It's no big secret around here that GarGuy and I have become good friends over the last few years. Similar personalities, hunting styles, sharing the same name, and a passion for doing stuff outside makes for good buddies.
I'd love to do a write up and tell you how I'd been working on this deer for years, and I'm an awesome Indian/ ninja that can't be stopped in the woods, but that's just not how it is. About the only thing I can claim is I picked the right tree and pulled the trigger with the crosshairs in the right spot.
A few weeks back, GarGuy/ Steve and I where on the phone and I was complaining about the wind being wrong for me lease and not having time to do much scouting in the NF. He invited me to hunt on one of his properties and o has a fantastic hunt, just didn't see anything to shoot. When I left that evening, Steve told me to come by after I hunted my lease the next morning, that he had some spots in the Davy Crockett National Forrest he wanted to show me.
If you don't know Steve's reputation with big deer, surely you're living under a rock. I was pretty excited and cut my uneventful hunt short and headed his way. His mom cooked us breakfast and we had a buffet or her exotic jams and jellies! We visited with Steve's dad (ALWAYS entertaining, and ALWAYS educational), we checked and placed some cams, and then we took off to look at a few of these spots. The one in Trinity Co particularly stuck out. I know better than to get caught up on the hype of how something looks, but these hardwood ridges where beautiful! The kind of place that when you look around there's no question of rather or not God exist.
No traffic, no noise, no grinding schedule, no crappy rig floor displays with long updates and bad tool faces. Life seemed to be complete in that spot.
I hunted there that afternoon and did see a deer, but nothing like what was expected. Then I got called back to work.
I was gone a little over 20 days before I got to come home. I was staying in touch with deer activity and it was getting hot! Big bucks falling everywhere! I couldn't get home fast enough. When I did finally make it to the house at 5am after driving 600mi I was WAY to jacked up to sleep. I'd seen big buck after big buck on the way home and sleep wasn't an option.
I let it get close to time to get off the stand because I knew I had a member still hunting and didn't want to disturb him. I ran cameras and put out corn, and the lease is EXPLODING! Only problem was, the wind was wrong for every single stand I have. I decided to put the bow down for a hunt and head to the ridge with my .280 and do it old school style like my dad taught me.
I picked a tree 3/4 of the way up the ridge with some good brush close by to go a little further with breaking up my outline. I raked all the leaves and pine straw away from the base of the tree, and took my heel and made a little insertion in the ground for my butt. When I sat down, I had my grunt call and I bumped it a few times as I rubbed my back against the tree to sound like a buck making a rub while I broke the loud pine bark with my back. With a "Y" stick for a bi-pod and a beautiful view of some of God's greatest work, I settled in.
I had started a live hunt a was even able to post pics even with the sketchy service. Wind was picking up, it was cooling off, and I was considerably under dressed. I guess I'd been there about 2.5 hours and hadn't seen a thing. I wasn't even close to discouraged, that's typical hunting where I live, especially a week after opening day of rifle season in some of the most pressured woods in the world.
The sun had fallen behind the tree tops but it was still very good light. I was jibbering back and forth with several on the live thread and scanning everything between sentences. Behind me and to the left, I caught a flicker of movement and immediately knew it was a deer.
Now mind you, I'm sitting on the ground, leaned up against a tree, no blind, no brush blind in the brightest orange vest you've ever seen! I turned my head super slow and knew that from the body size it was definitely a buck, but what caliber was unsure because I was afraid to move my head anymore to get a look at him.
He walked up to a scrape, worked the ground, and started depositing his scent on the branch above. That allowed my to turn enough to get a better look, but still couldn't make out what he was because his head was working the branch. No mistaking this guy, he was fully mature! Pot belly, loose skin around his neck, black hocks all the way down the back legs and the bull of the woods swagger when he walked.
He finally gave the limb a break and I saw his head for the first time. My initial thought was, "Nice deer, but I'm not shooting him." He walked quartering my path and crossed my trail where I walked in. I held my breath as he walked across is, and stopped with his head behind some brush. I picked up the bino's and when his head popped out the other side, my heart kicked up a notch and I got a little shaky.
I haven't killed a good buck in years with a rifle. I still enjoy hunting with one, but most of my good bucks and all of the big ones have been bow kills. Here I am knowing I'll likely only have 5 or 6 days to hunt before I'm gone for a month, and then will be on a rig floor on February talking about how I should have killed that 6 year old 8pt with the gnarly kicker on his G2. When he turned his head, I could see he had good high heavy main beams and the shakes kicked into overload.
You don't argue with the shakes. When you get them, you make sure what you're looking at, and make a rational decision to pull the trigger. If you do that, you will enjoy yourself regardless to what's on the other end when he hits the ground. I decided to live by my own rules, put the binos down, and pick up the .280 I did a classifieds swap with my buddy Joseph, and try to get on this deer.
Mature bucks have a knack for stopping where you can't shoot them. I don't know how they do that, but that's exactly what he kept doing. I looked ahead and found a pretty good opening about the size of a hood of a truck and fixed the cross hairs there so and got ready to stop him. He came through at a clip, I grunted, he stopped and I instinctively touched the trigger, and the Barnes Triple Shock cut him a flip! He was down right there in site 125 yards away!
I didn't even get the text out to Steve very good and he replied I'm on my way. I gathered my gear, walked down to my buck, poked him with the barrel, unloaded my gun, and took a few pictures. Steve was bringing a deer cart, but I knew he was getting over being sick so I grabbed a horn, great mass by the way, and started dragging straight up hill all the way to the truck.
I'd made it a little over 1/2 way when I heard Steve drive up. We shook hands, did the man hug, took some pics, and loaded him on the cart. We finally got that sucker up on the tailgate and took some more pics because we're both old school and like tail gate pics.
This deer was way more than just another buck to throw on the wall. He was another chapter in a book that I'm writing with my buddy. I thanked Steve several times for showing me these places. I told him someday I'd sure like to pay him back some way. He looked at me a little offended and said, "You're not gonna pay me back, you're my friend."
They don't come any better than Steve Barclay and his family. I'm thankful for every second I get to spend with that family. He's pretty good at locating hunting spots too
Steve, thanks again buddy, I sure do like playing the coyote and cleaning up your scraps
I'd love to do a write up and tell you how I'd been working on this deer for years, and I'm an awesome Indian/ ninja that can't be stopped in the woods, but that's just not how it is. About the only thing I can claim is I picked the right tree and pulled the trigger with the crosshairs in the right spot.
A few weeks back, GarGuy/ Steve and I where on the phone and I was complaining about the wind being wrong for me lease and not having time to do much scouting in the NF. He invited me to hunt on one of his properties and o has a fantastic hunt, just didn't see anything to shoot. When I left that evening, Steve told me to come by after I hunted my lease the next morning, that he had some spots in the Davy Crockett National Forrest he wanted to show me.
If you don't know Steve's reputation with big deer, surely you're living under a rock. I was pretty excited and cut my uneventful hunt short and headed his way. His mom cooked us breakfast and we had a buffet or her exotic jams and jellies! We visited with Steve's dad (ALWAYS entertaining, and ALWAYS educational), we checked and placed some cams, and then we took off to look at a few of these spots. The one in Trinity Co particularly stuck out. I know better than to get caught up on the hype of how something looks, but these hardwood ridges where beautiful! The kind of place that when you look around there's no question of rather or not God exist.
No traffic, no noise, no grinding schedule, no crappy rig floor displays with long updates and bad tool faces. Life seemed to be complete in that spot.
I hunted there that afternoon and did see a deer, but nothing like what was expected. Then I got called back to work.
I was gone a little over 20 days before I got to come home. I was staying in touch with deer activity and it was getting hot! Big bucks falling everywhere! I couldn't get home fast enough. When I did finally make it to the house at 5am after driving 600mi I was WAY to jacked up to sleep. I'd seen big buck after big buck on the way home and sleep wasn't an option.
I let it get close to time to get off the stand because I knew I had a member still hunting and didn't want to disturb him. I ran cameras and put out corn, and the lease is EXPLODING! Only problem was, the wind was wrong for every single stand I have. I decided to put the bow down for a hunt and head to the ridge with my .280 and do it old school style like my dad taught me.
I picked a tree 3/4 of the way up the ridge with some good brush close by to go a little further with breaking up my outline. I raked all the leaves and pine straw away from the base of the tree, and took my heel and made a little insertion in the ground for my butt. When I sat down, I had my grunt call and I bumped it a few times as I rubbed my back against the tree to sound like a buck making a rub while I broke the loud pine bark with my back. With a "Y" stick for a bi-pod and a beautiful view of some of God's greatest work, I settled in.
I had started a live hunt a was even able to post pics even with the sketchy service. Wind was picking up, it was cooling off, and I was considerably under dressed. I guess I'd been there about 2.5 hours and hadn't seen a thing. I wasn't even close to discouraged, that's typical hunting where I live, especially a week after opening day of rifle season in some of the most pressured woods in the world.
The sun had fallen behind the tree tops but it was still very good light. I was jibbering back and forth with several on the live thread and scanning everything between sentences. Behind me and to the left, I caught a flicker of movement and immediately knew it was a deer.
Now mind you, I'm sitting on the ground, leaned up against a tree, no blind, no brush blind in the brightest orange vest you've ever seen! I turned my head super slow and knew that from the body size it was definitely a buck, but what caliber was unsure because I was afraid to move my head anymore to get a look at him.
He walked up to a scrape, worked the ground, and started depositing his scent on the branch above. That allowed my to turn enough to get a better look, but still couldn't make out what he was because his head was working the branch. No mistaking this guy, he was fully mature! Pot belly, loose skin around his neck, black hocks all the way down the back legs and the bull of the woods swagger when he walked.
He finally gave the limb a break and I saw his head for the first time. My initial thought was, "Nice deer, but I'm not shooting him." He walked quartering my path and crossed my trail where I walked in. I held my breath as he walked across is, and stopped with his head behind some brush. I picked up the bino's and when his head popped out the other side, my heart kicked up a notch and I got a little shaky.
I haven't killed a good buck in years with a rifle. I still enjoy hunting with one, but most of my good bucks and all of the big ones have been bow kills. Here I am knowing I'll likely only have 5 or 6 days to hunt before I'm gone for a month, and then will be on a rig floor on February talking about how I should have killed that 6 year old 8pt with the gnarly kicker on his G2. When he turned his head, I could see he had good high heavy main beams and the shakes kicked into overload.
You don't argue with the shakes. When you get them, you make sure what you're looking at, and make a rational decision to pull the trigger. If you do that, you will enjoy yourself regardless to what's on the other end when he hits the ground. I decided to live by my own rules, put the binos down, and pick up the .280 I did a classifieds swap with my buddy Joseph, and try to get on this deer.
Mature bucks have a knack for stopping where you can't shoot them. I don't know how they do that, but that's exactly what he kept doing. I looked ahead and found a pretty good opening about the size of a hood of a truck and fixed the cross hairs there so and got ready to stop him. He came through at a clip, I grunted, he stopped and I instinctively touched the trigger, and the Barnes Triple Shock cut him a flip! He was down right there in site 125 yards away!
I didn't even get the text out to Steve very good and he replied I'm on my way. I gathered my gear, walked down to my buck, poked him with the barrel, unloaded my gun, and took a few pictures. Steve was bringing a deer cart, but I knew he was getting over being sick so I grabbed a horn, great mass by the way, and started dragging straight up hill all the way to the truck.
I'd made it a little over 1/2 way when I heard Steve drive up. We shook hands, did the man hug, took some pics, and loaded him on the cart. We finally got that sucker up on the tailgate and took some more pics because we're both old school and like tail gate pics.
This deer was way more than just another buck to throw on the wall. He was another chapter in a book that I'm writing with my buddy. I thanked Steve several times for showing me these places. I told him someday I'd sure like to pay him back some way. He looked at me a little offended and said, "You're not gonna pay me back, you're my friend."
They don't come any better than Steve Barclay and his family. I'm thankful for every second I get to spend with that family. He's pretty good at locating hunting spots too
Steve, thanks again buddy, I sure do like playing the coyote and cleaning up your scraps
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