After a fruitless archery season, and rifle (I have not gone over to the bow only mode) I decided to try with my new recurve again in an expanded archery zone in the town of Rockland. This is an archery only zone that opened for an extended season to try to control the deer population in a heavily developed town. My buddy had been scouting the property we had permission to hunt, and a scrape had been freshened near the tree we scouted in Sept.. He took his first deer, a big 4 point from, that tree as well as a small spike. When I set up a single line of tracks that looked like a good buck passed in front of the tree and headed into the thick cover bordering the property we have permission to hunt. As sunset approached I turned to face the area I thought the deer would come from. At 4:10 up pops a nice deer and walks down to me. I can see his body and antlers clearly against the snow on the ground. I am set up to shoot to my left with my right shoulder leaning on the tree as he pops up at 12:00 to the direction I am facing. He walks directly at me and hits a point where he can angle left (perfect) or right (not so perfect), he turns right. I start to move my arrow over some tiny branches from a neighboring tree, lightly hitting a tiny branch. At the sound he stops 8 yards from the base of the tree, looks around and then look up at me. He stares for about 30 seconds, drops his head and turns right. As he looks up at me I can see the white rings around his eyes and nose, and ten points on his rack. He takes a couple of steps and I draw to anchor and release as he steps into a shooting lane. I see and hear the arrow hit, a little further back than I wanted, but he is sharply quartering away and the arrow is headed for the opposite shoulder. He runs off, stops looks back and walks away. After getting down and meeting my buddy who was just down the hill from me we went back to the shot site and track him to where he starts walking. He walks up a four wheeler trail and heads to a thick power line full of brush and juniper. Since there is no blood yet we decided to back out for 4 hours.
When we got back we trailed him for 200 yards, with very little blood, except if he bumped into a tree or sapling. Thank goodness for the snow. I had a little trouble when he used the same trail as some does, but was able to work out where he separated. He crossed a big yard and road on a run. On the other side of the road we found good blood, but decided to back out considering how far he had come and the fact that he was running. I don't think we pushed him as he had never stopped or bedded down after the initial hit.
With two hours of sleep under my belt I finally got up at four and diddled around until I had to pick up my buddy and son at six. We headed back and got in to the woods at 6:45. It had snowed about a 1/4 inch during the night and made it tough to follow the track, especially with a fair number of doe tracks weaving through the woods. We finally started to hit good blood we could see through the snow. We tracked him to his bed which was about 400 yards from the hit site. He had gotten up and kept going. I was not sure why, there were doe tracks near by and some coyote tracks. the trail wa fairly easy to follow as he must have been moving near the end of the snow. I began to worry when any time we lost the track it was easy to find by looping onto one of the four sets of coyote tracks. After four hours of tracking we found him. A beautiful 10 pointer that would have dressed out in the 180's. Problem is the better set of trackers had gotten there first and left nothing but the head, neck and one shoulder. I was able to salvage a couple of sections of backstrap as well, the skin, head and neck. Not much to show up with at the tagging station. The total track was about 8/10 of mile from hit site to where we found him. I would never have been able to track him with out the snow. I wish I had gotten to him before the coyotes, but I don't regret backing out and giving him more time.
Topic: First Tad kill, long story and trail (Read 3776 times)
