Hey guys,
First of all, I'm not posting this three year old buck up here for attention, but I've had the pictures up on a couple other threads and got some requests for the story. It was a true "Teamwork buck" between Dad and I. So...here goes.
Dad and I were hunting somewhere in GMU 578
, and we'd spent all day thrashing the brush. Didn't see a thing. So we hike back to the truck and start rolling out. On a whim, we decided to take a road that we don't usually take, so we start rolling down the road about 100 yards when we each see the deer at the same time.
About 100 yards down the road on the left hand side, we see three deer. I could immediately see antlers on the one, but dad couldn't and was looking through the binos as I was already capping my muzzleloader. Both getting out, we crept up about thirty yards closer when the buck began getting nervous. He quickly walked across the road, and I knelt and fired a Hail Mary at him. He disappeared.
We go down and look for him, and there's no sign. We look for nearly five minutes, trying to be discreet because another pickup who'd heard the shot came sniffing around. After they left, the buck suddenly snorted about forty yards away and ran off!
I figured he was long gone, but we went down and started to track him (tough in the soft dirt) but no luck. Suddenly, again about forty yards away he jumped up and took off. Here, I'll try to make a long story short, but this happened all the way down the mountain side. He'd jump up and run, we'd track him for about 100 yards, then he'd jump up forty yards away again. This happened probably about five times. Throughout all of this, we found just one single drop of blood.
Finally, we reach the bottom of the mountain, where a river runs below it (A river with no name, of course!
). I had an opportunity to down him, but I was looking through the binos instead of down the barrel. So Dad and I split, he walked just above the river, and I was about 100 yards above him.
Suddenly, I hear a shot. I start looking around when I hear a second shot. I begin hurrying down the hill to find dad when (this is no BS, I swear) I see the buck lodged on a very shallow rock bed in the middle of the river! Throwing all of our gear down, we jump in the water (late November, very cold!) and grab him.
We figured he crossed the small channel on the near side, but the channel on the far side was wider and faster, and he had paused there a moment, which is where Dad shot him. He got the kill shot, but if it weren't for me gut shooting him back at the road, we'd never have gotten that far.
Taking it to the Sportsmen's Show in Portland, he scored (can't remember the exact scores, but this is ballpark figure) 157 typical, and 182 non-typical. Good enough for #2 in the state of Washington, blackpowder, Cascade Blacktail.
