Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Aram Von Been a dik

Aram VOn Benedikt seems like the type of guy who would share a facebook account with his wife.

Indeed.

"failed to dial for the additional range". And there you go - a-dial-a-prayer (or not) dick.

O'Conner lost my respect when he related how he had, not once, but twice (ram and deer, IIRC) deliberately shot an animal in the hams as the only shot he had, then was able to walk up to "finish" it.

Not the way I roll - tho I did do one of those by cold, gloved/fumble -fingered ACCIDENT a few years back.

Not in Alaska, either. On a caribou hunt one time, my friend Bud shot a cow, only to find it wearing a collar. It was one he had helped release a few months before in establishing another herd some miles away across the Kenai Peninsula. OOPS! But no foul. She was apparently trying to get back up to Nelchina Herd country, from whence those recently released animals had come, and were still not a huntable population themselves, but had ended up in the Kenai Mt Herd. Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet apparently thwarted her plan. Wrong time/wrong place for her. Travel makes you dead.

The first caribou I took (same place, a decade or so earlier) was also a collared cow, from a herd that had been established well before I shot her. It was the first year that firstly established herd had a season, here on the Kenai. Either 13 or 23 years old sticks in my mind as her age when I shot her. She was still wearing the long-dead collar though, which I also back-packed out 10 miles and turned in.

I don’t recall the state but read somewhere a year or two ago that one state was trying to encourage hunters to shoot collared animals as too many were turning them down that they thought they weren’t getting an accurate data on mortality

How has nobody made a Jack Mormon comment yet?

It appears you just did. Congratulations.

Well whatever happened in the lead up to the blood trail Aram clearly ran on ahead of her to get the chance to finish it and claim it. My son did the exact same thing to me on a 5 point last season. But he's my son so I just congratulated him and helped drag it out.

Yeah, I don't know. First two hits were a gut shot and a leg shot. Where I come from that deer didn't belong to either of those folks at that point. Brain/spine shots tend to be a non-issue. Heart, lung, even liver - that's your deer. Gut, leg, throat - that deer belongs to the first person to put a killing heart, lung, liver hit in it. Anything else and that deer might live and run for days.

Of course, all that goes out the window with young or even new hunters as the great stories in this thread have shown.

Very hard to judge the situation from the accounts posted earlier. Seems like awfully long shots to me, though. Jack O'Connor's rules for long shots come to mind. One is get closer if you can. Maybe they couldn't. Another is that the animal is out in the open so that a bad shot can be followed up a few times before it disappears. This obviously was not the case for either hunter. But, as well, we can all make bad shots. If you want a sure thing, head down to the local butcher shop.

Why people need to air theirs and everyone else’s dirty laundry in public is beyond me as well. As Allen Day used to say. Everyone loves trouble when it isn’t their own.

Actually, reminds me of a Cormac McCarthy book, No Country for Old Men. Great read. The movie's ok but, the book is great. Starts out with a dude hunting antelope. He takes a shot, if I remember correctly, at 800 yds. Wounds the antelope which disappears over a rise. The guy is a bit prideful about his marksmanship - the hubris that triggers the tragedy that follows. Following the antelope over the ridge he comes on a drug deal gone bad - trucks a bunch of bodies and a pile of drug money. The long range wounded antelope basically, turns into a pot of cursed gold. Hmmm...

2 sides to every story maybe it was hers , maybe his but I'll say this whatever credibility he had as a hunting writer just blew out the window. Just pulled a dick Metcalf or a Jim I don't think anyone needs an ar-15. Professional suicide if you will. Be damned hard for me to ever bother reading him again...mb

I’ll only shoot collared animals anymore…..😂

It’s not illegal here to shoot one with a collar.

Decades ago I killed a big doe that someone else had shot through the jaw. I heard the shot and she stopped not far from me. The other hunter arrived promptly. There was no question in my mind who was entitled to the deer. My dad had always said that the first hit gets the deer. That's what he did so how could I do differently? I have wondered though what my response would have been if that had been a ten point buck.

Heck, I shoot them IN the collar. I don’t want any gps tracking me while I abscond from the kill site…

Who would want a deer that's been run hard before dying anyway?

I never agreed with that. First killing shot takes it not the first garbage shot

In the 4th paragraph he says that he didn't range the deer and then a couple of sentences later he says that the range is 730 yards. What did he do, range it after he took the shot and wounded the deer?

The deer was obviously a long way off, but he didn't take time to range it before he took the shot? That seems like irresponsible behavior, particularly so when done by an experienced guy who writes about shooting sports for a living. If a guy who I was hunting with did that it would be our last hunt together.

That leaves plenty of room for debate, doesn't it? Who gets to decide what is a killing shot.

In my experience, the majority of hunters do not adhere to my dad's philosophy about this.

I was mule deer hunting one year a long time ago. Sitting on a little knoll looking over a valley about 600 yards long by maybe 250 wide with a deep arroyo running down the center of the valley.

I noticed a big set of antlers coming our way up the ditch in the middle of the valley and pointed it out to my buddy. Right as the deer were about to come up out of the ditch a dude pops up closer to them but off to our right and sits down oblivious to the deer being there. They continued their path and popped out right in front of him.

I was on the buck and could have killed him but held off because he was within 100 yards of the other guy. He finally noticed the deer when the does started stomping and gawking at him and managed to shoot that big old buck to rags, several not great shots but enough to put him down.

We went down and checked the buck out, told our story and congratulated the guy, who acted nervous as a cat the whole time and grabbed an antler and said “I gotta find my brother” and took off at a trot dragging the buck. I don’t know if he thought we were going to take his deer or what, we were just two skinny teenagers, but I’ve wondered over the years if he actually had a tag or if his brother did and he needed it. He didn’t tag it while we were there.

We chalked it up to us doing the right thing. Right up until the last day when we drove by their camp and there was that buck. It had been 3 or 4 days and he wasn’t gutted and was lying on top of the tonneau cover of the pickup right out in the sun and all gassed up. Then I was pissed I didn’t shoot it out from under him. Oh well.

These kinds of [bleep] shows certainly have the possibility of happening any time you’re hunting in proximity to others and big antlers make it worse. Heck I shot a bull elk out from under two guys last fall, neither of us had any idea the other was there and there was no danger of hitting each other. But they congratulated me and I thanked them and we shook and parted ways. If it had been a 300” 6x6 instead of a rag 4x4 it might not have been so cordial, never know I guess. There used to be a poster here who’s signature line said, “people are fuggers”, he wasn’t wrong.

It definitely requires the autopsy. Which might have been where Aram was going with that at first but, then it became more about the following up and who gets to follow up a deer wounded by two different people? Maybe then you go to who wounded it first? But, you don't know if both of you wounded it. Or, Aram did know his was a leg shot. Sheesh. I guess if I knew I had shot a deer in the leg, I would assume it was not my deer and go from there. If we follow it up together, not knowing how things stood and I happen to get the first shot and the autopsy show's it as the killing shot and everybody agrees it's mine, ok. But, in a doubtful situation like that, knowing my shot was in the leg, I'd want the woman out front because maybe her shot had been good - we don't know at that point. And, if my expertise allows us to track the thing, that's neither here nor there except I get to be a good guy.

OK, by Aram's own account, I think he screwed up. But, it took me an hour of sitting on my couch thinking about it with zero adrenaline in my blood to figure it out. And, I'm weighting the wounding shots and Aram's expertise arguments differently than he did. So, I'm inclined to cut the dude some slack.

eblake, I've known guys who thought just like your dad and it seems to be a culture thing - what you were taught or how your camp has always done it. I don't think it's as fair or encourages responsible behavior as much as the first killing shot rubric but, if everybody agrees and knows the deal, it's easy and prevents arguments. I know good guys who think just like your dad. I'm lucky to never have been in a situation like this. But, moral conundrums fascinate me. You can't go wrong erring on the side of generosity of spirit even if it means you lose the deer.