November 29, 2004
It was a cold morning and I was taking off of school to hunt. My dad and I were meeting my brother down at our family farm. We got their before my brother did so we got all dressed and I put 4 shells into my gun, but none in the chamber.
We all walked down the back drive to our stands. When we got down to the pond our friend Tom was down there and he was going to sit there because the deer and other game cross that field in the morning. I ended up walking back up to the truck to get a bucket and then set off across the field to a set of bushes located between an apple orchard and the field I had just crossed.
It was only about 5 minutes after first light when I looked to the horizon and saw a nice buck standing there. I set up with my elbo on my knee to take the shot, holding the gun with my left hand. I was going to wait for the buck to get closer, but instead he started to walk away from me!
I made a deep grunt to get his attention before taking a careful shot. We waited about 30 minutes before Tom and I got up and started to look for blood. When we got to the spot where the buck stood, we searched around and couldn’t find any blood. I thought that I had missed. We moved down into the woods and Tom was putting on a drive for me after we saw two large bucks run in that direction.
As I was sitting I kept hearing rustling to the left of me over in the bushes, so as soon as Tom caught up to me I told him to look over in the bushes for blood…and maybe even a deer. As we were walking, Tom said that he had seen blood, and as soon as he said it I looked down and there was a thick blood trail right under me!
As I walked toward Tom I found even more blood and one of the other guys in our hunting party that had joined in the search. He commented on the blood and said, “Yeah, and there is a deer laying right there!” The deer was my buck and he was a big 8 pointer and I had shot him right through the heart. This was my hunt and my first buck, so I would say it was worth skipping school for.
