Tonight, we had a fairly big hunting party. It was me, a buddy, my wife, and a friend of hers who was just tagging along (ie: not hunting). We head down to a spot where I’d found a lot of rub activity going on. We set up in two groups – me and my friend, and my wife and her friend, about 500 yards apart. Me and my buddy setup about 15 yards apart.
After sitting there for about 15 minutes, my buddy starts in with his deer grunt call. I’ve never actually seen a deer come to one of those, so I kind of mentally roll my eyes as he honks on the call. About 90 seconds later, I get my world shaken up by the sound of crashing behind us. Over my right shoulder comes a whitetail buck, looking mad as a wet hen, presumably for whatever other buck had dared invade his space. He’s not just a buck, he’s a shooter buck. On the pretty small side of being a shooter, but still a definite ‘shoot me’ buck in my book.
As my freezer is already close to full, I held off, hoping my bud would get a shot at him. However, he came through moving too fast, and got over a rise where my buddy couldn’t see him, and was heading out in a direction he was never going to get a shot. The deer was also fast getting out of my available shooting lanes when he stopped and turned broadside to look back at about 30 yards (the bush where we were was pretty thick and ugly, 30 yards was the edge of visibility). He was so far over the rise in the land that I couldn’t see his vitals, but I had a perfect clear view of his spine.
I had an instant to think about it. He’s a definite shoot-me buck. He’s on the small side for a shoot-me buck. I have less than a second before the buck makes up my mind for me. Even less than that. Who are we kidding, I’m the kind of guy who kills deer. Ka-BOOM. Dropped him were he stood – clean shot through the spine.
He won’t win any horn-porn competitions, but he’s a shooter in my world.