Cletus T.
Senior Member
Alright folks……I finally got a chance to get in the deer woods this past weekend and boy what a weekend it was. It was a little hotter than I would have liked it and I almost went bonkers due to the tiny bugs trying to crawl in my ear hole and eye ball socket but there were deer seen, one good buck dropped and one massive dark-horned buck that must have been living right because I blew a very simple shot on him and I’m still dying on the inside because this deer would have been my biggest buck EVER but even with that most unfortunate event, the weekend was full of wonderful memories made and here is a little recap of what went down in my neck of the woods.
I took a half day vacation on Friday and slipped out to the woods in enough time to be in the stand for a good afternoon hunt. The road turned from asphalt to dirt at about 3 o’clock and it was like a jolt of “feel–goodness” went pumping through my veins. Dave (the landowner) was already out there waiting on me and after I unloaded my bag into the pop up camper and switched over to camo gear, we had our bags packed…..blaze orange on…..and rifles in hand and we were zooming down the dirt road to settle in for what was sure to be an excellent afternoon hunt. Now this area had been pounded with some heavy rain earlier in the week and the creeks had turned into rivers and even though the water had lowered some you could see how high it had gotten and it was unbelievable. We came to the bridge that is usually 4-5 feet above the water and there is only a matter on inches of open space between the ragging water and the bottom of the bridge and we had to cross a couple sections were the boots got a little wet. There was a lot of water folks in Oglethorpe Co. over the weekend but we weren’t going to let that stop us from going hunting. We park the four-wheeler and start our long and soggy walk in and as we head to the stand we jump a big ole nanny doe and she shows off her vertical leap and it was pretty impressive but we keep on trekking through the slop to get to the stand. Dave is hunting the t-stand and I’m hunting a big 2-man stand overlooking a big field down in the river bottom. I get settled in fully expecting to see the field just start loading up with deer but it just never happened. I didn’t see a one on stand but Dave had 2 doe come in on him but he let them pass hoping to see Mr. Mossy Horns following them but he never showed. It sure was a pretty afternoon to be in the woods even though we didn’t connect on a deer. We made our way back to the 4-wheeler and scooted back to camp.
When we got back to camp there was a fire roaring and our good buddy Rhetro had made it to deer camp and it was going to be a great night to sit around the fire under the stars and eat and tell stories and be merry. Dave fried up some what he called “turkey fingers” and that were very tasty. Plus the turkey meat was off a big plump turkey he had taken back in the spring off this very land. There is something about eating your own kill that gives you a great sense of accomplishment. I had stopped and bought a peppercorn tenderloin on the way in that we put on the gas grill and Tim the next door neighbor had brought some pasta and broccoli and we put all these things together and just got fat as ticks that night. Man…….that super was good! At about 9 o’clock we see the headlights of a truck coming down the road and we all knew that we were about to laugh our heads off because what was about to come out of that truck was a man that can stories like you have never heard. He at times can be a little gross and crude but you can’t help but love this man. He’s in his 60’s and as he tells it, he has already died once so everything he gets to experience from here on out is just gravy. Folks…….I give you……. “Dirty Eddy”. He comes out of the truck and immediately wants to know what we saw that afternoon in the woods and we tell him not much and he begins to tell us we were doing it all wrong and that he would show us how it’s done in the morning. After some hilarious stories and the burring of some good solid logs we turn it in for the night and get some good sleep because we need to be well rested for the morning hunt.
The next morning finds me on the back of Rhetro’s 4-wheeler flying down the dirt road in the dark of the early morning and it was rather chilly but ole Rhetro is a big man (300 pounds) so he serves as an excellent wind breaker. He’s going to put me in the tri-pod that is overlooking a cutover that had grown up into something nasty but there were 3 solid roads cut through this and I was right in the T of it. I could shoot to my right…I could shoot to my left….and I could shoot straight out in front of me. Rhetro was behind me and to my left…….back up in some thick planted pines basically doing some OTG hunting. He wasn’t totally on the ground because he had a seat that he could jack himself up a tree about 4 feet or so but he liked the area and he had found some serious buck sign in there and mainly a couple pines trees that had been shredded by what appeared to be a very angry buck. So we get settled in and wait for the woods to come alive. There really is nothing like seeing those first rays of sunshine pierce through the pines to make you look up into the Heavens and tell God thank you for making such a wonderful playground for us to play in. The morning is pretty quiet except for all the birds bouncing from limp to limp and they are just a singing and I love it. A couple times I thought I was hearing a deer coming through the nasty cutover but nothing ever popped its head out. At about 9 a.m. I hear Rhetro’s rifle bark. Trying to make sure it was him that shot I call him and ask. He tells me that he has shot what he thinks is a pretty good buck but he was in some real hairy stuff so he’s not sure if it was a clean shot or not and that he was going to get down and look for it in about 15 minutes. I was excited for him and I was ready to do some tracking. I was going to stay put in the stand and wait until about 10 and come down but I had just sent my wife a text that Rhetro had shot a buck but I had yet to see a deer. At that very second from back behind me to my left I saw a big bodied deer take two hops through some tall brush and after the I saw the body I looked to the head and what was on top of its head was sure enough impressive. What stuck out to me first was how dark the rack was…..I mean it looked it had been dipped in chocolate and the rack had some serious mass and some serious tine length and I knew that I had to get my gun ready because he wasn’t going to be in the open for very long, because when hunting this cutover you have to be ready for a quick shot because they never stand in the open but rather scoot from one side to the other and they usually do it quickly. So I’m getting ready and first thing I do is bump the bill of my hat on the scope so I flip the hat around backwards and then I start to look through the scope and realize that I still have my sunglasses on which I needed because of the stand location but I don’t like to shoot with my sunglasses on so I drop those down and by this time he is moving right out into the opening and he’s moving pretty quick so I’m looking through the scope and I can’t find him…….and I can’t find him and there is a freaking plane going right over my head that sounded like a sick weed-eater or something and I can’t find him……..and I can’t find him…… and then finally I see brown body and I try to move with him and I find his shoulder and I squeeze the trigger and I look up to see him sling mud all through the sky and he jumps back from where he came from and down into some thick brush and I can hear him moving around and I thought he was kicking around but I was soon crushed as he made two STRONG hops out of there and trotted off behind me right onto the property line of the next door neighbors. I had already put another bullet in the chamber but I wasn’t able to get another shot off on him and even if the opportunity would have presented itself I couldn’t have taken it because the monster buck was standing on someone else’s property now. I was sick as a dog. I had missed!!!!! I got down to look for hair or blood and nothing…..it was a clean miss and I wanted to pound my head up against a big oak tree. It would have been the biggest deer of my life and I blew it. In the meantime Rhetro had called and asked what in the world was going on down by me and I told him the sad story and then he told me he had found his buck and to bring the 4-wheeler to him so we could load it. Rhetro was a little disappointed because he thought the buck he shot was a little bigger but with the sun hitting its rack and the big body of it he pulled the trigger on it and he said it had some ground shrinkage but none the less it was a fine 8-pointer to be proud of.
We load the buck up on the 4-wheeler and ride back to camp where there are plenty of high fives being handed out and even Dirty Eddy told Rhetro he was proud of him……not sure if he meant it or not but still…..it was a nice gesture. I was hanging my head a little bit and running over everything in my head at what went wrong and the first thing that I messed up on was that my scope was set to 9 power and there was no need in that at all and the deer come out so close that as I was trying to find him in the scope I was looking so far off that I couldn’t see him. That was just the first of many mistakes but it was all in the past and this moment was about Rhetro and his fine buck. We took him to town, dropped him off at the processor, picked up a box of chicken and biscuits from Chicken Express which was phenomenal by the way, and headed back to camp. The afternoon hunt came and went and other then seeing a few passing does the weekend hunt was over for me.
Yes…..I wet the bed on the shot that would have scored me the biggest deer of my life but what are you going to do. Sit here and whine about it? Well…….YES…..I am going to do that for a little while, but give me a couple days and I’ll get over it but it really does hurt…..BAD. The weekend was a success even still because I got to spend some time with some great friends and be at deer camp and I did get to see some deer too, which for some folks that has even been kind of hard this year. I got to help my buddy load up a nice 8-pointer onto the 4-wheeler and ride back into camp with horns on the hood. We ate good…..we slept good and as always……good memories were made. There will be other chances to get that big buck but nobody was hurt and there were a lot of good laughs had over the weekend and even though I have a pain deep down inside of me as I write this, I also have a smile on my face.
*****Side Note******
The HUGE buck I missed yesterday morning was killed this morning by my dear friend Rhetro around 7:30. I had to come home last night but he stayed to hunt this morning. He sent me a text message with a picture of it and asked me if it looked like the one I had missed and without a doubt that was him. It was still in the same area and it turned out to be a heavy 10-pointer with about a 17 inch inside spread and both the G-2’s are 10 inches long and the G-3’s are 9 inches long. The rack is chocolate dark and Rhetro said the buck had a bullet hole through its ear (He was joking about that one). In all of Rhetro’s years of hunting this is the biggest buck he has ever killed. It’s the first mountable buck he has killed since 1983. As sick as I am about missing him……I couldn’t be happier for ole Rhetro…..it couldn’t happen to a better guy! I got a picture of it on my phone and I’ll try to get it loaded onto here. Here are some other pics of the weekend hunt!
Thanks for reading!
Cletus
I took a half day vacation on Friday and slipped out to the woods in enough time to be in the stand for a good afternoon hunt. The road turned from asphalt to dirt at about 3 o’clock and it was like a jolt of “feel–goodness” went pumping through my veins. Dave (the landowner) was already out there waiting on me and after I unloaded my bag into the pop up camper and switched over to camo gear, we had our bags packed…..blaze orange on…..and rifles in hand and we were zooming down the dirt road to settle in for what was sure to be an excellent afternoon hunt. Now this area had been pounded with some heavy rain earlier in the week and the creeks had turned into rivers and even though the water had lowered some you could see how high it had gotten and it was unbelievable. We came to the bridge that is usually 4-5 feet above the water and there is only a matter on inches of open space between the ragging water and the bottom of the bridge and we had to cross a couple sections were the boots got a little wet. There was a lot of water folks in Oglethorpe Co. over the weekend but we weren’t going to let that stop us from going hunting. We park the four-wheeler and start our long and soggy walk in and as we head to the stand we jump a big ole nanny doe and she shows off her vertical leap and it was pretty impressive but we keep on trekking through the slop to get to the stand. Dave is hunting the t-stand and I’m hunting a big 2-man stand overlooking a big field down in the river bottom. I get settled in fully expecting to see the field just start loading up with deer but it just never happened. I didn’t see a one on stand but Dave had 2 doe come in on him but he let them pass hoping to see Mr. Mossy Horns following them but he never showed. It sure was a pretty afternoon to be in the woods even though we didn’t connect on a deer. We made our way back to the 4-wheeler and scooted back to camp.
When we got back to camp there was a fire roaring and our good buddy Rhetro had made it to deer camp and it was going to be a great night to sit around the fire under the stars and eat and tell stories and be merry. Dave fried up some what he called “turkey fingers” and that were very tasty. Plus the turkey meat was off a big plump turkey he had taken back in the spring off this very land. There is something about eating your own kill that gives you a great sense of accomplishment. I had stopped and bought a peppercorn tenderloin on the way in that we put on the gas grill and Tim the next door neighbor had brought some pasta and broccoli and we put all these things together and just got fat as ticks that night. Man…….that super was good! At about 9 o’clock we see the headlights of a truck coming down the road and we all knew that we were about to laugh our heads off because what was about to come out of that truck was a man that can stories like you have never heard. He at times can be a little gross and crude but you can’t help but love this man. He’s in his 60’s and as he tells it, he has already died once so everything he gets to experience from here on out is just gravy. Folks…….I give you……. “Dirty Eddy”. He comes out of the truck and immediately wants to know what we saw that afternoon in the woods and we tell him not much and he begins to tell us we were doing it all wrong and that he would show us how it’s done in the morning. After some hilarious stories and the burring of some good solid logs we turn it in for the night and get some good sleep because we need to be well rested for the morning hunt.
The next morning finds me on the back of Rhetro’s 4-wheeler flying down the dirt road in the dark of the early morning and it was rather chilly but ole Rhetro is a big man (300 pounds) so he serves as an excellent wind breaker. He’s going to put me in the tri-pod that is overlooking a cutover that had grown up into something nasty but there were 3 solid roads cut through this and I was right in the T of it. I could shoot to my right…I could shoot to my left….and I could shoot straight out in front of me. Rhetro was behind me and to my left…….back up in some thick planted pines basically doing some OTG hunting. He wasn’t totally on the ground because he had a seat that he could jack himself up a tree about 4 feet or so but he liked the area and he had found some serious buck sign in there and mainly a couple pines trees that had been shredded by what appeared to be a very angry buck. So we get settled in and wait for the woods to come alive. There really is nothing like seeing those first rays of sunshine pierce through the pines to make you look up into the Heavens and tell God thank you for making such a wonderful playground for us to play in. The morning is pretty quiet except for all the birds bouncing from limp to limp and they are just a singing and I love it. A couple times I thought I was hearing a deer coming through the nasty cutover but nothing ever popped its head out. At about 9 a.m. I hear Rhetro’s rifle bark. Trying to make sure it was him that shot I call him and ask. He tells me that he has shot what he thinks is a pretty good buck but he was in some real hairy stuff so he’s not sure if it was a clean shot or not and that he was going to get down and look for it in about 15 minutes. I was excited for him and I was ready to do some tracking. I was going to stay put in the stand and wait until about 10 and come down but I had just sent my wife a text that Rhetro had shot a buck but I had yet to see a deer. At that very second from back behind me to my left I saw a big bodied deer take two hops through some tall brush and after the I saw the body I looked to the head and what was on top of its head was sure enough impressive. What stuck out to me first was how dark the rack was…..I mean it looked it had been dipped in chocolate and the rack had some serious mass and some serious tine length and I knew that I had to get my gun ready because he wasn’t going to be in the open for very long, because when hunting this cutover you have to be ready for a quick shot because they never stand in the open but rather scoot from one side to the other and they usually do it quickly. So I’m getting ready and first thing I do is bump the bill of my hat on the scope so I flip the hat around backwards and then I start to look through the scope and realize that I still have my sunglasses on which I needed because of the stand location but I don’t like to shoot with my sunglasses on so I drop those down and by this time he is moving right out into the opening and he’s moving pretty quick so I’m looking through the scope and I can’t find him…….and I can’t find him and there is a freaking plane going right over my head that sounded like a sick weed-eater or something and I can’t find him……..and I can’t find him…… and then finally I see brown body and I try to move with him and I find his shoulder and I squeeze the trigger and I look up to see him sling mud all through the sky and he jumps back from where he came from and down into some thick brush and I can hear him moving around and I thought he was kicking around but I was soon crushed as he made two STRONG hops out of there and trotted off behind me right onto the property line of the next door neighbors. I had already put another bullet in the chamber but I wasn’t able to get another shot off on him and even if the opportunity would have presented itself I couldn’t have taken it because the monster buck was standing on someone else’s property now. I was sick as a dog. I had missed!!!!! I got down to look for hair or blood and nothing…..it was a clean miss and I wanted to pound my head up against a big oak tree. It would have been the biggest deer of my life and I blew it. In the meantime Rhetro had called and asked what in the world was going on down by me and I told him the sad story and then he told me he had found his buck and to bring the 4-wheeler to him so we could load it. Rhetro was a little disappointed because he thought the buck he shot was a little bigger but with the sun hitting its rack and the big body of it he pulled the trigger on it and he said it had some ground shrinkage but none the less it was a fine 8-pointer to be proud of.
We load the buck up on the 4-wheeler and ride back to camp where there are plenty of high fives being handed out and even Dirty Eddy told Rhetro he was proud of him……not sure if he meant it or not but still…..it was a nice gesture. I was hanging my head a little bit and running over everything in my head at what went wrong and the first thing that I messed up on was that my scope was set to 9 power and there was no need in that at all and the deer come out so close that as I was trying to find him in the scope I was looking so far off that I couldn’t see him. That was just the first of many mistakes but it was all in the past and this moment was about Rhetro and his fine buck. We took him to town, dropped him off at the processor, picked up a box of chicken and biscuits from Chicken Express which was phenomenal by the way, and headed back to camp. The afternoon hunt came and went and other then seeing a few passing does the weekend hunt was over for me.
Yes…..I wet the bed on the shot that would have scored me the biggest deer of my life but what are you going to do. Sit here and whine about it? Well…….YES…..I am going to do that for a little while, but give me a couple days and I’ll get over it but it really does hurt…..BAD. The weekend was a success even still because I got to spend some time with some great friends and be at deer camp and I did get to see some deer too, which for some folks that has even been kind of hard this year. I got to help my buddy load up a nice 8-pointer onto the 4-wheeler and ride back into camp with horns on the hood. We ate good…..we slept good and as always……good memories were made. There will be other chances to get that big buck but nobody was hurt and there were a lot of good laughs had over the weekend and even though I have a pain deep down inside of me as I write this, I also have a smile on my face.
*****Side Note******
The HUGE buck I missed yesterday morning was killed this morning by my dear friend Rhetro around 7:30. I had to come home last night but he stayed to hunt this morning. He sent me a text message with a picture of it and asked me if it looked like the one I had missed and without a doubt that was him. It was still in the same area and it turned out to be a heavy 10-pointer with about a 17 inch inside spread and both the G-2’s are 10 inches long and the G-3’s are 9 inches long. The rack is chocolate dark and Rhetro said the buck had a bullet hole through its ear (He was joking about that one). In all of Rhetro’s years of hunting this is the biggest buck he has ever killed. It’s the first mountable buck he has killed since 1983. As sick as I am about missing him……I couldn’t be happier for ole Rhetro…..it couldn’t happen to a better guy! I got a picture of it on my phone and I’ll try to get it loaded onto here. Here are some other pics of the weekend hunt!
Thanks for reading!
Cletus
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