So, last night in the last 15 minutes of fading light, I’m sitting quietly near a well used game trail, counting the does as they filter through (and wishing something with antlers would show up). About that time, The Wife™ calls me on the radio and says that gunshot I heard about 15 minutes ago was her. She’s getting pretty anxious, because light is fading fast, and she can’t find the the blood trail, and she’s pretty unhappy with how hard the critter ran getting out of there, when she was expecting it to go down pretty hard given her estimation of the shot placement being right through the front shoulders. I go get the truck, and drive around to the closest point I can get to where the Rino GPS says she’s at.
I bring the blood-tracker flashlight (basically a light with red/green lenses and no blue – makes anything blood-ish red stand out brightly in the dark; a remarkable little device, actually), as well as one of those hand-held floodlights. We pound bush until well into the night, and just nothing. No blood. No deer. No nothing.
By this point, The Wife™ is near tears. It was only about a 60 yard shot, and she was sitting down with her elbows braced on her knees to boot. Either she missed, in which case she’s convinced she has no business ever shooting at an animal again if that’s the best she can do, or she did hit it and we have a wounded/dead one still there in the bush, which isn’t really much better that the first scenario in her view. It doesn’t help her mood that pitch dark has long since set in, and the batteries in the floodlight are all-but dead by now. So we headed back to the truck with heavy hearts.
This morning, we headed back up and made a beeline for the spot. The Wife™, good little hunter that she is, left trail tape ribbons at both the spot where she was sitting, and the tree nearest where the deer was at the moment she pulled the trigger. Getting ready to start the walk-through, she heads for the point where she was at when she took the shot, and I head over to pretend I’m the deer.
As I walk up to the tree with the trail tape on it, I see it. Right there, with a bullet hole in it, about the size you’d expect a 30 cal to make in something, is the very tree that has the trail tape hanging in the branches. I let out a loud guffaw, and start laughing. The Wife™ is not seeing the humor in the situation as I insist that she come over and have a look at what I found. The trees are thick enough in there she didn’t have the biggest shooting lane in the world to shoot through, and after seeing where the deer was and which tree had the hole in it, there was no doubt that she just pulled the shot a couple of inches forward. T’would still have been a very clean kill shot, except for the tree.
So – we are both very, very relieved on all fronts. It wasn’t a bad shot, the gun doesn’t suck, and the deer isn’t still out there wounded or dead somewhere. The Wife™ wasn’t really happy about it, but I made her pose with the tree she shot. After all, it’s the biggest thing she’s put a bullet in this year – heheheh.
