Day 2
Back at the water tank. Calm, clear day, only thing moving was grasshoppers, and the occasional bird that flew in to get a quick drink at the tank. An occasional breeze blew thru the windows of the blind. Flies bit at my legs and I had begun to wish I had worn some pants instead of lightweight ripstop shorts. I had read a couple of magazines that I grabbed from the bathroom of the hunting cabin we were staying in, but I was starting to get bored. By 2:45, nothing moved. Not even the breeze. I needed a little bit of airflow, so I turned around and began to fiddlefart with the window flaps behind me. As I'm doing this, I'm thinking about how good a cold bottle of water from the my cooler would taste, along with something to snack on. So when I finished opening up the window I turn around and began to reach for my bag cooler and looked out the front window at the same time.
There he stood. The buck from the day before. He was like The Ghost and the Darkness. He just appeared directly in front of the blind at 8 yards.
Not only did I not have my bow in my hand, nor an arrow on the strong....but I didnt even have my tab on, yall. This buck had me dead to rights, and had caught me slipping! He had come from the only direction I hadnt expected. From the other side of then hill, directly behind the water tank.
I slowly slid my tab over my finger, picked up an arrow with one hand, and the bow with the other, and easily nocked an arrow and raised the bow up. The buck was again quartering towards me, but to my knowledge had not approached the tank to get a drink. He then took a few steps straight forward, and then stopped directly between me and the blind, at about 7 yards. I leveled the bow, picked a spot about halfway up his body and began my draw. The buck never twitched an ear. I hit anchor, held it for about 2 seconds while I burned a hole at that spot in his side.....then cut the arrow loose. My release felt good.
"WHAAAAAAAACK!!!!!!!!" went the sound of my top limb tip hitting the roof rod of the popup blind. I'm not sure who the sound scared more, me or the buck. But, I saw the shaft and my red/white fletchings bury into the shoulder of the antelope. And it looked like a pretty stellar hit!
The buck jumped forward when the arrow hit him, and he turned and lit off back down behind me like he was jet assisted. He reached the bottom of this little drainage in probably 3 seconds, the same drainage he took hours to cross the day before. When he reached the bottom of the drainage he stopped and turned towards me. He no longer had the arrow in him, and he seemed to be bleeding fairly well. He turned and slowly walked up the ridge of a finger that ran down into the drainage, reached the top of the finger, and bedded down in a patch of sagebrush. About 30 min later he stood up, turned around and laid back down. He was slow and wobbly as he did this. 30 min later he stood up, moved a little further down on the other side of the ridge, out of my sight.
I called Chuck and told him how everything had gone down. And that I could no longer see the buck but didnt feel like he dead yet. 30 min later, Chuck was up on the high ridge above me, glassing the antelope.
Close to nightfall, Chuck descended the bluff and met me at blind. Chuck said that the buck was not dead, looked like a fair hit, if not a little high. On the way out, we never saw the buck, so we figured he was laying in the sagebrush hiding, dead, or had managed to sneak out. Our plan was to back out, come back and start glassing in the morning until we found him, dead or otherwise.
The little drainage the buck ran into then managed to sneak out of.
Topic: 1st antelope hunt or Great Plains on the Great Plains. (Read 5666 times)
