If I’m being truthful, I thought I was going to get to most of the following content the first week I started my hunting and fishing stories. You would think I would know better by now. If I told my stories every week, I probably couldn’t cover them in a year, but I need to get back to the task at hand after this week.
Recency bias aside my best deer story contains my kids. I have shared the struggles of the last few years with no actual animal to show for their hard work. Which I know how much the surface level failure is teaching them as the other things they are learning will lead to success in the future and in other parts of life. They have been at this for a while. The first walkabout (they may have been 7 and 8) that they had led to tears and me having to break my cover to get them through. Coincidentally when I broke my cover so did a buck a few yards from me that had they been able to stay on course would have come right down a path like we planned. Probably wasn’t anything to write home about anyway (at least that’s what I told myself).
The story I’m sharing is a couple years and miles of walking later. I forget what year, but we were in an up year for the deer population in our neighborhood. It was the first day of season and pretty warm as there wasn’t any snow and the sloughs didn’t have ice. We watched several bucks travel in and around this large slough. This slough is the same one that was the sight of so much death in 2012 from EHD. The slough has a dug out in where trees have grown on the spoil piles. I shot my first archery deer there and my first duck. So, a unique place. Anyway, we had watched where we thought one had bedded down and yes deer love to be around, sometimes in, water. We were far enough away we couldn’t really make out if he was a shooter or not. I knew there was some water in there but as we were walking it started to get too deep for the kids’ boots so I had them go up onto the one spoil island so they could watch and still be part of the hunt.
As I continued walking through the water and cattails, I had decided that if this was much of a buck at all I was taking a shot as I wanted the kids to have that feeling of success. I continued for another 20 yards when I heard the splash, splash of the deer getting up. I had fairly high confidence that when we started after him that he would run to this angle in the slough where there is higher ground. This is exactly what happened thankfully as I couldn’t even see him until he did. I took the shot and we had the first deer that the kids were part of the hunt. He wasn’t huge by any means but what the kids got to experience was more important to me than that.
My brothers, father, and I had developed a theory that many of the large bucks will stay laying down unless you almost walk on them. We would see a nice deer go into something in the morning and in some cases never see them come out. We also suspected they could crawl but that one might be too hard to prove. The irony of when our theory was proved is that it was my father’s last deer before he passed away and it was Frank. Yes, the deer had a name. Only one given a moniker simply because he was always around our farm, until rut hit. This is another reason we walk to seek out deer. When rut hits, it always has seemed to me that they go nocturnal. Frank was famous for that and for showing back up after season was over. We could distinguish him easily as he had a distinctive drop tine. He even taught us just how long deer can keep their antlers before shedding them. The latest I recorded his antlers still on his head was March 18th.
He proved our theory as my father was walking along a food plot one day by himself, which was weird, but I think he was already feeling sick and just didn’t want to tell us. He is the only one who I know had the sight for this. In this corn food plot, he could see in between the rows, maybe 20 rows over a big buck laying flat to the ground. With one shot from the Marlin .357 lever action, the deer was down. Anyone else would have walked right by. He calls me to come and help him lift the deer into the pickup and he says he thinks he got Frank. I didn’t believe him but sure enough that’s what I laid eyes on when I got there. Mind you this is a deer we or I have been trying to find during season for years. I would see him running the feed wagon but never in season. We think he was 7 ½ by the time he met dad in that short corn, so he was going down hill a little. Thanks to Frank, our theory was proven, I wish he hadn’t been dad’s last deer but if you want a good one, to go out on hard to get better than that. You can see Frank as he is still up in Buckshots in Letcher along with 2 of my older brothers last deer.
I know I have been all stories the last couple weeks. These things that shaped me, that live with me forever wouldn’t have happened without the habitat. Corn and soybeans don’t give this to us.