Well, to be honest I think she wouldn't do it. We live in NH and the bow kill success rate is the lowest in the nation or at least has been for many years. Anyway, getting any deer here with a bow of any kind is a tough assingnment. My wife, Laura, started hunting with me last year and took a nice black bear with her DAS bow. It was a goal she had set out to accomplish and she did it. You would think I would have learned something about her from that.
She has a "thing" about shooting does and/or yearlings. I have no problem with that except that in NH any deer is a good deer. Where we live we have set up a feeder and it is frequented by a number of does and fawns during the entire year. The number increases during the winter but we understand that and enjoy observing them. Often, after the season, the bucks show up. Sometimes a lot of them. One year we had a bachelor group of ten bucks show up every nite for several weeks and we would watch the "boys" engage in various forms of male dominant behavior including sparring and harrassing the "ladies". Some years this goes on well into early Feb.
Back to Laura, sorry for the digression but it all fits. Laura will watch hunting shows with me now and actually she listens and talks to me about what she hears. One of the things she heard is that the best buck "bait" was real live does, which we have around all the time. So she figured that once the rut started that all she would have to do was go sit in one of the stands and the bucks would eventually come by to check out our local group of does and fawns. Well, yesterday afternoon, after retruning from a doctor appointment Laura walked in the back door in her hunting duds. I asked, "See anything"? "Shot the four pointer", she said. Seems that we had seen a four pointer a few weeks back at the feeder and wondered what had happened to him. Laura decided to sit in her stand while I was at the doc's and she wasn't there very long when this four pointer walks past her into a patch of woods that we knew was a bedding area for one doe and her fawn. Not too late, but just before it started to get dark she has one of the does run by her stand. A few minutes later she hears (for the first time in her life) what she recognizes as a buck grunting. She looks in that direction and see the four pointer coming her way looking, obviously, for the doe. When the buck walked by at 15 yards she simply shot him...just the way she had figured it would be. Trouble was was that the shot was a little far back (she didn't try to stop him but thought she could get him walking by). We got out the lights to take a look and found a sparse but evident blood trail. About 80 yards later we found the arrow....covered in blood but with the tell tale odor of paunch. We backed out and to make a long trailing job short we found him about 200 yards away this morning in his death bed by our brook. The arrow (a 500 size Beman Max 4 with a 100 grain insert and a 100 grain Phantom head) had taken the liver and just nicked the front of the stomach. She shoots a 58" DAS bow. Fortunately the arrow was a pass thru which leaked enough to make finding him challenging but rewarding.
After all the advice I gave her during the season I promised her that I would no longer put myself in that position again. She is just going to do it her way regardless of what I suggest. Besides, I do not like the taste of crow.
Here he is where we found him
Here she is with him
By the way, this is Laura's first deer and I am very proud of her. She beat all the odds and did it with a stickbow!
Topic: Wife gets first buck (Read 4355 times)
