Huntin' Story - First Buck I Killed "On my own"....1993

[Ryan Rothhaar]

With the recent uptick in traffic here (and Terry calling out some of us "Old Timers")  I thought I'd add a little story....it's been a while since all this happened...so bear with me...

So this is about the first buck I killed pretty much on my own hook.  This was a huge accomplishment for me, and gave me a great dose of self confidence about my deer hunting.  Of course Dad brought me into bowhunting and set me up on my first several deer.  I'm sure it was pretty frustrating for him dealing with my ability to mess things up...over and over...but eventually things started to come together and I managed to kill bucks each year I was in high school from '88-'92.  These deer were all killed either directly from setups he put me on, or from stands he set up, with me making the decisions where to sit and when.  I was learning, slowly, but hadn't managed to get it done independently yet.

In the early '90's Dad was retired and spending a large amount of time out of state bowhunting, both bears in the spring, and whitetails in the fall.  One year I recall he was out of state over 180 days.  I was in my second year of college, attending Ohio Northern University, about a 45 minute drive from home.  I was living on campus, so had limited time to hunt, managing weekends only, maybe skipping out early on a friday once in a while, and hunting around home whenever I could.  I was trying to do things on my own, both because Dad was out of state, but also I was getting to a point that I wanted to move forward in my deer hunting and demonstrate some independence (not unusual for a 19 year old)  .

I knew my usual haunts pretty well by that time, spent lots of time in the woods and had a pretty good feel for where/when and how...just needed to put the pieces of the puzzle together myself.....

[Ryan Rothhaar]

I had a bunch of places around home to hunt, it was the type of place where everyone knew everyone, and all the farmers either knew my Dad or Grandfather, so access was pretty easy.  There was one place I had gotten permission on a year or two before, and hunted squirrels on a bit, that I wanted to scout out for deer and get a setup or two onto.  The owner was an old bachelor farmer that folks around the neighborhood called "Old Crazy".  Needless to say, he was a unique old guy.  He had lived there with his older brother for years, and his brother would walk around the farm fields on the property picking up rocks...and carrying them to the northeast corner of the property and piling them.  He'd spend days after days carrying rocks and piling them, eventually developing a trail across the field where he walked with every rock - and building a very large pile over the years.  The brother had passed away by the time I was hunting there, and the farmer was probably in his '70's.  I talked to him quite a bit, and he wasn't really crazy, but just had some old fashioned lingo he'd use that was confusing...and a few "strange" ideas.

The area of Ohio where I grew up is pancake flat.  All the area is cut up into 1 mile square sections by roads, as the area was all surveyed under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, and has the square townships, sections, one school section per township and all that as laid forth in the old law.  Typically the woods in these sections, if there isn't a river bottom or something, is comprised of the "back 20's" of the 3 or 4 families that owned the section, with the woods often comprising the middle of the section (back of all the properties as measured in from the roads) and broken into ownership by the different farmers.  The woods behind Crazy's place was that way - with a shape like a square "S" with the top and bottom sections projecting north and south of maybe 20-30 acres each, and the connecting piece of maybe 10 acres of brush, briars, and smaller trees.  Crazy owned the south projection of large timber as well as the connecting piece along with fields to the south, east, and west of these woods/brush areas.

[rastaman]

 

[Ryan Rothhaar]

When I first stopped at Crazy's place in the summer to ask permission to hunt the first thing he said to me was "There ain't no huntin' laws anymore!"....huh....what....

A bit of discussion led to the conclusion that he meant "There aren't any hunting seasons open right now"...he was using the old terminology..."Hunting Law" meaning "Hunting Season" as in "Squirrel Law starts on September 1st".  This was Old Old type talk you'd hear from the real old timers once in a while.  He used lots of old words like that, and communication could be "interesting" to say the least.  He was a real friendly old guy, and I had lots of good conversations with him.  It got to the point where I'd have Mom drop me off to hunt there and I'd sneak through the yard to get back to the timber so I wouldn't have to have an hour long discussion with him every time I went there to hunt.

The next thing that came up was "There ain't no trees back there in the woods anymore.....".....huh...what?  I asked for clarification and got that the trees were all gone for the "landing strip" for the "747's"...ok...Another half hour and I understood that once upon a time - like 20 years earlier - he bulldozed that connecting section of trees (hence the connecting 10 acres of brush) and had leveled the area to the east and west because he had the idea that he'd sell cattle to someone (cattle were LOONNNGG gone by the time I was there) and the buyer would send a plane of some description in to land there to pick up the cows.  This kind of stuff would go on all the time......

Bear with me though....I WILL go deer hunting eventually..

[durp]

 

[Ryan Rothhaar]

Old Crazy heated his house with firewood, which wasn't that unusual in the area, and he'd cut it all winter and into the early spring so he could drive his tractor around on the fields when the crops weren't there.  Another digression - we heated with firewood too, and one of Dad's pet peeves were "Hillbillies that cut firewood in the fall!"....the "right" way to do it was to cut in the spring before the sap rose and split the wood so it could season all summer for use that winter.  He talked about it like some "grasshopper and ant" thing, like the "hillbillies" were too lazy to do it right, but I think he really just didn't like people banging around creating a disturbance in the woods in the fall when anyone with any sense would be bowhunting deer!

Anyway, Crazy's method to cut firewood was to drive his tractor back there to the woods and start cutting a trail into the timber, dragging the whole trees up to his house and arranging them in the side yard where they would lay till late summer when he'd cut them up for wood, pile the brush in the yard, and burn the brush piles.  What ended up happening, then, is there would be all these logging trails into the woods in random places that would just go in 50-75 yards and end - when he finished cutting for the year - and then he'd start some new place next year.

One time I was back there scouting and saw where he was cutting wood and he'd drive the tractor in some tight right hand circles several times - leaving a circular donut track - then hook up to the tree and drag it off.  I saw him doing this one time and asked what was up - evidently there was something wrong with the steering on the tractor and he had to do a few circles to loosen something up before he could steer straight ahead.....

Anyhow...back to the deer hunting....

[Ryan Rothhaar]

So spending some time in this woodlot over a couple years I started to figure out generally what the deer were doing.  In the early fall of '93 I walked back there with a treestand and a commitment to getting a deer setup in place.  Dad had all of his good stands with him, probably in Illinois, so I dug around in the garage and found this old home-made job somebody gave him back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.  It was an OK stand - like a typical hang-on with a fold down foot platform - but over engineered and weighed about 30 pounds.  Also back then, for some reason, we didnt use ratchet straps for stands, and this had an automotive seat belt for around the tree.  The belt was plenty strong, but the buckle part was crummy and dirty/rusty and was hard to work.

I got back into the timber and started snooping around and found where one of Crazy's wood cutting roads ran into the woods far enough, right along the north edge of the center connecting brushy area, to "Y" into an old logging road that came off of the north neighbor's land that was open woods and ran into the brush.  This "Y" fork was obviously being used by deer pretty well, and there was a nice scrape right at the fork.  There were also some decent rubs around, and the 2 logging trails gave good access to and through the brushy area and out the other side to the open timber in Crazy's south woods. 

The spot would be good on a northwest wind, as I could set up east of the fork, with the main road running in front of me right to left (north to south) and the "Y" of the wood cutting path forking off at my  left hand and running south and a bit east, with the main road trending south and west.

The setup would only be good on a west or northwest wind, with enough west to it to not give my wind to the "Y" running south and east.

The only tree I could hang in on that brushy spot was a shagbark hickory that split into several trunks.  It was a small tree and I got up about 10 ft on the middle trunk and it was probably 8 inches diameter, max at that point.  I remember I had to wrap that stupid seat belt around the trunk about 3 times to get the buckle to work.  I then pruned a little walking lane to access the stand on my way out to the field 40 yards to the east and got out of there.....

[Ryan Rothhaar]

Throughout the fall I was hunting here and there when I could, but never got back into Crazy's place as the wind/timing/whatever wasn't right when I was around home to hunt. 

Now keep in mind, in that part of Ohio, in those days, the deer were pretty scarce.  You had one tag, good for either a buck or a doe, and that was it for the whole season.  No extra tags, bowhunting and gun hunting whatever, one deer only.  As I said before I had killed a buck each year in high school, but I also hunted every afternoon, weekends morning and afternoons, had a guy that was pretty good at deer hunting setting me up, and I didn't pass much.  Basically, I'd get one or two cracks at bucks a season, typically, and I never killed one before Halloween.

The first week in November that year ('93) rolled in warm, but a cold front was predicted for late in the week.  The predominant wind in that area (like much of the Midwest) is southwest, with northwest or northeast on cold fronts.  With a good front during prime time and a northwest wind predicted I had Crazy's place on my mind.

Friday I cut out as early as I could to get home and get in a tree.  Getting some laundry done and some home cooked meals were also high on the list. 

I remember that afternoon was blustery with winds from the northwest and on-and-off spitting snow/ice flurries.  I couldn't hear much due to the wind so was keeping eyes peeled on the logging roads, and as far as I could see into the brush for deer activity.

[Ryan Rothhaar]

I only had a couple hours in the tree as I had made a bonzai run home after classes and had to get back into the woods and up in the tree, but the wind probably helped me as I could get in there undetected.  An hour or so before dark I saw a deer coming down the logging road...according to the script...from the north open timber headed to the fork.  He was a year and a half old buck, and a full 5X5, with the front tines being a couple of inches long.  A real dandy in a few years.  I didn't want a year and a half old deer, and watched him put on a performance on the scrape, and wander away on the southwest trending fork of the road off into the brushy area.

As it was getting to be primetime I caught a movement in the timber straight in front of me across the main logging road and out pops a buck.  No doubt in my mind about this one, good enough for me!  He hit the logging road right in front of me headed for the fork moving at a fast walk.  I grabbed my bow and got an arrow on the string about the time he took the southeast trending trail and walked pretty much right under me.  I let him get a few steps out and got lined up on him.  I whistled and when he stopped I shot him at about 7 yards......

[Ryan Rothhaar]

I was shooting cedar arrows at the time, and a Black Widow, shooting my own limbs (a used set we bought) on one of Dad's risers.  I still have both, the limbs are MAII graybark's marked 61 at 30 inches with someone's name on them I don't know.  These were pre-fastflight limbs and I was getting about 57lbs out of them.  I was (and still am) a big believer in "shoot em in the middle with a big Snuffer"  .  I got him quartering away at the back of the ribs and the arrow went right in to the nock.  He peeled out of there headed south and I sneaked out the back way as I wanted to give him some time.

I just checked my arrow on the wall here, and I have Friday November 5, 1993 written on the broken cedar shaft.

I went back in there with Mom the next morning - she was always good at blood trailing, making up for my color blindness and over-enthusiasm on my own blood trails...and we (she) tracked him a couple hundred yards through the timber to an old grown up homestead south of the woods where he bedded down and died in his bed.  I ended up getting one lung and the liver and he was likely dead before I got home from the hunt.

He was a clean 5X5 with a broken brow tine...he still scored high enough for P&Y as is, and would have been high 130's if he wasnt broken off.  Never did determine for sure if he was a really big 2 1/2 yr old or a 3 1/2 yr old deer.  I do recall he was 194 field dressed.  And in that area, at that time, a deer that size could have been either age.

I was very proud of this deer, and the feeling that I had kind of made it over a hump in my deer hunting career to be able to be a bit autonomous and able to successfully kill a good buck on my own.

I'll attach a couple pictures below.  It's hard to believe it's been almost 30 years since this happened! 

R

[Ryan Rothhaar]

[Terry Green]

Great read while I'm waiting on the wifi guy in NYC.

Great Story, Great deer, Great memories. 

[kennym]

That's as good as it gets Ryan!! Most excellent!!

[Irish Archer]

Great stuff, Ryan. Thanks for sharing.

[Captain*Kirk]

Excellent read! And a deer anyone could be proud of!

[mparks]

Great story Ryan!  Thanks for sharing.

[Cory Mattson]

Very Cool
Nice buck! The deer you hunt are “big game”.
Good job Great story <><
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[GCook]

Dang Ryan that's a good story and a great deer.  But you look so young.  That's just crazy!  Thanx for sharing it.

[rastaman]

Thanks, Ryan, for taking the time to write that up and share your long ago hunt with us! Awesome hunt and deer!

[twist_off]

Awesome!  Loved it.