Started out Sunday morning the boys took pity on their old man and decided to allow myself choice of which stand to hunt for the day.
I chose to hunt my son Joshes stand,an area that had some nice bucks on camera and an area that we hunted last year and had a lot of deer movement .
For the first couple of hours in the stand , I had does moving through but was constantly getting busted with very little movement. So around 9AM I decided that I was going to move the stand to a different tree and also help me warm up a little.
Just a short time after getting set up in a differant tree, i began having deer moving all around , had a spike bed down 35 yards away. 45 mins later i saw another spike coming down the trail, which spooked the bedded spike who took off running. The spike that came in was milling around the stand about 20 yards away , when we both heard a twig snap and I saw the spike look to my left , and without trying to spook the deer in front of me I slowly turned my head to see and antlered deer coming through the trees straight at the spike deer.
At 20 yards the bigger deer step behind a couple of trees, that is when I drew my Bow, the spike saw this and startled enough to stop the Big buck. I now was thinking that I will have to hold draw for awhile until the buck decided to move a couple of steps. It didn't take long. the Buck began to move slowly forward clearing the trees, at that time turned his head toward me , my first thought was 'that's wide ! I took aim at its vitals and let go. Look like a great shot, the buck jump straight in the air and took off up the hill. I loud grunted a few times and it slowed down to a slow walk until out of sight.
I waited the 30 minutes,got down from the stand, walked over to where the deer was when I shot, no blood at all! I then found the arrow and to my surprise after knowing it was a complete pass through there were very little Red blood and of course the dreaded gut smell. I played it over and over in my mind, I know the shot maybe a little back but close enough to the vitals that I felt really good about it. But the arrow told a different story, thats when I decided to walk out of the woods and get ahold of the boys to help with what I knew was going to be difficult tracking.
We had lunch and waited until 2 o'clock, and went back to the spot where I left the arrow. we walk the path that i last saw the buck. we only found two small drops of blood in the first 50 yards. when we ran out of any blood we began to make circles. I started going in a totally different direction I last saw the buck, the boys went the other direction. After searching the ground for 20 yards or so, came to a a small area where the snow hadnt melt yet. I found one dime size drop of blood. Called the boys over to where that drop was, looking scary at this point, starting to feel sick to my stomach. Just then My oldest son Josh in a loud whisper, dad,dad,dad, My first thought man , he is pretty excited about spotting blood. lol, 10 yards away he lay. Awesome buck. Turns out I got enough of the vitals to make the difference..
