I’d hunted archery for a few years, but never really dedicated myself to it the way that it truly requires. A super-old PSE Compound Bow and some cheap arrows that I picked up at Wal-Mart made up my gear for some time. My family weren’t archery hunters, neither were any of my close friends, so I didn’t have a great knowledge resource on where to get started. I also was working for a non-profit, not making a whole lot of money, so the cash to go out and blindly purchase all of the necessary supplies was not in my reach. My confidence with the old PSE was not great, which didn’t help either. In 2014, my brother gave me an old Martin bow (old, but not nearly as old as the PSE). It needed a new string, new arrows and some tuning, which I took care of that summer and began practicing regularly, amazed at my increased accuracy with the “new” bow. I got to where I was confident out to 25 yards, which was good enough for me at the time. I was always on the lookout for new spots, especially those that allowed me to slip into the woods quickly after work and hunt that last hour or so before night fall. I had a few such spots, but none that had worked out, up to this point. It was after church one Sunday in mid-October, that I was speaking with a woman from the choir, that somehow the topic of deer hunting came up. She mentioned that there were always deer in her back yard including a few big bucks. I half joked that I’d be willing to come “help out” with that problem. Surprisingly, she responded “sure!” Now, it was a few weeks until I got to her house, and I was not very optimistic. Her home was just at the edge of town, and her backyard butted up against a tiny peninsula of woods at the end of a much larger tract of timber. I figured that maybe some deer would come down through to invade the neighbor’s garden, but not enough to pattern for hunting. It was late October and the leaves had not yet fallen off the trees, which made visibility relatively close, which was ideal for such a small parcel. I walked into the woods and spotted several large buck rubs on some cedar trees. My outlook was on the uptick. I hung a trail camera near a well worn trail and got out of there quickly, having read that deer in developed areas are even more skiddish about humans in their territory. Knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have gone about this spot the way I did. Typically, you should wait a week or two to check trail cameras, but I was impatient. The thought of the big buck, making rubs in this new spot was eating away at me. I got out of work a little early on October 30th, grabbed my laptop and quickly drove to my new spot. I hurriedly grabbed the SD card from the woods and ran back to the car to see what the camera had managed to capture in 3 short days. The very first picture – a fat raccoon. Great… Next picture – I took a deep inhale – a “huge” buck! It was an 8 point, right in front of the camera! I didn’t even bother to go through the rest of the pictures but threw my Summit climber tree stand on my back, grabbed my bow and gear from the back of my VW station wagon, and hurried back into the woods. I had about an hour before sunset, so I scampered up the best tree I could find and settled in. Pulling out my range finder, I was able to see that I was about 40 yards from the neighbors fence, and only 75 yards from their back door. For archery season, you must only be 50 yards, but this was still a very tight spot. It was maybe 10 minutes before I started to hear and see deer. A hundred or so yards to my left (the other neighbor’s property), I saw groups of does starting to get up out of some thick cover and make their way up the hill, following a well worn patch along the chain link fence. They walked right by the house,, crossed the front yard and then the street, leading into a different patch of woods. Several doe groups followed this same pattern… I was worried that all the deer would do the same and none would make their way in front of my treestand. About 20 minutes of shooting light were left when I saw a much bigger deer rise out of the thicket and follow the same path, I was sure I saw antlers, but not certain of the size. He was ready to go out of sight when I blew a grunt call at him. He stopped. I blew a few more short calls. He turned around and charged back into the thicket. I was fairly certain I had spooked him and thus sealed the fate of the evening’s hunt. I was feeling anxious and excited at the same time. No deer had come my way, but I had probably seen 20, including one that appeared to be a nice buck, so there was certainly reason to be happy. Daylight was fading, I figured I had ten minutes of shooting light left. I heard a thump and some rustling off to my left and behind me. Turning slowly, I spotted a nice buck coming out of the little creek bottom and angling towards me. I readied an arrow and turned to get in position. “THUD.” My quiver, which I had taken off the bow knocked into the base of my stand. The buck froze and looked around. “That’s it” I thought, “I’ve blown it...” But the buck continued slowly, seemingly shrugging off the foreign sound. I drew back as he crossed behind a large tree. The buck crossed an open path at about 15 yards, and I bleated at him with that ridiculous sound, “maaah.” He stopped perfectly broadside. I took a deep breath and released my arrow. Those milliseconds in which you watch an arrow fly are so strange. For hunters like me, the adrenaline of that moment lead you an almost out of body experience. When you decided to take the shot, your mind goes blank and you have to hope that all of the practicing and muscle memory will pay off allowing your body to go on autopilot and do what it’s supposed to do. It did. The arrow hit right where I had aimed and I knew I had made a good shot when the buck dropped forward. He tried to head up hill immediately but, unable to run in that direction, he turned and drove himself down hill with only his back legs. “Crash!” That moment after shooting a deer is only a bit less intense than the shot itself. I had been so involved in the previous moments, but now, I was helpless, with no action I could take to change the outcome of what had just happened, but all of the adrenaline left telling my brain to do something. I was shaking like a leaf, trying to catch my breath. I had to sit down and compose myself, trying hard not to question myself or my shot, making myself more anxious. I called my older brother first, because I still needed to “do something.” “I just smoked a monster” I said, sounding like kid hyperventilating. He quickly asked where I was and said he’d be there shortly to help recover the deer. I didn’t want to track the deer alone, and I really didn’t want to push him if he hadn’t yet expired, so I climbed down the tree and took my gear the hundred or so yards back to my car. My brother arrived about 20 minutes later. By that point, I’d been able to stop shaking, but retelling the story brought back some of nerves. He just couldn’t believe that I had been hunting on this tiny property. We went into the woods and I quickly found my arrow which had broken after passing through the deer. There wasn’t very much blood to follow which worried me initially, but the trail was still easy to follow because the deer had clearly torn up the dirt in his descent down the hill. We followed the path of fresh earth for 50 yards and easily located the buck in the same creek bottom he’d first emerged from. It had been a perfect heart shot, entering just behind the shoulder, and exiting through the other, making certain that he didn’t go far. He was enormous by my standards, with a heavy set of antlers and 8 points. I wasn’t into scoring antlers at the time, but he was somewhere in the 120” range. Not a trophy buck for everyone, but certainly one in my book. His body was massive (the butcher estimated his live weight at about 220 pounds), taking a lot of work to drag even a short distance and proving difficult to fit in the back of my station wagon.
I spent the next few hours, driving around and showing my hunting buddies my trophy, which by the way, was not the 8 point from the trail camera picture. I would meet up with him in 2015, but that’s another story. I’ve since abandoned my little spot, realizing that I was extremely lucky to have harvested this deer without having it leave the property and expire in a not-so-friendly neighbor’s backyard. But the experience in this hunt hooked me. I am an archery hunter through and through. I’ve upgraded my gear a bit, and gained so much knowledge about deer habits and archery hunting, but this experience taught me several things:
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