Big buck on biggest day at old site

I managed to get in on the action on that  2019 opening day of sz crossbow season, when I think more members of the old site got bucks than didn’t.  

I was up in the cupola of my two story truck cap blind that morning, when a busted up rack, little 1.5 year old “scout” buck came out to work a nearby scrape and tried to tempt me into taking a shot.  He stood up on his back legs to  work  a licking branch, just 15 yards away.

I held off, leaving my crossbow laying up on the top of the 3 foot barnwood wall/shooting rail.  5 minutes after he departed, this 3.5 year old 8 point emerged from the same trail that the little guy had  came in on.  This was not the first time, that a much larger buck was preceded by a small scout, from this very stand. 

Thanks to the earlier “practice run”, I was already in position. I very slowly moved my green dot behind his shoulder and sent a bolt thru him with my Barnett Recruit.

He turned and ran, throwing me for a bit of a loop on the blood trail, because I thought I heard him crash in the brush just behind the clover plot I that shot him in.

I had to stop and consult my secret weapon, prior to continuing on the right track.  Naturally, it worked perfectly, just as it has each and every time I reached for it:

As it turns out, that must have been his little buddy that I heard in there.  He made it all the way across a hayfield, to a larger patch of brush.

That was the only one of (5) bucks that I killed with that Barnett and o-ring style mechanical broadheads, that I did not hear crash or see go down.  I blame myself for that, because I “cheaped out” and attempted to resharpen a used mechanical broadhead on that one.