Hey guys,
Well this fine Monday morning started off with me over sleeping
I had driven almost 500 miles since Saturday afternoon home to see family, take the son to see his grand mother, etc etc.
So, I finally make it out to the farm I am going to be hunting on about 8:15am, pull into the lane and stop to call the property owner to let him know I am heading in, as we are talking I ask him if he has moved brush to block the entrance to the farm, no he hasn't, so I roll on in after clearing the brush and someone else has been there and left this morning, so the land owner and I take a cruise around the farm looking to see what the trespassers have done, we can't tell, but they took a truck of some kind back into a corner field, didn't see any sign of them having killed something, so not sure what they were up to. By now it is about 10:00am or so, so I check my little path again that I like to go over as I am heading to this nice little pond. I get to the pond about 11:00 or so and settle in so I can see all three trails that lead to the pond.
About 12:30 I see a little doe, about 1 1/2 years old just sort of materialize out of the weeds and start down to the pond, she was off the side of the trail. So I watch her for a little bit and she looks over her shoulder and another little doe comes out and they both set there about 80 yards from me drinking at the waters edge, so I just kick back abd watch them for a little bit, about 10 mins later another doe comes out, and she is almost a 1/3 larger than the two small does. Now I am thinking this is more like it, so I sit and watch the three of them for about 15 minutes as they drink from the pond, I was hoping the six point I had seen last week would come out and show himself, but he didn't. So, at 1:00pm I slipped my 12ga up to my shoulder and took a nice broadside shot on the largest doe, boom, never even felt it go off. I watch and the deer take off, I felt it was a good shot, it felt right. So I sit around and kill some time and have a bottle of water.
After waiting awhile I go over to the other side of the pond, I look where the doe was when I shot her, nada, nothing, but I know it is a good shot so I look more, I follow the tracks where she was running and she jumped a fence and skidded on the other side. Now one thing that is new this year is I have bifocals, and I hate them for trying to track. Finally about 20 -25 yards from where I shot her I found a small speck of blood, but it is bright red so I know I have a good hit, but there is almost no blood, and there are these bushes all over that have little red berries that are falling off. So down on my hands and knees as I follow along, a spot here, a drop there, none of them bigger than about maybe 1/8 inch at most. Well she ran down a hill, through a brier patch, stopped there for a moment and I found a nice amount of blood, then across a creek and up a hill, all told about 100 yards from where I shot her and in the worse bunch of dead fall and briers you have ever seen. So I get her cleaned up and start to try and drag her out, I have now decided I am too old to drag a deer through stuff like that any more, so a call to the land owner and he runs by my place and picks up my son and drops him off at the farm.
Between the two of us we were able to get the deer out of the woods and into the truck. Then off to the check station, I was looking at this deer and from her size and stuff I was guessing 3 1/2 years old, that is what the game warden thought too, then we checked the teeth, twice, all three wardens at the check station looked at the teeth, she was 2 1/2 years old, ok, big deer for that young is what we all thought. So off to drop her off at the butcher, put her on the scales, just a shade over 125 pounds dressed out.
So all in all it was a very good day, sorry there are no pictures, but I don't own a camera except for the cheap webcam on the computer.
So, how did every one else do?
Greg
