The week after I got married, I purchased a single shot NEF Handi-Rifle chambered in .243. If memory serves, I paid right at $100 for it.
At the time I still entertained delusions that my wife may be interested in waking up at 2am to lay ambush for forest creatures in the frigid cold. Turns out she has much too much sense for that, and if anything, she’s won me over to her preferred hobby...ripping lips on the riverbank. If you’d have told me 7 years ago that one day, I’d willingly spend a Saturday of deer season, during peak rut no less, fishing for bluegill…I’d have punched you.
But ya don’t know what ya don’t know til ya know it, ya know?
As a conscientious adult husband (and as an excitable kid with a new toy) I felt it was my responsibility to kill a deer or two with the gun to make sure there weren’t issues with the caliber’s performance that may lead to a bad taste in a new hunter’s mouth.
So, I decided to hunt with it first, of course.
Opening weekend that year was warm. My dad and I spent it up at our lease at Travis Bridge but didn’t have much luck finding test subjects for the new gun. As we lounged around Sunday evening, I checked my weather app.
Cold front.
According to Ole David Alan Seales, we were supposed to transition overnight from late summer to dead of winter. It was projected to be in the low-to-mid 30s Monday morning.
My dad was a real adult and had to be at work bright and early, but I was only an adult on paper. I had to pay taxes, but still couldn’t rent a car. One of the “perks” of that transitionary stage was that I still worked my college job in retail, and as a result had no obligations Monday morning. So, after an evening sit he headed back into town after wishing me luck, and I ate a lonely dinner of Lucky Charms from a red solo cup.
The next morning, I slipped into the woods at 3am to the “Coyote Hole,” a stand we inherited from the previous lessees. It was a moderately-rusty ladderstand with fresh straps that overlooked the beginnings of a drainage that flowed into Old Town Creek. That drainage connects a young, planted pine thicket to the creek bottom, and runs right behind one of our food plots. Deer, turkeys, and of course packs of coyotes use it to cross the more open piney woods that make up our lease.
Access to the stand without potentially disturbing deer feeding on our lease required a bit of brush-busting with as little use of a light as possible, so it took me almost an hour to make the 300 yard cut through the woods from the paved road where I had parked.
At 4am, I was sitting in the ladderstand waiting for daylight. My hope was that I could catch deer returning from our food plot back to the safety of the pine thicket that lay maybe 100 yards behind me. I was early…very early…because it was only a 500 yard or so journey from the food plot to the thicket, and it had been my experience that bucks are usually the last to arrive at a food source in the evening and the first to leave in the morning. I also had noticed that for whatever reason, it’s a fact that deer don’t spook nearly as easy in the dark.
I had plenty of time to get chilly as I waited. It remains shocking to me how wildly the weather can shift in south Alabama. Yesterday evening I had been swatting mosquitoes, and today there was frost on the stand I was sitting in. I could see my breath in the moonlight, which was thankfully blowing the way I wanted it to. South, towards the thicket and away from the food plot.
The cold kept me from being sleepy, as did the inexplicable feeling that today would be the day. I’d like to think that years of experience have made me subconsciously attuned to the conditions that make for successful hunts, but the truth is I almost always have that tense feeling of anticipation as grey light begins to break in the deer woods and duck sloughs…regardless of what the daylight brings.
But this morning, my premonitions bore fruit. As individual tree trunks began to emerge from the darkness, I heard footsteps. Not the erratic shuffling of leaves produced by featherweight squirrels or birds, but a steady, rhythmic, purposeful, and heavy-sounding trot of a large animal with small feet. It started off faint, but quickly grew louder and combined with the sound of snapping twigs and rustling brush and splashing water.
I stood up, turned slightly to better face the oncoming noise, eased the hammer back on my rifle, and raised it to my shoulder. I scanned the woods over the top of the scope. I was sure that whatever was coming my way had to be mere yards from my stand, but nothing appeared.
The noise grew louder.
Worry crept into my mind. Whatever was coming, it was heading off of our property. I couldn’t see it yet, but the blue blazes delineating our lease from our neighbors’ was maybe 50 yards behind me. Most of my hunting had been with a 7mm Rem Mag or my dad’s .30-06…both quite capable of stopping a deer right there. Here I was about to fling an 80 grain pill at what was obviously going to be a quartering-towards deer.
The noise grew louder.
I could now differentiate the smooth, white-splotched trunks of bay magnolias from the purplish, crinkled bark of pine trees in the creek bottom.
The noise grew louder.
Antlers appeared maybe 60 yards out. Then the grey form of a deer. The buck had his head down and was slinking purposefully my way. He looked almost like a dog sneaking out of the kitchen with a ham sandwich in his mouth.
He was headed straight at me.
I could see him fine with my naked eyes, but he was close enough and fast enough to make getting him in the scope difficult. The crosshairs bobbed and weaved around his chest.
“Slow down!” I urged him silently.
He trotted closer…and closer…and closer…
His path started to veer a bit. Behind my stand, instead of in front of it. Gun still raised and at my shoulder, I took the smallest shuffle-step to try and turn.
The stand popped.
There are a lot of strong emotions to experience as a hunter. The thrill of your first kill. The odd sense of regret as you hold the limp, iridescent corpse of what seconds ago was a wood duck. The intense frustration as you watch an arrow sail over the back of a fat doe. The exhausted satisfaction of finally reaching your truck after packing one out 2 miles on your back.
But to me the strongest emotion is the one you get when you’re looking down the barrel at an animal who just realized it may have made a tiny little mistake.
A squirrel who stops eating a hickory nut mid-chew.
A gobbler who deflates from a full strut.
A cupped-up duck who suddenly retracts its landing gear.
A buck who slams on the brakes and looks at you through the scope.
My crosshairs were right at the crease where his neck met his shoulders. I couldn’t have possibly missed. He was maybe 15 yards from my stand.
The little bullet didn’t exit the deer, but it went from his shoulder all the way to his ham. He did manage about a 20 yard run which ended with him slamming into a fallen log about 5 yard yards from my stand.
He’s one of three deer I’ve killed that left a blood stain on the tree I was sitting in as he ran. To date, he remains the largest buck to be killed on that lease. He was the second deer I ever shoulder-mounted, and the first one I paid for myself. Sean Knight did him for me, and while it wasn’t cheap it taught me the value of really good taxidermy. I look at him every day, and if I stare for too long I start holding my breath and waiting for his ear to twitch.
