While I normally spend my opening weekends at my company’s lease south of Abilene, with the construction of our new house and trying to get our existing place ready to sell I needed to be home to get some things done. With me working out of town Brandy has been working her tail off keep our place clean for realtors and cleaning up around our new house so it was my turn to come lend a hand. Here are a couple pictures of our new place, its further along than this but these are the only pictures I have on my computer.
On the way home from McAllen Friday evening I talked to several people heading to their prospective leases and opener fellowships and kept telling everyone that building a new house was getting in the way of my hunting. Well my brother-in-law and I have set up some stands close to home for just such occasions so I was going to be in a tree one way or another on Saturday morning.
Saturday morning had me in the stand set up by 5:50, a long wait for daylight but the deer have been slipping in early grabbing bites of protein and I wanted to make sure I didn’t spook anything. As day approaches and the feeder goes off deer slowly start to trickle in. Several does, fawns & small bucks fed in and around the feed pen for an hour or so. Although we wanted to shoot a few does this year I decided to wait an see if one particular buck would show as we had been getting several game camera pictures of him lately. He is one we definitely wanted to take out.
Around 7:30 all the deer threw their heads up, looking to my right and high-tailed it up the hill and out of site. While I was trying to figure out what happened a pack of coyotes comes into site but quickly disappears moving along the fence line up he hill. Since I had a lot of work to get done before the evening hunt I used this as my chance to quickly slip down and eased out of the area.
After getting all our work done around the house Brandy & I showered and headed out to the stands. I get her in her stand; throw out some hand corn and its off to my setup. Talk about hot by the time I got up in the tree I was sweating from head to toe. I got everything ready and sprayed down with some White Lightning and waited for the feeder to go off. As soon as the feeder went off the deer started to move in, it looked to be the same group from the morning hunt. I watched them for a while and decided that since the seven pointer was not showing I would take a spike that would surely give me a chance to win some cash in our local hunting contest. I carefully got my camera in place, centered him in the viewfinder, drew, picked a spot and released. The arrow sailed through him, he leap out of the feed pen and ran a short 40 yards before expiring. I was pumped and although I got the whole thing on video I forgot to turn on my wireless mic so there was no audio at all. I’ll go ahead and post the shot sequence though.
After watching him fall I sent out few texts and since Brandy wasn’t seeing anything she decided to head to the truck to come get me since I still had deer eating at the feeder. I started to pack things up quietly to get ready to get down only to look up to see a herd of pigs surrounding my deer. I quickly grab my bow and launch an arrow into the middle of them and the scatter. One sow returns and is nudging my deer with her nose and it looks as if she is licking up the blood on the ground. Not wanting my deer to be eaten by hogs I quickly nocked another arrow, took my time to pick a shot and squeeze. I judged her to be at a hare over 60 yards and the arrow slammed her hard lodging in her head knocking her to the ground instantly. The others quickly wheeled and got out of there. What a hunt both animals were down with in a yard of each other. We quickly took some LDPs and loaded the animals up for the real work. Hoped you enjoyed reading along, sorry it was so long but it was as fun as an opening weekend as I’ve ever had and I wanted to share it with everyone.
On the way home from McAllen Friday evening I talked to several people heading to their prospective leases and opener fellowships and kept telling everyone that building a new house was getting in the way of my hunting. Well my brother-in-law and I have set up some stands close to home for just such occasions so I was going to be in a tree one way or another on Saturday morning.
Saturday morning had me in the stand set up by 5:50, a long wait for daylight but the deer have been slipping in early grabbing bites of protein and I wanted to make sure I didn’t spook anything. As day approaches and the feeder goes off deer slowly start to trickle in. Several does, fawns & small bucks fed in and around the feed pen for an hour or so. Although we wanted to shoot a few does this year I decided to wait an see if one particular buck would show as we had been getting several game camera pictures of him lately. He is one we definitely wanted to take out.
Around 7:30 all the deer threw their heads up, looking to my right and high-tailed it up the hill and out of site. While I was trying to figure out what happened a pack of coyotes comes into site but quickly disappears moving along the fence line up he hill. Since I had a lot of work to get done before the evening hunt I used this as my chance to quickly slip down and eased out of the area.
After getting all our work done around the house Brandy & I showered and headed out to the stands. I get her in her stand; throw out some hand corn and its off to my setup. Talk about hot by the time I got up in the tree I was sweating from head to toe. I got everything ready and sprayed down with some White Lightning and waited for the feeder to go off. As soon as the feeder went off the deer started to move in, it looked to be the same group from the morning hunt. I watched them for a while and decided that since the seven pointer was not showing I would take a spike that would surely give me a chance to win some cash in our local hunting contest. I carefully got my camera in place, centered him in the viewfinder, drew, picked a spot and released. The arrow sailed through him, he leap out of the feed pen and ran a short 40 yards before expiring. I was pumped and although I got the whole thing on video I forgot to turn on my wireless mic so there was no audio at all. I’ll go ahead and post the shot sequence though.
After watching him fall I sent out few texts and since Brandy wasn’t seeing anything she decided to head to the truck to come get me since I still had deer eating at the feeder. I started to pack things up quietly to get ready to get down only to look up to see a herd of pigs surrounding my deer. I quickly grab my bow and launch an arrow into the middle of them and the scatter. One sow returns and is nudging my deer with her nose and it looks as if she is licking up the blood on the ground. Not wanting my deer to be eaten by hogs I quickly nocked another arrow, took my time to pick a shot and squeeze. I judged her to be at a hare over 60 yards and the arrow slammed her hard lodging in her head knocking her to the ground instantly. The others quickly wheeled and got out of there. What a hunt both animals were down with in a yard of each other. We quickly took some LDPs and loaded the animals up for the real work. Hoped you enjoyed reading along, sorry it was so long but it was as fun as an opening weekend as I’ve ever had and I wanted to share it with everyone.
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