Special Buck from a Special Place
Bit of a long read, but I've been wanting to write this down for a while in long form as much for myself as for you guys to read, so here goes...
Back in November, I had a day off of work to make a long weekend of hunting happen while my wife was out of town. That meant for the first time in years, I could hunt multiple times per day for multiple days in a row. I was excited all week with the goal of shooting a nice doe and a couple of fox squirrels we have hanging around.
This piece of property was originally owned by my dad's friend and my hunting mentor. He was a bit of a loner but always poured into me in a similar fashion to how my dad did. He taught me to shoot with a Marlin lever action .22 that I now own. The Christmas that I got my first gun, we drove up to his place to shoot it after lunch on Christmas day. We spent countless evenings in the summer shooting thousands of shells and breaking clays in his back field. I learned about running pull start tiller handle Jon boats on Lake Wateree from him. Much of the wingshooting, gun safety, dog training and bird cleaning knowledge that I have came from days and days in the field shooting pen raised birds over his and our Brittanys and shorthairs throughout my middle school and high school years so we could keep all of our dogs sharp for trips out west the Dakotas, Kansas and Nebraska.
The role he played in my life influenced many of the activities I did, from being in the high school marching band (he was in the Air Force Band and taught at Ft Jackson in the elementary and middle school there after he retired), my eventual interest in wildlife management and conservation (I ended up going to Clemson in wildlife biology), and shooting on the shotgun team once I got there. My dad was always there when we went hunting, but so was Eddie. Reminding me to check the tang safety on my Citori. Not to load a round until you get to the top of the ladder stand and are settled. Always wear your kill switch cord in a small boat. Etc Etc.
After college, I moved to Charlotte and got married and didn't get to hunt or see Eddie much at all anymore. He moved from Fairfield county up to Jefferson to build a small house on his family land where he spent his childhood summers. I visited there around Christmas every year and usually a time or two during small game season to put out birds and socialize with our small hunting group that has amassed over the years. I hadn't deer hunted his place but twice leading up to last year, and on both hunts for some reason I shot at does and missed. He was there to reassure me and didn't even poke that much fun of me, which was appreciated. In April of 2021, Eddie fell ill. He told my dad and another friend we hunt with that he was feeling pretty bad and wasn't sure what was going on, but he might have to go get it checked out. They encouraged him to go ahead, so he drove to the hospital where he was admitted and they began all the scans and tests, only to find out he was in an advanced state of Leukemia. By midweek that week he was unresponsive and within another day he passed away. He was a meticulous man, to an obsessive level, and he had everything spelled out in his will and even calculated an estimate for how much money he spent on dog food and vet care per year and multiplied that by how many years he felt each dog had left, and left that to our friend who he outlined would keep his shorthairs and English pointer. He also left the house and surrounding ~90 acres to my dad and his friend who had become a part of our small hunting group in the previous years. This property is a good one, with good turkey numbers and great deer numbers, as well as squirrels and planted pines for harvesting. We all had spent time there in the previous years, but had other places to turkey hunt and deer hunt and primarily used it as a dog training property because that's what Eddie liked best. In his absence, we realized the potential it held. This spring, 3 gobblers were shot there. There's been a truck load of does and 3 or 4 nice bucks killed in the two seasons since his passing. Its a special place. For more than one reason.
Enough back story, on to the hunt.
I arrived there on Thursday night to spend some time with my dad. We started tossing back a few Miller Lites and then climbed into the bed after midnight, planning to hunt the morning and evening on Friday. Due to some drunken alarm setting skills, our alarm was set for PM instead of AM, and we woke up at 7:30 to daylight coming through the curtains. We just got ourselves up and went on to the stands for a late morning sit, where we both saw nothing. We then went to do a little scouting and to check a scrape line that Dad saw a few weeks before to see if it was still active, and it was. Multiple scrapes in a 200 yard area that were all freshened up with no leaves in them. We do not have a stand in that area, so we set out a ground blind and I went to hunt that Friday night. At about 5 PM, Dad shot a good buck about 250 yards away from me on the other side of a draw on a ridge. He ran into the deepest part of a dry creek bed and fell there, of course. Shortly after he shot, I caught movement to my right, and all I could see was one side of antlers coming through the low understory and blowdowns from a strong wind storm sometime in the past. I picked up the rifle and shooting sticks and began getting myself positioned to take a shot because even having only seen one side of the antlers, I could tell this was a buck I was not passing on. He stepped into a small opening where only his head was exposed and stopped and looked right at the blind that had only been set up hours before....he blew once, and just turned and slowly walked back the way he came, tail flicking side to side as he walked back out of my line of sight. I contemplated taking a risky neck shot, but only for a second before I told myself thats a really really dumb idea. Darkness came and I went to go get the side by side to help Dad load his buck, which was a wrestling match inside of a 7 foot deep creek bed with a dead buck who didn't help us a bit when it came to lifting and getting him out of there. Dad and I celebrated his kill and shared a hug and a beer to close out the night and he soon left to go home as he wasn't going to stay the entire weekend.
Saturday morning brought rain, so I again went to sit in the blind since it was one of two dry places we have (the other being where dad shot his deer the night before and we walked all over). I saw nothing. I hunted a different stand that night thinking it was a good idea to stay out of there and wait for better wind to go back to the blind area. I again saw nothing. I went to bed contemplating what to do, whether to hunt where the best chance to shoot a doe was or to continue to hunt this buck that I saw on Friday night. When I woke up on Sunday morning, it was pouring down rain again. Not having my full rain suit with me I went to sit in the box blind that Dad killed from Friday night as it has a metal roof and a great chair (comfort > the grind sometimes). At 7:30, I noticed movement coming from the same creek bottom where Dad's deer fell and where the far end of the line of scrapes leads to. It was the buck, several hundred yards from where I saw him Friday. I raised the rifle and in the middle of making that move, I realized there was a big doe less than 50 yards from me in the road that leads to the box stand. I froze, thinking I was toast because I got tunnel vision and didn't even see her there at all. Luckily, she was completely focused on the buck too, as he was with her. He came sneaking across the oak flat with his head outstretched and I waited for an opening in the briars and low oak saplings. Stepped right into it and I let it fly with a good trigger pull and confident shot. He kicked hard and ran out of my vision behind a row of cedars along an old fence line that is no longer standing, the cedars the only reminder of it still being there. I could still see the doe, as she only ran about 60 yards into the oaks and stood facing back the way she came, watching. I never saw him cross back over the flat section of ground leading to the creek, but I also didn't hear him fall over the rain still dripping out of the trees on the tin roof of the box stand. I told myself I was going to wait about 15 minutes and go look for him, but after lifting my binoculars I could see bright red blood sprayed on the bleached white trunk of a downed pine tree where he must have crossed after my shot. I loaded another round and slipped out of the door quietly and got in front of the stand at ground level and could immediately see his white belly lying motionless 35 yards from where I took the shot. That image of looking through those binoculars and being able to see his antlers sticking up out of the leaves is one that I think will be imprinted in my memory until the day I die. I hope to kill more deer like this in my lifetime, but if I don't, I'll be fine to just remember this hunt on a rainy Sunday in November at Eddie's house.
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