Tell us your best deer hunting story ...

[Robhuntandfish]

Was listening to a Gamekeepers podcast where they did "best deer stories" and it was pretty entertaining.  Thought this might be a good idea for us.  I have a couple but will do just one.  And this is best story not necessarily your best deer but it might be both. I would bet most best stories prob arent a persons best deer. 

My first buck.  i have access to one side of the road of a private area that used to be a farm.  First time ive ever had that.  Lot of open fields and not much for woods but there is some standing corn in this little field.  My plan is to sit on the corner of this field where i can kinda see over the standing corn.  I get there before light in the morn toting my mossberg 12 g with open sights. Sun is coming up, deer tracks everywhere.  About the time the time the sun is up i hear a tractor coming up the road.  It pulls onto the little farmer road i just walked in on and starts into cutting the cornfield.....WTF.....Lol.  Yup opening day of deer season they are cutting the cornfield.  Now this isnt one of those big ole cornfields where the deer are going to come flying out.  Its only maybe 5-6 acres and i can see into almost all of it.  Plus where i am sitting i couldve about touched the combine.  So deflated and no other real option opening day was a wash. 

So next day i decide im going to take a chair and sit along the fencerow and stay all day or as long as i can.  So i tuck in next to some brush and get comfortable.  6 hours later of seeing nothing i need to stand up and stretch for a minute as i havent seen a thing all morn.   I look around me before i stand up, still nothing.  So i set my gun against the brush and stand up and take a good stretch and look to my left and here stands a buck.  It was in the only spot i couldnt see from the chair.  Its a small buck, one side a forkhorn the other side is kinda dangling down.  So i say "@&#^%" under my breath.  Reach for the shotgun and dropped him in his tracks at about 60 yards, never really had a chance to get shaky or nervous.  Had i not have stood up right then never would have seen the deer. 

For a few years all tagged deer in Oneida Co had to go to a DEC station to be checked for CWD.  So i take my deer there thinking they do a test for it right then.  Nope they take the whole head. Wow some guys were pissed.  A guy there with a 12 point was not a happy man.  But you would get the head back later.  The DEC guy asked me if i wanted the head back.... i tell him its my first buck but i am def not getting it mounted.  So he offered to saw the horns of it and i went with that.  The one side he looks at and he says "this deer has a fractured skull"  No other damage on it to be seen, dunno if this was from some serious fighting or what.  At that moment i thought to myself - wow what a great hunter i am, almost outsmarted by a deer with a major head injury. lol    

Edited January 10 by Robhuntandfish

[Lawdwaz]

Tag

[Dogman]

After thinking about this I probably could come up with more then one but this one comes to mind. I once had a deer ghost in behind me from my right. I spun around for a perfect broadside shot. Released my arrow and it hit something and slammed the spike vertical against his side. With that he stumble stepped up the hill and reacted like " what was that ?" Looking back he circled back around to see . At which point I double lunged him. 

[Robhuntandfish]

20 minutes ago, Lawdwaz said:

Tag

am i it? 

[Lawdwaz]

24 minutes ago, Robhuntandfish said:

am i it? 

Lol no, I just wanted to be able to find this when I have more time to add to it.    I might have a story or two to tell….

 

[mowin]

My god, how do I pick one....

[Robhuntandfish]

14 minutes ago, Lawdwaz said:

Lol no, I just wanted to be able to find this when I have more time to add to it.    I might have a story or two to tell….

 

im betting on it!  

[mowin]

Yrs ago during archery season I was hunting a stand, and several times when  I walked past a group of boulders surrounded by brush, a decent buck would jump up and head in the direction I came from.  Could never get a great look at him, but he looked like a nice buck. Back then any buck was a nice buck though.. 

Fast forward to rifle season and my brother and decided to fool that buck.  I put Dan at the head of the trail, and I'll walk past the spot, and once past it, the buck will run right to him.  

As I'm sneaking past the spot, I could see fresh tracks in the snow heading towards the boulders.   Once I got 20 yards past, I stopped for a minute, then took a few steps in that direction.  Up pops the buck and he's running towards my brother.  30 sec later I hear him shoot.  Walk over to him and he's shaking in his boots. He blurts out..  "It's huge... If we find him, he's definitely getting mounted. Biggest buck I've ever seen".  We followed the blood trail about 80 yards and Dan's huge huge was laying there, with significant ground shrinkage.  It was a 3pt.  He was shocked and even claimed it wasn't his deer, and we followed the wrong blood trail, in fresh show, to someone else's deer.  

Needles to say, we remind him of that hunt every year. 

Edited January 10 by mowin

[Nomad]

I went into a woods and shot a deer .

[mowin]

9 minutes ago, Nomad said:

I went into a woods and shot a deer .

I bet your a bunch of fun at parties.. 

[Splitear]

A couple of years after my wife and I started dating, she said she wanted to go deer hunting with me. This is when we were in Illinois. So, opening day of shotgun season (Friday), I hunted in the morning, and then set up a blind in a little 5 acre patch of woods that I knew we would see deer the next morning. After setting up the blind, I still had an hour or so left of shooting light, so walked down a fencerow to a treestand to wait out the rest of the evening. 

15 minutes later, a beautiful 10 pointer came right down the fencerow that I'd just walked. He got to about 75 yards and hung-up, looking right at me. Though I don't think I'd do it now, I took a shot at him facing right at me. He took off at the shot, and didn't look hit. Once I climbed down, I followed his trail through a wide fence/ditch row, and when I got to the other side, I found blood. I trailed him to where he crossed the road, onto "Root Ground". Jim Root was a farmer back home, not the most pleasant of fellows, and I dreaded asking him if I could track on him. To my surprise, he said I could look for the deer that night no gun, and he better not see me around the next day when he and his boys were hunting. 

I called my uncle, and we took up the trail in the dark. It turned into a pretty good trail, good steady blood. We tracked for several hundred yards, and jumped the buck out of some brush, and he was a nice buck. He got up slow, really just walking ahead of us. Me, being a dumb kid at the time (not the dumb adult that I am now) thought that if I got behind him and hit him hard enough I could knock him down, and then, well, I'm not sure what then. So, I get behind this deer and lob a right cross as hard as I can into his rump, and rather than falling over like I naivly thought he would, he takes off like a race horse across the bean field. I pull out my pocket knife (again, not the smartest thing I've done) and give chase. When he gets to the other side of the field, he slows to a walk again, and I catch up. I walk up beside him, and grab a hold of one of the tines of his left antler, and just walk beside him, not knowing what to do. We make it to a steep ditch, and he falls and slides down to the bottom, and I go behind him. We both climbed out of the other side, and when he reaches the top, he lopes off ino the woods, never to be seen by me again. 

At this point, I'm pretty lost. I can see my uncles flashlight coming through the woods, so I wait for him. We both decide that there's no way we are finding that deer that night, and decide to head out. Problem is, we don't know which way to head, we've both gotten turned around in the dark on ground that we've never hunted. So, I call my dad, let him know what's going on. I asked him to park by my truck and honk the horn so we know which way to go. 20 minutes later, he calls and says "can you hear me?" and of course we can't. Being Illinois, everything is pretty much squared, the old "country mile" is a thing. We knew that as long as we headed in one direction, we'd end up at a road. Turns out, we were only a couple hundred yards from the road on the other side of the property, so my dad came around and picked us up. Jim Root never gave me permission to continue looking for the buck, and I lost him. 

There's more to the story that ends up with my wife and I going back out to the blind the following morning at 11:00. Within 15 minutes of sitting down and doe walked by, I shot it, she ran to the field edge and feel. My uncle calls me, asks "Did you shoot?". He was driving by headed to town and heard the shot. He pulls down the field edge as we leave the woods, and within 20 minutes of walking to the ground blind, we have a deer in the bed of the pickup headed for home. I told my wife "It's never this easy".

[Splitear]

13 minutes ago, Nomad said:

I went into a woods and shot a deer .

Whew, I feel like I was there  Tag on someone dieing alone in the rain, and I'd swear this were a Hemingway short story

[Splitear]

Another good one. When I was in High School, I went hunting with a church group, that was really just some of my buddies and their dads, "Brothers in Christ". We took a weekend camping/hunting trip to Sam Dale Lake, as it was early bow season and the weather was nice. We got there in the morning, set up camp, and then all headed in different directions to hunt for the evening. I found a spot next to a green space and took my climber up. 

After watching several hikers come by my stand, and a couple playing frisbee with their dog for 45 minutes, I have a doe come up beside me. I shot, and she took off with what I thought as a pretty good hit. I snuck out and headed back to camp. We decided to let her lay until the morning and just enjoy camp that night. 

The next morning I head out with a friend, and we find the deer, less than 100 yards from where I shot her. However, overnight, something had started eating on her, and in the way of a possum or skunk, it started from the butthole. The back quarters were pretty much shot, so we decided to skin out the backstraps and front quarters and ditch the rest. We took the carcass up an old access road, and dumped it a little ways in the woods. 

When we get back to camp, we find out that another kid in camp, we called him "Squirt", shot a doe that morning, and was out looking for her with some of the guys. They spend a couple hours looking, and came up with nothing. The search crew gave up, but Squirt kept looking. An hour or so later, Squirt pulls in to camp, grinning from ear to ear, he'd found his deer! However, we had to check it out, because something had been eating on it, and it had eaten both backstraps, the front legs were gone, and it had started eating the hind quarters too  

Don't think we didn't raz him about that one for a while.

Edited January 10 by Splitear

[mowin]

Good friend of mine shot a doe during a drive.  Him and my cousin started tracking and they can see it standing there in the brush.  Now his eyes ain't great, so he's taking aim and moving side to side trying to get a clearer shot through the brush. My cousin looks at him and says don't shoot.  Frank says it's kinda standing there.  The doe had run into a small tree and her head was stuck in the crotch of a tree and was basically hanging there with her front feet off the ground.  We couldn't figure out how he thought that deer was still alive, or even looked alive, lol.  

[blackbeltbill]

I was out Deer Hunting an all time high of 7 mornings . 5 for the early Anterless  Season and 2 days for the firearms segment.

   I had 1  shot on a Doe that was questionable  as far as getting a Kill Shot and Let her go. I saw a number of Does just walking around like a Hiker.   So that one morning when I decided against  shooting that Doe Stands out.