I didn't have a lot of confidence going in to today's
hunt. It's so late in the year, there is a full moon, and I haven't seen a deer in
over two weeks. All last night I though about where I would hunt this morning, and I
finally decided on stand #18, Arnold's tower stand on the power lines.
I sat quietly in the tower without seeing anything until about 8:30am. I was
getting restless, so I decided that at 9:10 I would get out of the stand, then go for a
short walk down an old county road near this stand and maybe try to jump a deer.
When 9:10 arrived, I stood up in the stand and got ready to get down. Immediately I
noticed some movement down below me in a deep gully that I couldn't see while
seated. I carefully glassed the gully trying to pinpoint the movement when suddenly
I saw the head and ears of a big doe. Looking even closer, I saw three more does
standing in thick cane breaks nearby.
I raised my rifle, sighted in on what looked to be the biggest deer, then carefully
squeezed the trigger. I couldn't tell if the deer dropped or not, so I jacked
another shell in the chamber and got ready to shoot again. I couldn't see any of the
deer anymore, so I switched to my binoculars and started looking carefully around for
them. I kept seeing something twitch down there in the cane, but I just couldn't
pinpoint what it was. Finally I made out the head of a doe, but I didn't know if it
was the one that I had shot at or not. I raised my rifle again, when suddenly that
deer and four others burst from the cane and ran from left to right across the power
lines. I aimed at one of them, fired, and was happy to see the deer crash to the
ground as the others bounded off into the woods.
I was shaking hard when I called Ted on the radio to tell him that I had one
definite kill
and another probable one. I asked him to meet me at the top of the power lines, but
to not drive down to where I shot the deer until I got there. There is an impassable
creek between the tower stand and where I shot the deer, so I would have to drive more
than a mile around the lease to end up 30 yards from where I was hunting.
I hopped on my four wheeler and high tailed it around to the top of the power lines, and
Ted and I drove down to where the second deer lay dead. It turned out to be a nice
doe, in the one hundred pound range. We started looking down into the gulley for the
first deer, when suddenly Ted hollered, "There she is!". The deer was
still alive, and had gotten up and started walking into the woods. Ted could tell
that it was wounded, so I started loading my rifle to take a finishing shot. As I
scrambled to get the rifle loaded, Ted yelled that the deer had crossed back over the
power lines in front of us and gone into the woods. He said that it was pretty
bloody, and was obviously hit hard.
We walked up to where it crossed and immediately found the blood trail.
It was simple to follow, and we soon found the deer laying forty or fifty yards
into the woods. We loaded both deer on the four wheelers, and I had my first double
on deer! A great way to finish the season...
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