Hunting was a success.
Just to cut to the chase, Adventure Boy got a nice-sized doe at eighty yards with a 243 that he borrowed from my dad. It was his first deer hunt. He waited patiently for a good shot, made sure his line of sight was clear, and dropped the deer where she stood. Rocky got a doe, and I got an eight-point monster buck. It took five of us to drag it out of the swamp.
There were masses of deer all over up there. The population hasn’t really seemed to have gone down much despite three years of almost unlimited hunting (we could have each bought three management licenses…so we could each have taken four deer…for a total of twelve for our family. Unbelievable. There’s just no way we could possibly use that much meat.) I saw five deer, but only shot one (which turned out to be the one that presented the best target of all of them. I think I’ve mentioned before how picky I am about the shots I take.
All of these deer were killed within an hour of each other. All clean kills, very little suffering. Then, it started to rain. Then, it got REALLY cold, and rained harder. Then, it got really windy and colder, and the rain turned to snow.
We got all the deer in, but we were wet, frozen, tired.
We all have sniffles today, but managed to get one of the deer totally in the freezer. Well have the others done by the day after tomorrow. Big thanks to Robert Wagner for lending a hand.
We had fresh venison for lunch and dinner today. It was soooo good.
If I have time, I’ll write a little more later.