Not me, but an older gent we used to hunt with but has since passed. He was a farmer and was as frugal as they come. He hunted with a trapdoor Springfield 45-70 he bought from the DCM in his youth, along with a crate or surplus ammo he was still using. This took place in the early 80s. Anyway, he farmed sugar beets and usually brought a good enough supply that he sometimes had to wait for the deer to move from behind the pile to shoot. One day, he shot. You could always tell from the boom of the old cannon. When we all got back to the cabin, he came in talking of the ‘monster 12 point’ he shot. ‘Biggest damned deer I ever seen, and I seen a few!’ This is from an area not known for big bucks and a buck surviving until his third year was unusual. So we went to help track his deer. Come to find out it had been standing behind a 6” diameter maple in a stand of poplar. Knowing his old rifle had probably killed Buffalo, he shot through the maple, and that bullet had hit and killed the buck. It lay about 12 feet away, a true trophy for the area. It was a 2 1/2 year old basket racked six point that live weighed about 130 pounds. He swore until he died that wasn’t his buck, and that we just didn’t look hard enough for his deer. When he found it, one club member said, ‘well, I found your deer, but I think that old cannon blew half the points off him!’
I may have shot the wrong buck once, too, but that story still amuses me.
Old70
