Home Forums Hunting & Shooting General Big Game Big axis on ice

I was finally able to get away from work for some long overdue social distancing and freezer filling. My stockpile of axis has been running dangerously low. I booked a guided axis hunt in June but we had talked about a particular deer for a few years

Two years ago he busted up pretty early in the rut. He was a giant last year but was a ghost. I got a few texts about a month ago saying the buck had been hitting a couple protein feeders a few times a week. As he kept growing and growing, we pushed up the date hoping he would still be in the general area and knowing the brows wouldn’t make it through the rut. There were some other nice bucks around that were already hard horned as well.

I left my house excited but with realistic expectations that even seeing this particular deer was going to be 50/50 at best. By this time, the buck was no longer showing up on camera . I asked for an extra day and hoped we would be lucky enough to get a glimpse of him. I planned on bringing home some meat and having a good time either way. On the second afternoon, we split up to cover more ground. About 7pm, I got a text that he’s here, he’s huge, and hurry. I ran about a mile, belly crawled a couple hundred yards and got set up. He was calmly feeding in a good size herd, which gave me a few minutes to catch my breath and settle down. A little while later, he and another buck happened to filter downhill in our direction. It was my first experience with 120 ballistic tips out of the 7mm-08 and performance couldn’t have been better. I’ll continue to hunt axis every chance I get but it’s unlikely I’ll ever come close to topping this one. An axis doe hunt the next morning turned into a stalk on a nice blackbuck. Every now and then, it just all works out