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The icing on the 2019 cake

Creamer

Active Member
1,584
81
Athens
I could not ask for a better first year of hunting with a recurve. Throughout the season, I've had plenty of deer in range. The season started off with the initial high of a first shot on a deer with a recurve that developed quickly into the sinking feeling of not recovering a deer due to a poor shot. Several close encounters and near shot opportunities on solid bucks led to a public land buck kill for the first deer with traditional equipment. I took several weeks off after that deer, both to recover a bit mentally and to pay back my wife for her allowing me to hunt so much early in the season while she watched our son. I kept shooting, though, with the plan to try to take a late season doe to fill a second tag. The fallback plan was taking out my muzzleloader in January if I couldn't seal the deal with another trad harvest.



Flash forward to last week and a friend of mine I went to high school with who now lives out west (comes in to hunt every year on his family property) texted me and told me to head to his place if I wanted to kill a doe. He shot a nice buck on his hunting trip in this fall but did not kill any does. This was perfect timing because my other private option was showing little daylight activity on the camera. Not gonna lie, I threw out a corn pile in a spot I had hunted before and he had multiple bow kills in this past Sunday. Yesterday I took the afternoon off and went in there. The tree wasn't ideal for hunting lower elevations due to a lack of cover, but I did have one little tree trunk I could tuck into to try to conceal myself.



I was in the tree saddle by about 1:30PM yesterday with a perfect wind. Knowing where to expect deer to come from, they would be coming from directly upwind. It swirled a little, as always, but even the swirls I felt never seemed to push any scent towards where I expected deer. Around 3:50PM, I spotted a pair of does working my way from upwind. The lead doe was the big one, and she was on red alert on approach. When she hit the path I walked in on, she immediately smelled the ground and followed my track. She got to within about 4-5 yards from my tree and started with the head-bob while the fawn was eating happily at 12-13 yards. I froze against the tree and she walked back towards the corn. When she turned broadside at 12 yards and looked away, I tried to draw. I got 3/4 drawn and my damn elbow hit the tree trunk behind me and my coat scuffed the tree slightly. She heard it and bounded to about 20-22 yards but didn't seem to know where the sound came from. When she stopped and looked away, I drew, anchored, and she looked up at me. She was too late. I released a good arrow and hit her square in the lungs with the arrow buried to the fletchings. She made a death sprint about 75 yards, stopped, and toppled over in sight.





The drag out, compared to the public land buck nearly 2 miles in, was a cake walk. I had to drag her maybe 40 yards to the field edge, loaded her on the cart, and pulled the cart maybe 300 yards to the car. I was even home by dinner time. To be perfectly honest, on the buck kill this year, I knew I got lucky with the shot deflection. I felt like I executed a decent shot, but my ballsiness in trying to squeeze an arrow through a narrow window nearly caused disaster. This shot last night felt amazing. I executed my shot as well as I could have hoped under stress, and it made me feel like all the hard work shooting in the yard paid off. The only disappointment was losing my arrow. I could see it mostly hanging out on the exit side as she ran off, and part way through her sprint she must have kicked it with a front leg as it was coming out. That freaking arrow went tumbling through the air into the brush like a twirling baton. I looked for probably 20 minutes and couldn't find it. I'll look again when I go to retrieve my camera. The freezer will be topped off with this deer, and it feels really good to get two trad harvests under my belt for Year 1. In all likelihood, this concludes my season. It's a season I will never forget, no doubt.