The one that walked away

This is a story about the one that walked away, what walked away you may ask.  It was none other than a 10-point buck, this would have been my personal biggest buck.  Unfortunately, it walked away.

I was only 14 years old when i felt my first heartbreak.  It all started late in the hunting season of 2020.  I hadn’t seen anything but squirrels and woodpeckers all season.  Then with two days left in the season, my dad lets me take Friday off from school to go hunting.

 My father and I drive into our hunting spot first thing in the morning, we see nothing on the drive in so we decide to start walking.  We load our guns and start the hike it is just barely daybreak, the leaves are still crunchy from the cold temperatures so we sound like a freight train coming through the woods despite our best efforts to be quiet.  I decide to sit under a tree off the side of the road we were walking for the past what felt like a mile and a half, so I sit as my father go’s about 300 yards further down the road and sits so I can just barely see his orange.  About an hour has passed since I had sat down, haven’t heard much just a couple of squirrels then.  Crunch, crunch, crunch, I slowly turn my head to the left thinking it’s probably just another squirrel but it’s not it’s a deer.  Dark as night it slowly walks along a ridge, not 50 yards from me I pull my gun to my shoulder and wait for a shot, it never comes the deer just walks on by.  But this is not the last I will see of this deer.  I text my dad that a deer just walked by me so he gets up to cut it off, he walks around for 10 minutes with no sign of the deer.  I am starting to lose hope but I hear something, a crunch and then another so I start looking around, I get a glimpse of an antler shining in the sunlight.  It disappears behind the trees, he’s heading broadside to the road I get my gun ready I’m ready for him to step out so I can get a clean shot then.  He turns 10 feet from the road now he’s walking right at me my gun is already in my shoulder, it’s starting to get heavy, my barrel is doing figure 8’s at this point, I just need him to turn broadside.  But he sees me I struggle to get my gun stable he is about to take off, so I shoot.  He runs 15 yards and looks back at me, I’m up and jacked another round in the barrel, he’s broadside but I can barely see through my scope because the sun is directly behind him I fire again but he just walks over the ridge as if nothing has happened.

I look for blood the first shot missed, so I go to the spot where he was standing broadside, there’s blood.  I wait for my father to get there once he does we start tracking.  All we find are just spots of blood but we track him any way we walk for miles but never see him again.  I tracked him to a river but he crossed it and we lost the blood trail. 

The mistakes I made on this day were the fact I pulled my gun up to early and my shot placement, other than that I got on the blood trail too fast I should have waited.  My takeaways were to wait for a better shot and not to track a deer immediately after you shoot it.

“Deer” by mcoughlin is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.