Your first deer?

[deerslyr]

I started hunting when I was 10. Opening morning was a wet soggy day like most in western washington. We parked at a landing and waited for it to get light. Once it was light we decided to walk in the timber. I had no idea what to do so I ended up getting soaking wet with out seeing anything.
 We headed back to the truck to get warmed up. On the way back I saw some fresh tracks but didnt pay much attention to them. When we got to the truck another truck was parked there with two guys looking down into the clearcut. They told us that a spike and a doe came out of the timber(that we were just in) and went into the clear cut. They didnt want the spike and told me where they went.
  This clear cut was STEEP and BIG so I went down one of the draws while my dad bs'ed with those guys. About half way down I decided to sit and wait on a stump. I wasnt there for a minute when I glimpsed a deer. I put my scope up looking for the deer when I saw a spike and a doe looking at me only a 100 yards away!
   I layed on the stump and put my little 30-30 to my shoulder and thought to my self right behind the shoulder. BOOM, the deer just kept feeding. I jacked another shell in, BOOM the spikes starts rolling down the hill. I start yellin to my dad that I got him. My dad gets down there ands says we got a hell of a pack out!! 4 hours later we were finally back at the truck and celebrating. That was one of the most memorable days I ever had and also one of the worst pack outs I have ever had!

[hogsniper]

my first buck..lookin through pics today and found this one...i was 11 years old and was hunting above my house after school when i found this deer....

[gunner]

I was introduced to bird hunting at the age of nine and didn't hunt deer till I was twenty six.  that year I bought a tag and off I went!!  Hunted around up above Randle.  I hiked in about five miles and camped up there with a friend.  Opening morning shot my first buck which was  a forky.  To this day was one of the most thrilling moments in my life.  I spotted this buck heading up a finger which he dissapeared over the ridge.  I ran 500 yards down a old logging road around the corner and got set up for him to pop out of this little draw which ran up the center of that ridge.  He popped out, I took aim bang!!!!!  I hit him right behind the shoulder spinning him around and down the hill he came.  Cartwheeling down the hill.  I was so excited, I wuhoooooed so loud That my buddy heard me all the way across the valley.  I started running up that hill towards where I saw the buck go down.  I clean ran right by him forty yards before I figured out where he was.  Been hooked ever since.

Gunner

[skinzner]

Heres my first deer i was probably 23 or 24 in 1995 or 1996 i did not grow up in a hunting family but some of my friends got me hooked. .....Now the story i had never hunted before this day and just bought my rifle the week before  and just shot it at the range to sight it in a few days earlier. Well me and two buddies who were hunters went out behind one of their parents house on some timber company land until we reached a big clearcut. Once we reached the clearcut one buddie peeled off and we hiked a little more until my next buddy went his way. Now i was on my own and walked a little farther down the clearcut and found a stump in a little depression to sit on. As of now i'd probably been carrying a rifle in the woods for 20-30 minutes tops, so i sat down for maybe 5 minutes and heard something walking. I look up and i see antlers , i'm shaking so bad i cant tell how many points i just know its any buck and he's legal. So i aim behind the shoulder (75 yards) and boom the deer drops i'm amazed i hit it i was shaking so bad and i had my scope on 9 power (lesson learned) i'm amazed i hit the deer. I dont know what to do so i called my buddies and told them i shot a deer and come help me, they asked what did you get i told them i'm not sure but from where i was 30 yards away i know its at least got 2 points.For some reason i would not go any closer until they got there but soon enough they showed up and we walked up to a nice  4x4 blacktail. Well theres a lot more stuff we talk about to this day me gutting it and almost puking  a half dozen times and my buddie showing me how to cut off the tarsal glands and instead of cutting i drug the knife over the top and squeegeed all that stinky pi$$  all over the place and almost puked again. Oh and my shot behind the shoulder turned out to be a spine shot i guess i was shaking pretty good. Well to sum it up i thought this hunting thing was pretty easy i was hunting for 30-35 minutes and shot a nice buck ,well nothing has been close to that easy since

[Bookworm]

When I was growing up I was more into fishing, which I still love to do. My best friend in high school was from a hunting family so he finally convinced my to tag along. I'd shot a few ducks before but had never really big game hunted. His wife's family hunted a ranch over in eastern wa. I went over there with an old model 94 30-30. I saw a few does in the morning but nothing with horns. After I walked back to the truck my friend wasn't back yet. I started walking back towards the ranch . One of the ranchers kids picked me up after a short distance. As we were driving back a couple of deer ran across the road in front of us. We took off after them across the wheat stubble field. When we got up beside them he told me to shoot. We were doing 15 to20 mph across the field. I shot once hitting it in the neck,pure luck. 

[boneaddict]

anybody get their first deer this year?  There are about 2,000 more members here...any more stories to add?

[Elkrunner]

I didn't get my first deer this year but I did get my first deer with a bow this year.  I really wish that I had it on video.  My hunting partner and I had pulled into camp around 1 pm, we decided to put the bare minimums up for camp and do a quick scouting drive.  We ended up driving along the chewuch in winthrop when all of the sudden he said to stop.  He mentioned that there was one lying down next to the river.  It was a doe laying across the river about 3 feet from the water.  It was just laying there trying to stay cool.  I backed the truck up about 500 yards and dropped him off and pulled forward about 300 down stream from the deer.  We both got out and started to weed our way through the thick brush.  As I popped out of the brush I realized that I was directly across from the doe.  I pulled back and hit it pefectly from 28 across the water.  She imediately jumped up and ran into the river, swayed a bit and fell over.  I had to wade into the water cheast deep to retrieve her.  It was one of the most exciting times,

[Dslayer]

I got into a little later than some of the stories here.  I had hunted with my dad and brother around 16 0r so with some guys they know out of White Salmon, a big party hunt with more bitching about where to go and who was standing and who was driving-seemed like my brother, who is 2 years younger than me, always got one though, but it didn't seem like hunting to me so I struck off my own.

When I was 20 or so, I killed my first deer, a spike, above Sheep Lake on Chinook Pass back when it was not quite so inundated with tree huggers as today.  Hit it at about 50 yards, went down immediately, walked over to it and couldn't immediately find antlers.  Turned out that one spike stood straight up and was buried in the dirt and the other had grown along the top of it's head and I hadn't immediately seen it.  After that wee bit of a heart stopper, I gutted it, taking about forever.  In those days I hadn't given a great deal thought to moving a dead animal; I drug it down the hill and onto the PCT toward Chinook Pass, about 1 and a half miles away.  I got some interesting looks from hiker types who weren't very impressed, but were rather apalled actually, really the first time I had experienced that sort of folk.  Finally, I decided to take it straight down a  drainage to the Chinook Pass Hwy., which I could hear below me.  This started off pretty easy, then eventually devolved into me lowering the deer one minor waterfall after another until I reached the Hwy.  By that time, about all the hide had been stripped off the deer, kind of looked like a Mexican hairless.  Boy I was beat, walked up the highway and came back with my pickup, wrestled into the bed, took it home, skinned it and cleaned and took to the butcher shop.  Kind of a sorry looking thing by the time I got it home, but I had done it all by myself-the first of many, though I have greatly refined my packing style.

[huntnphool]

Got my first moose this year, isn't that part of the deer family?

[EastWaViking]

My first deer was in 6th grade in 1977 down by Washougal.  I had an old H&R single shot 20 Gauge with open sights and slugs, (still have it) and I missed lots of deer that year.  Once my mom got her deer I got to use her .244 with a SCOPE!  I remember lots of cold rainy days in the brush sitting on stumps in my school jeans, freezing, while my dad pushed the brush for me. Why didn't anybody think of rain gear or gortex back then?  My second deer,  the next year is my biggest blacktail to date.  (then again I haven't hunted them since 1979) 

[Elkstuffer]

Shot my first deer in 1977. I was 12 years old. It was a HUGE doe. After I shot her I walked over and carried her out with one hand and she wasn't even dragging on the ground. She looked alot bigger thru my scope.
Killed my first buck five years later. A nice fat grain fed forked horn mulie.
Last year I took my first archery buck, a 2x4 blacktail. It was like I was 12 years old again. Love that feeling.

[bigdave]

1982, huckleberry unit back when they used to issue 1500 doe tags a year. I was twelve and had worked all summer buckin' bales to save up for a rifle. (Ya, 12, they don't call me bigdave for nothin') Dad said it would mean more to me if I bought it with my own money. I remember being really disappointed when I went into the White Elephant to buy my Savage 30-06 and they told me I had to pay extra for a lefty. My dad felt so bad he ponied up the cash to help me out. My dad used to hunt back in the day and I vividly remember asking him how far would a bullet go if it went through another deer. He said not to shoot if there was another deer directly behind the one I was shooting. I said OK and that was that.

Flash forward 2 days.  A herd of whitetail does and fawns in a farmers alfalfa field, I creeped up a fenceline with my Dad and put my iron sight on an old doe at 80 yrds. Dad had a tag too and so we tried the old 1,2,3 thing. Anyway I squeeze the trigger, my doe falls like a ton of bricks and about 50 ft off to the side and behind her so does another deer, it's a fawn with SPOTS. It's kickin' and floppin' on the groud like a chicken with it's head cut off. Incredulous, I look at my Dad and ask him why he shot a fawn. And you guessed it, He looks at me and says he didn't shoot. I made him empty his rifle so I could count his bullets and he was still full.

He made me tag the fawn so that I would remember it for the rest of my days. He tagged the doe and our hunt was over. After we took it home and showed my Mom and sisters they didn't speak to me for a week. Sorry, no pics, I think you understand. Important lesson learned that day.

[huntnphool]

Thanks for the story Dave.

[croix]

I started hunting with my dad in the Black Hills of South Dakota at about age 12 and continued to do so until I was 16 without any luck. Then I got a car and discovered girls and didn't hunt the rest of my school days . In fact I didn't hunt again until I had moved to Washington under Navy orders. After several years of trying to figure out the whole Blacktail thing, I finally got my first in 1995.

I had hunted most of the season with a couple of good friends, but they were on different boats and had to go to sea before the end of season. Luckily I met a guy leaving work one day who was in a simialr situation and we decided to make a go of it on the final weekend.

We headed to Brown's Creek - Mason County, NW of Shelton - and spent all day Saturday and most of Sunday hiking some pretty tough terrain. After lunch on Sunday I talked him into crawling through some old willow trees to a small clearing that I had seen plent of sign in earlier in the season.

I hunkered down under the boughs of a Fir tree and he found a spot in an old snag pile 50 yards from me. We sat in the rain and sleet for over three hours. It was nearly dark and I was miserable. With 15 minutes of legal light left on the 31st of October, I started to get up and this big bodied blacktail with a small forked rack walked out in front of me at about EIGHT yards. I am sure that he only stuck around to find out what the shaking was all about since I had suddenly come down with full blown buck fever.

He had turned to face dead away from me and was looking back over his shoulder. My inexperience got the better of me and I tried to make a head shot. Of course I did not account for the range of EIGHT yards and my shot was a complete miss. Miraculously, instead of running for the hills, this suicidal deer simply turned broadside in pure amazement. I think even he was confused by my ineptitude. His confusion was his downfall, however, as even in my shaking buck crazed state I couldn't miss a broadside shot at ... that's right... EIGHT yards.

Despite the 7MM mag shell blowing through both of his shoulders, he still managed to run / hobble 25 yds across the short end of the clearing and reach the 20 foot straight drop at the other side before expiring at the base of a tree. I suppose that is my retribution for missing the first shot. The first 20 feet of that drag took almost as long as the rest of the drag to the truck.

Naturally, my new found friend was confused at the whole affair. He heard the first shot....  second shot..... crazy raucous going over the bank. Thank god he was there though, or I might still be trying to get that deer up the first 20 feet. He earned his share of the deer meat that day.

I know it's a bit of a long rambling story, but that is partly because I  can still remember every detail of that day - just as I can remember every detail of every deer I've taken since then. I hope that I never lose that feeling I get when I take an animal, or the complete roller-coaster of emotions leading up to it. I want my last hunt to feel just like this one did.

[Skyvalhunter]

Got my first moose this year, isn't that part of the deer family?

Yes indeed and you earned every ounce of that big deer!!