Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Deer Hunting 2014 Adirondack Buck, and recovered Partition

I wanted to post the story of my buck this year, taken at our camp in the Adirondack Mountains in New York. My father and I got to camp on Saturday, November 15. We arrived to about 6 inches of snow on the ground, and temps in the low 20�s. For the next few days, I don�t think the temperature ever got out of the teens and we�d get a couple inches of snow each day. It was a great week to hunt.

The deer in the area we hunt feed primarily on beech nuts when there is a good beech mast crop. This year was not one of those years, with no beech nuts on the ground. It took me a couple of days to locate the exact areas the deer were spending their time. The deer density in the Adirondacks is pretty low, but if you can locate pockets where does are spending their time and feeding, and know the natural funnels in the terrain, you can start to see deer.


I�d located a natural funnel a couple years ago, with some fresh snow on the ground. I shot a nice eight-point that year in this area, and it�s turned out to be a terrific little spot with a lot of buck sign every year since then. It was being used pretty regularly again this year, and after seeing some deer in the area, I sat there the morning of Wednesday, November 19. This is a photo of the sunrise from my �blind� taken the morning before.



We�d gotten a couple inches of snow the previous evening with about 10 inches total on the ground, and it was a pretty clear and cold morning. It was about 8 degrees when I left camp, and I was settled into my spot before shooting light. At 8:05 AM, I saw movement and heard a muffled �crunch-crunch-crunch� coming through the snow. You can see in the picture above it�s a pretty thick area, and the snow on the trees made it even tougher to see for any distance. I saw enough of his left beam as he came through the woods to know I�d shoot him if I got a chance, so clicked the safety off and waited as he got closer. He didn�t hit an opening until he got to about 35 yards away, and he had no idea I was there. He was quartering to me, and when he got into the opening I put the crosshairs on the off shoulder and shot. At the shot, the concussion from the rifle lifted all the powdery snow off the branches, which then settled slowly to the ground. It was like I�d shot him with a muzzleloader, a total whiteout in the scope for a second or two after the shot. Once the snow settled, I saw that he hadn�t moved at all. The shot entered his lower neck, severed his neck/spine continued through and stirred up the lungs pretty well before lodging in his off shoulder. He was dead before he hit the ground. Here�s what he looked like when I first walked up to him.



I was hunting with my Remington Model 7 in 7mm-08. The bullet was a 140-grain partition. There was no exit wound on the off shoulder, and I was hoping I�d find the bullet while butchering him. I looked for the bullet while quartering the buck up for the ride home, but hadn�t found it. The next day, while trimming and packaging the meat at home, my father was working on the off shoulder and said �Guess what I found�.�. I was surprised the partition looked as good as it did for it being such a close shot, and the amount of damage that had been done to the spine. Here�s what the partition looked like, and it weighed 88.3 grains.



I had to drag him between a quarter and half mile to get to the nearest trail, which included some steep uphills. This was the hard part.



At that point, I left him and walked the couple miles back to camp and went in with the 4-wheeler to finish the job. That was the easy part.



Here are a couple pics of him in front of camp, and of course an obligatory fuzzy wind chime picture, with a nice picture of the camp.



[img]http://i44.photobucket.com/alb...ck%20Buck/DSC01420_zpsbf9bd50a.jpg[/img]

[img]http://i44.photobucket.com/alb...ck%20Buck/DSC01427_zps922c2b57.jpg[/img]

Thanks for reading.