Glenn
Dunning is a member of New England Outdoor Writers Association
(NEOWA) and contributes monthly to Outdoors Magazine
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
||||||||||
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
||
Outdoors Magazine, February issue, Traveling Outdoorsman col. Submitted by: Glenn Dunning |
||
Indiana Whitetail Encounter Skill, Luck or Fate |
||
| This story does not end the way I would have liked. In fact, I became physically nauseous when I realized what I had done… It had been raining hard all night but my guide, Travis, was on time and I piled into his truck a full hour before shooting light. This was the second day of my Indiana muzzleloader hunt with Midwest Bucks, owned by my friend and outfitter Rick Davidson. We had been seeing mature bucks chasing does from the trucks while going to and from our stands since we arrived at Rick's. But having one of these rutty bad boys come within range of my 50 caliber Encore was far from a certainty. As dawn broke I found myself 17 feet up in a ladder stand on the edge of a narrow piece of woods looking out over 300 wide open acres of CRP. This fallow ground was flat as a pancake and grown up in swamp grass, scrub brush with some areas of thin hardwood whips. From my vantage point it was hard to tell how deep the cover was but I was pretty sure that it could hide deer. That's exactly what I was thinking when through the rain and fog something caught my eye. I had met another Vermonter, Steve, the night before at one of the lodges. He was packing up to head home but mentioned he had hunted this same stand. "Look for white against the brown background of the CRP" he offered. "More than likely it's a tail or horns." I now was trying to identify through my scope something very white some three hundred yards straight out in front of me. "What was I seeing? Was that movement?" Everything was moving in this wind and my glasses were covered with rain. I cranked the Nikon 2-7 to max power and flipped open the scope covers. I zeroed in on a dark patch of swale grass. "THERE; HORNS!" I couldn't believe it, there was a buck out there in front of me. He kept disappearing and then reappearing. His wet gray body was nearly invisible but his rack was high, wide and as white as ivory. He was obviously well out of range and most of the time I couldn't even tell which way he was facing but he was certainly a shooter. Now and again as time passed I'd lose sight of him and wonder if he had wandered off. Then a group of 5 deer went tearing, tails up, across the open country. I tried to get them in my scope to see if that buck was in the bunch but he wasn't. He was right where he had been since daylight and as those deer ran across he picked his head up and all of a sudden I was looking right between the G2's of that big pearly rack. "That old hog is out there napping!" He'd been there all along, sleeping with his chin down on the ground and even though he now raised his head to watch the alarmed deer race past, he made no gesture to get out of his bed. Then, just as quickly as his head had come up, his horns suddenly disappeared. He had put his head back down. The realization that the buck was sleeping with its head down in the grass got me wondering whether I could stalk up on him. Initially it seemed totally impossible. He was in the wide open with not a bit of cover in any direction but in my favor; the wind was right and the rain would hopefully muffle the sounds of my approach. I slipped my grunt tube around my neck and lowered my rifle to the ground. I cut around to the north through a stand of whips. I had made a mental map of land marks to help identify the buck's exact location and now as I emerged out into the more open brush I realized I was already within 100 yards of the small circle of dark brown swale grass where I was certain that he still lay. I crept closer one silent step at a time. At 70 yards I stood beside a solitary maple whip the forearm of my muzzleloader tucked up against the trunk. I blew hard on the grunt tube expecting the buck to stand but nothing happened. I inched forward until the distance was less than 50 yards. Again, I steadied my weapon anticipating a shot, again I blew hard on the grunter and again nothing. There I was in the middle of open swale. Another hunter in almost any direction could have seen me from a quarter mile away yet my every sense was focused on the small piece of ground immediately in front of me. I knew he was still there, and I was going to bust him. Silently I cocked back the Encore's hammer, the butt pad rested against my shoulder and the strap under my left arm. I slid my foot forward in the soft mud. With the dark brown swale grass up around my mid thigh I had reached the spot but where was he? In a prone shooting position I searched the grass around me for an antler tine, the twitch of an ear anything. "GET UP!" As the words barked from my mouth, the mighty buck's head raised up out of the grass less than 8 yards to my left. I swung in that direction, my scope now full of head and horns. Instinctively I lowered the cross-hairs below the buck's chin and squeezed the trigger. The world filled with smoke as he bolted from his bed slipping as he tried to gain his feet. To my surprise there was a doe with him which I had not even seen. I watched as they ran straight away from me, waiting for the beast to fall under the killing weight of my 250 grain sabot. He didn't fall but swung left into the much taller swamp grass and disappeared. The air was thick with the smell of gun powder. I was rattled and confused. Of course, I had hit him, in fact, I had stalked that deer across open country and had railed him at practically point blank range. But there was no blood in the bed. For two hours Travis and I conducted a ground search and as time wore on I started to come to grips with what had happened. I reran the video in my mind of exactly what I had seen when the head had come up. "He was so close, what did I see?" As I concentrated I saw it all again but wait; the head did not come straight up out of the grass, the head was cranked around to the right, the deer was looking back at me. "NO, NO!" I became dizzy, I felt very sick and I wanted to puke. "How could it have gone this way I busted him!" I did bust him but I didn't kill him, in fact, I did not even hit him. His body, unseen in the deep grass was not facing me as I had assumed and when I lowered the cross hairs thinking I would have all body as a target, I had all air. The sabot went under his chin and in front of his chest and I had whiffed. That was over two months ago. If I dwell on it I still feel sick to my stomach. I'm disappointed for not realizing other possible options that might have changed the result but I was on automatic pilot and over confident that the day was mine. While I believe that a really good deer hunter makes the shot, it is not necessarily the criteria of a good hunting story and besides its better now that it's off my chest. |
|
|