lines, I decide to hunt on a stand in some hardwoods
down near the pond. Both Arnold and I thought that this
ought to be a great place for deer. Earlier in the year I
had missed a bow shot at a large buck, but that had been
the only deer that we'd ever seen there. It was one of
those spots that looks great, but that seldom comes
through. Arnold decided to hunt on the power lines
On this particular morning, the rain was
lightly falling, and I have to admit that I was quite
drowsy. I remember drifting slowly off to sleep.
I awoke quickly, having heard, through my slumber, the
sound of a stick cracking in the woods behind me. I
turned full around in the ladder stand, and was actually
standing on the top step.
I saw the five pointer at the same time
as he me. He snorted and started to run off. I
raised my rifle almost without thinking, slipped the
safety off, and quickly fired. The deer dropped
without a sound. I sat in the stand for a couple of
minutes and watched him as he lay there unmoving. When I
had decided that he was dead, I climbed down and saw that
I had taken him in the neck, and that I had taken my first
buck of any size.
Although the story should end there, it
really doesn't. I dragged the deer back through the
woods toward the road, where I found an Indian arrowhead
fragment that was the beginning of my arrowhead
collection. I then walked back to the camp and got
my truck. I loaded the deer up and drove back up to
the camp to wait for Arnold to come out of the woods.
I had heard several shots from his direction, so I figured
that he had a doe and that he would need my help loading
it up.
As Arnold came driving up, I told him
that I had taken the lead for the year, with two deer to
my credit to his one that he had taken a couple of weeks
earlier. He smiled slyly and told me that he
had three down out on the power lines. Although the limit
on deer is two per day, Arnold had thought that he had
missed one of them, when he had really made a good shot.
I'll never forget how hard we worked dragging those three
bucks of Arnold's, two spikes and a six pointer, back to
his truck. We had to pull them up through a gully
with a tractor, and by the time we had them loaded we were
both exhausted. When we were finished, we had four
bucks loaded in the back of his truck, and my doe the day
before made 5 deer for the weekend, a record that we'll
never top, nor would we try to.
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