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Chapter 2: The buck that broke the toe....

Before I knew it, those two weeks were gone and it was the night before the opening day of the buck hunt. I still hadn't found all the time I needed to make myself a knife so I was up until 11:00 PM finishing one. I went with my #7 profile with a clip point, lined cherry canvas micarta scales in a left hand sheath. I prefer to carry my knife on my left side as to not have it rub on my rifle as I walk with it slung on my shoulder.







As mentioned earlier, we just added a new baby girl to our family and my wife still isn't fully recovered from it. She is a killer shot but she wasn't able to practice while she was pregnant so she opted to carry a light recoiling .243 shooting 100 gr. Nosler Partitions.

Opening morning we hunted a burn I had scouted and found a few bucks in. Grandpa and Grandma came up so my wife could break away for opening morning. Grandma watched our 4 year old and new born, and Kristen, Grandpa, myself and Addy all went buck hunting.

As we pulled out on a point to glass the burn a nice 3x4 buck jumped out of the ditch and started walking away from us. Kristen immediately chambered a round and took a knee.

He was about 110 yards walking directly away from us. We were on a point and he was down a steep hill. I said, "He's going to stop and look back at us. Can you hit him in the neck?"

"Yep" she responded very confidently... As soon as he stopped, she slipped one perfectly in his throat patch. It was a perfect shot. She has killed a couple doe, both antelope and deer and a cow elk but this was her first buck. I'm super proud of her and the best part was Addy was right there behind her and got to watch the whole thing!





I grabbed the game cart out of the truck before we headed to the buck. We loaded the buck on the cart and while carrying the buck out, the cart got away from me and ran over my pinky toe. I knew immediately and directly that the result of that little miss hap was going to be no fun at all. I tried to walk it off as we packed the buck but as time went on the pain got worse and worse and I could feel the toe changing shape in my Danner boot...

We got a buck loaded in the truck, found a good hanging tree to skin him out, wrapped him in a bag and now have him in the cooler. It was an awesome start to the hunt minus my foot being rendered more and more useless as the day wore on.



Still more to come!

Todd