In Wisconsin we have a general 9-day gun deer season. I usually hunt a muzzle loader only area as I feel I have a better chance at taking a better than average buck. I’ve been pretty successful at filling my tag the first day, and should have in 98 also. But I missed a small buck the first day - the fourth buck I saw. I must of just got a little to itchy to pull the trigger, as I should have been able to get him 100 times straight. Also I usually wouldn’t shoot a small buck like that the first day, I think things weren’t going too good that day and I was trying to salvage some success for the crew. As it was, I was actually smiling after I missed. I had the whole season off and didn’t want my tag filled anyway. Deer hunting is a sport that if you hunt with friends and family you share in each other’s success and failure. This year the first day was mostly stories of failure, three of us missing bucks was not a normal opening day.

The second day, in pitch dark, I made it across a picked bean field to a funnel in the bottom of a draw. I found this spot the spring before. The reason I was at the bottom was the higher you climb the surrounding hills the less view you have of the best spot. The deer get squeezed between the steep bank of a hill and the steep bank of a creek.

I’ve never been too lucky on Sunday’s, and even told my friends so. I even took my little camera out of my pack. Well shortly after dawn I hear a huge crash of a deer bounding down the hill behind the tree I am leaning against. It hits within 10 feet of the tree I’m on the opposite side of. I could hear it but didn’t see anything. The tree is dead and a couple feet in diameter. I peek around the tree and there about 40 yards away is the biggest buck I ever had a halfway decent look at. As soon as he saw me peek around the tree, he took off again. Because of the steepness of the creek bank he became a little tangled up, and ended up turning and coming at me. He changed course again, made a circle to get distance to jump the creek and when he was broadside for a split second I led him a little and shot. I didn’t see any sign of a hit as that is most of the time blocked out by the black powder, but said many times in that split second, "I couldn’t have missed, I just couldn’t have missed." He was going up a hill away from me, the hill he would have been going up if I wouldn’t have blocked his way in the first place. I imagine he hit my scent stream when he landed behind the tree I was sitting by.

When he was almost a hundred yards away he started to zigzag a little and made a half circle and went down. That is when I felt how hard my heart was beating. I read that if you survive the shooting of a big buck (that’s relative and different for all of us) the drag won’t kill you. I believe that to be true because my heart never pounded like that before. He was or would have been 10 pt, one ten inch g3 tine was broke off clean at the beam. It would have grossed a little under 150.

The story is not over. I shot this deer the Sunday before Thanksgiving, November 22. On March 26, I was doing some spring deer scouting and looking for sheds and found the broken tine in the bean field. The same field I crossed in the dark that Sunday, more than 4 months ago. Now that’s what I call 2 trophy’s with one shot.