Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Back from the deer hunt

That night after the afternoon storm we hiked back towards where we saw the doe as there was a logged clearing just past there.
We decided to leave the goats in camp tied up on leashes. Wouldn’t you know but not 400 yards from camp we saw a smallish bear scoot across the trail. I kinda felt like I was committed to keep going and hope the bear didn’t mess with the goats. It wasn’t very large and the goats were probably quite a bit bigger than the bear, so I crossed my fingers and kept going.

We got to the edge of a cut and we could hear ATVs and saw a few in the distance. I was willing to accept that was a risk but was definitely disappointed to have packed into here the hard way. We were now over 11,000 feet and sure enough we were in deer. We decided on the hike up that the first legal buck would get our attention and sure enough we saw two yearling forkies in velvet with two other does and fawns as we’re down to only one full day left. Katie didn’t hesitate and immediately started to stalk them. I was carrying the shooting sticks and stayed behind while she crunched through the slash. She got to within 60 yards or so and took an offhand shot while the bucks were focused on the sound of an ATV on the other side of the cut. She frickin missed! The buck turned his head to look back at the shot and then trotted off with the others while Katie reloaded in a drizzle.
She was pretty hard on herself but I was secretly hoping it was a blessing in disguise.
I tried not to laugh at her so I shut my mouth out my arm around her and kept walking. We crossed a few more openings and crossed a 4wheeler trail or possibly full size vehicle two track into a pretty recent cut and saw two more bucks, this time they were nice ones. Both in velvet. Both big high four points but not very wide. They were a bit over 150 yards and Katie tried to close the distance by putting a big slash pile between her and deer but as soon as she came out from around the pile the crunching of all the sticks and crap gave her away and the bucks ran. We tried to find them in the meadow past the timber strip and found two more bucks, these two smaller but hard antlered. The stuck around long enough for Katie to get set up for a 100 yard shot but we’re already alerted to us and quickly walked off into the timber as we lost light.



I was relieved to see the goats were fine when I got back to camp and that our food haven’t been messed with.