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Showing results for tags 'first buck'.
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I went out solo this morning for muzzleloader. Went to a stand in the back left corner of the property. Saw nothing and started to get cold after two hours, so I took a walk to another stand near the front left corner of the property. Within a few minutes, I see a white tail bounding from right to left, about 100 yards away, then another. They quickly go out of my range of vision, but then they circled back. It was almost like they were playing. I take a look with the rangefinder and see it is a buck chasing two does. I stupidly zoomed in my scope to the max 9x, and now I am struggling to get a deer in the scope. Finally, I spot them and get them in the scope. The buck pauses, I quickly line up a shot and fire away. The buck bounds off to the left again, after the does. I try to watch him go as far as I can. No drop. So I wait a few minutes, get down, reload (you never know) and start looking for tracks, blood or hair. The shot was between 80 and 100 yards, best I could figure. I find the tracks, but no blood or hair. I follow them as far as I could go where I lost the buck to the left of my field of vision. Nothing. Oh well, I missed. At this point I'm near another tree stand at the front center of the property, so I just decide to go sit in that one. It's about 10:45, and I was going to take a lunch/heat break around 11:30 anyway. Go up, get all settled in, etc. and within 5 minutes, almost directly in front of me, I see a buck standing in the middle of the food plot that's in front of the treestand I had just shot from! Well, this time, I'm not rushing it, and he was he kind enough to just stand there in the middle of the food plot and wait for me. I guess he was still looking for the does that gave him the slip. I use the range finder to range him in at 150 yards. Then I look at the chart for my scope/ballistics (I printed it, laminated it front and back with packing tape, and attached it to my scope with a garbage twist tie) and see that the second circle at 8x is 149 yards. So I crank my scope to 8x, carefully like up my shot, and gently pull the trigger. Bam! He drops like he is supposed to. Saw the legs try to move for a few seconds, but that was it. I quickly went to go get the UTV, then went over to field dress him. Although the middle of the day, I was worried about the coyotes coming. Fortunately, that was not an issue. When I finally get to him I see he is a six pointer with a surprisingly wide rack; medium sized body. For my first muzzleloader kill, and my first deer of this season, I'm happy. After two misses in shotgun, and one miss earlier this morning, it was a relief to finally connect. Sorry for the pic. I was solo and in a bit of a hurry.