A Tale of Two Shots
Being Part 2 of a Two Part Series
It didn’t take long for me to realize that while my wife enjoyed backpacking, canoeing, and fishing; hunting just wasn’t her thing. In a way, I was relieved. Her being an avid hunter would have made her a 10/10 woman, and I was on a good day maybe a 7/10.
Besides, her disinterest meant that I had a sweet little single-shot .243 all to myself, guilt free. I toted that gun all over the woods for the next couple of seasons. It rode on bicycle handlebars, in the bottom of my canoe, strapped to my climbing stand, and stashed under the back seat of my beater truck. It was cheap enough that I wasn’t particularly concerned about it being stolen or getting dropped to the bottom of the Tensaw. It spent a few nights twenty feet up a tree in the swamp. Since I knew I’d be coming back to hunt that spot again the next morning, why carry it all the way out and back in?
I got pretty fond of the little thing. It killed several deer and a few hogs, and one coyote that had the misfortune to respond to an impromptu lip squeak when I saw him slinking through the palmettos.
I did occasionally notice that, unlike with my .30-06, most of the critters I killed lacked an exit wound. Occasionally, that made tracking jobs difficult, but for the most part animals were dead where they stood. The little gun was remarkably easy to shoot accurately, and had almost no recoil.
And so, an evening came where once again David Allen Seales called for a cold morning. I’m an acolyte of Dr. Robert Shepphard, having been converted in college after reading his Whitetails: An Unprecedented Research-Based Hunting Model, so a cold front obviously necessitated a morning sit. Besides, it was (if I recall correctly) the second season that Alabama DCNR had allowed hunters to hunt until February 10th in my zone. This may come as a surprise to some readers, but our rut is still in full swing during the first week of February. I had killed a nice buck the year before during that time frame who was bedded with a doe, and I was anxious to repeat that hunt. I packed my backpack, laid out my clothes, told my wife where I’d be going, and got to bed early.
The next morning I was set up in the tree a full two hours before sunrise. I had sold myself a little short when calculating how long it would take me to make the mile trek back to my spot. I was set up next to a small creek that separated a high swamp ridge from the main tract I was hunting on. The spot is difficult to access, requiring hip waders and a high degree of faith in your compass to access in the dark. As a result, it doesn’t get hunted much.
The ridge is densely vegetated with palmettos, and has several very large white oaks on top of it. Food, cover, isolation from hunters…it has everything a deer needs to survive. Every year since I’ve discovered it, a buck makes a scrape line on the creek side of the ridge. I had snuck along the creek bank quietly to a tree that had an awesome view of a section of the ridge that allowed a little more visibility than was typical. As I waited for daylight, I felt pretty good about my odds.
Morning finally came, and it remains in my memory as one of the prettiest ones I’ve ever seen. We hadn’t had much rain lately, and the water in the creek was clear with a blue-green tint to it. It was cold enough that everything had a light dusting of frost, which is a rare occurrence on the Gulf Coast. As I maintained my vigil high in a tulip poplar, I watched a beaver busily starting some new construction underneath me, supervised by a half dozen wood ducks who were already making use of the slack water he had created.
It wasn’t until about lunch time that the action picked up. As I sat watching the beaver busily rearrange the sticks he had dragged into the stream, I heard hoofbeats to my north. Two deer were headed my way, moving fairly quickly. I excitedly shouldered my gun, anticipating a buck chasing a doe along the ridge top.
As they moved into view, it became obvious that both deer were does; a yearling and its mother. But they were looking over their shoulders as they trotted, and the mother had her tail up. I had witnessed this behavior years before when I shot my first eight pointer on a similar ridge further north on the Alabama River. The larger doe was obviously coming into heat, and being pursued by a randy buck.
The does moved quickly along the ridge and were soon out of sight. As I listened to the sound of them crashing through the palmettos fade, the grip on my rifle tightened. I knew with a fair degree of certainty what was about to happen.
Sure enough, minutes later I heard a third deer coming down the trail. Even though his head was glued to the forest floor like a bloodhound, I could see that he had antlers. I pulled the hammer back on my trusty little .243 and steadied it against the tree.
The buck stopped for a second to lift his head and sniff the air. Conveniently, he did so in an opening at the base of a large magnolia, leaving me a perfect, broadside shot about 75 yards out. He was a nice deer. I’ve never been good at counting tines, but his main beams were even with the end of his nose. He was definitely a mature buck, which was a rarity on this property.
With a steady rest and a gun that I was very familiar with, 75 yards was a chip shot. The shot dropped the buck in his tracks, flushed all of the wood ducks, and greatly perturbed the beaver. As I recovered from the shot, I could see the buck lying at the foot of the magnolia tree.
I waited a few minutes to let my shaking subside before I climbed down the tree. Once I hit the ground, I was faced with a dilemma. I couldn’t take the straight path to my buck, since my beaver friend had dammed it to chest height. I’d have to walk downstream about a hundred yards to cross below his dam. I glanced across the creek at the large magnolia. It’d be easy enough, I supposed, to walk down, cross, and walk back up to where my buck was. The tree would make a good landmark.
As I walked along the bank I replayed the morning in my mind and reflected on how far I’d come as a hunter. Two years in a row, I had capitalized on good timing, good weather, and detailed knowledge of an area to close the deal on a public land buck. I was getting the chance to see things other people would never get to see, and instead of “buying” my trophies in the form of an expensive lease, out-of-state-tag, or guided hunt, I was making it happen with nothing but grit and skill. “Anybody with $50 for a hunting license could have come out here and killed that deer, “ I thought to myself, “but I’m the one that got him.”
As I waded the creek, my self-congratulatory reverie was interrupted by the sound of crashing back down the river bank. I barely heard it over the sound of water flowing over the dam, and by the time I had paused to listen closer it had stopped. For a second, doubt crossed my mind.
“He’s not going anywhere,” I muttered out loud.
Still, I picked up my pace on the way towards the magnolia. I could see it clearly, since it was the only green-leafed tree left on that ridge. As I got closer, I started scanning the ground underneath it for white belly hair. Once I got to the base of the tree, I stood there for several minutes before admitting the obvious.
The buck was gone.
As I stood beneath the magnolia, I looked out across the creek bottom. I could see my pack hanging where I’d left it in my hurry to lay hands on my prize. Yep, this was definitely the spot. I looked around one more time. Nothing. Not a hair. Not a drop of blood. Upon close inspection, there was a suspicious looking patch of bare dirt that looked an awful lot like it had been kicked up rather recently.
I rushed up to the top of the ridge and surveyed the other side for several minutes, hoping that perhaps he’d made a dash and expired on the other side. I walked the ridge for a couple of hundred yards in either direction, looking for blood and listening for further crashes.
Struck by a thought, I returned back to the base of the magnolia, steadied my rifle against it, aimed at a small patch of lichen on the tree I had climbed, and fired. Upon dialing my scope up all the way, I could see that my bullet had impacted within an inch of where I’d aimed.
At this point I’m ashamed to admit that I gave that beaver, wherever he was hiding, an absolutely phenomenal introduction to the English language’s finest swear words. I recited them all loudly and in combinations that became increasingly fantastic and creative.
Once I had raised the air temperature several degrees with my prose, I sat down in defeat. All of the memories of critters without exit wounds flooded my mind. Why, I wondered, had I decided to deer hunt with a caliber usually relegated to varmints?
I spent all weekend looking for that deer. I walked the entire length of the ridge, both sides of the creek bottom, and a substantial amount of the swamp surrounding the ridge. I even called a man with a tracking dog, who politely declined to bring his dog out when I told him how far back my stand was and that I’d thoroughly disturbed the area already with my search.
Monday, when I went back to work, I brought that gun with me. After work, I sold it to the pawn shop across the street. To this day I remain convinced that I hit that deer, most likely mortally, and that I would have him on my wall if I’d have shot him with a bigger caliber. I know that plenty of deer have been killed with a .243, and that plenty of deer have survived encounters with hunters packing bigger calibers. But my confidence was completely shaken. Big bucks are too rare in the river swamp to take chances. Ever since, I have carried a .30-06, and I doubt I’ll ever shoot anything smaller.
If you don’t hunt, you can’t imagine how losing a big deer sticks in your mind. It’s been years since I watched the beaver build his dam on that creek, but every time I find myself in that area I find myself searching for old bones. Oddly, I did eventually find a dead head on that ridge. Several years later, after a duck hunt on the beaver pond, I almost stepped on a rather impressive dead head. The rack was badly squirrel-chewed, and half of the buck’s skull was missing. I doubt that he is “my” buck, but I brought him home and hung him on the wall in honor of all of the ones that have gotten away.
So concludes a tale of two shots.