BobinNH;
Good afternoon to you sir, hopefully this finds you and yours well on this first, foggy Sunday in February.
I'd like to say thanks to all our fellow 'Fire folks who've been so good as to share their big deer photos - truly some impressive specimens there and for sure ALL are trophies to me.
While I can only dream as big as some of the mulies shown here, this one was my largest bodied mulie buck to date. I'm reluctant to post it in many ways as I pulled the trigger on him when I knew he was starting to move and the shot landed behind the lungs and into the liver because of it.
I saw it was a big buck, got greedy and shot when I should not have Bob - and he made us pay for that in spades by bailing off the mountain down into the steepest shin tangle canyon imaginable. We blood trailed him for a good hour and a half and I shot him just as a blizzard set in.
We got the hindquarters to the pickup first, but the guy I was with fell hard on the way and blew his leg out.
So we went down to get reinforcements - my usual hunting partner and the chap's two teenage sons - and we headed back down into the canyon a second time with flashlights.
That's why I look about done in and not too impressed with myself in the photo - from '93 I want to say.
Including the four leg bones that we left in, I boned the rest of that buck out in the canyon and we all brought 144lbs out.
My best whitetail came because I'd missed a smaller buck the weekend before - a gimme shot at maybe 80yds that to this day I've no clue how I managed to miss.
I'd been playing tag with two small whitetail bucks for the last month of season and this morning was the last weekend of season.
It was a still, calm morning - perfect for calling - so when I saw antlers ghosting though the regrowth lodgepoles, I thought it was the second rack whitetail I'd been seeing....
While I had to stand and shoot freehand, it was a fairly simple shot and I broke this guy's neck as he cleared a pine. So it was that I had no real clue as to his size until I walked up to him.
I'm not ashamed to say I sank down on my knees in the snow and just looked at him for some time....
Interestingly he only went 124lb into the cooler and was extremely skinny with no fat on the rump, brisket or internal organs and just a bit of pink fat between the ribs.
Anyway Bob those are my personal bests and the stories that go along with them.
Thanks again for the thread and to the folks who've shared their grand bucks.
All the best to you and yours this week Bob.
Dwayne