Think before speaking....a good hunting story
A few years back I built a home off Clearcreek rd off rt 33 just south of Sugar Grove Ohio. After living there a couple years an old fellow who lived between Ohio and New York (wealthier than wealthy) donated 4000 plus acres to Metro Parks and now you have the park down there. I was a neighbor so I did not have to get in the lottery system to be able to hunt there. I got to know the rangers and they did special favors for me. Me and my friends would go back and north of the castle on the lake.....if you know where that is, not many do but it is a walk from the road. We always hunted the north woods from the old castle around a log home (small) built in the 1800's. GREAT hunting area, huge deer run. I would make my cell call to the rangers at the end of the day and they would drive a truck back to pick up our deer so we didn't have to drag. This was nice and for a few years we never saw any other hunters back in this area.
One year 6 of us went back and got set up for the days hunt. One friend who had never been there went past the old cabin with me to sit on a ridge which there was one major deer run through a thicket that followed the top of the ridge and it was so steep that there was no way for deer or human to go up or down the side of it. It was a perfect spot. So we were sitting there and around 10am I heard some noise in the thicket and the the tops began thrashing back and forth. My friend was sound asleep about 20 yards from me and I did everything I could to wake him up....even threw a can of mt dew at him. So I drew my gun, waiting, then steps out a very nice 10 pointer scoring in the neighborhood of 140 to 150, 2 of the tines were drop tines. Beautiful buck. I put my sights on him, stopped him and bam, shot him double lung, he slammed to the ground, jumped back up and took off through the woods and yes, this woke my buddy up. As we walked over my buddy was asking, "are you sure you hit him" and I just laughed, then we heard a shot over the next valley where we had never seen anyone hunt and that was where the deer was headed. So we examined the area and blood was everywhere. A very nice easy track this was. We stayed on his trail of blood and I was thinking, now way this buck made it to where we heard the shot. Well we ended up in the next valley and there was a guy way down at the creek bottom gutting a deer. We followed my bucks blood trail right down that valley to the deer the guy was field dressing. We checked it over and it only had the one hole, double lung shut. And it had 2 drop tines, and it was a 10 pointer. This was my buck. It had ran down there and died.
The guy cleaning this buck had a couple of youngsters with him (ah 10 to 13 years old IDK) and he was older than dirt. He jumped up and was yelling us the story of how the buck come flying over the hill, his grand kids were telling him, shoot it grandpa and he shot, then he said he didn't even know how he hit it he was so excited and so were the kids. All 3 of them telling us the story at the same time. The old timer said he had never ever saw a buck in the few years he had been taking and teaching his grand kids how to hunt, like this one. Mostly baby bucks they said. What to do...what to do...I just put my head down thinking for a moment then, looked the guy in the eye and told him, "Great Job" and shoot his bloody hand lol. He thanked me over and over and totally refused any help, him and his grand kids were going to drag the deer out. He was teaching them the total hunt.
Well the reason for this story is the other day I was at one of the outfitter stores and someone was tapping me on the shoulder, I turned around and it was a couple of kids, teenagers and I had no clue who they were. They began asking me about that buck and their grandpa and if I remembered them. It was those two kids. We began talking and they explained to me that their father had passed years back in Iraq. Their grandfather had been raising them and teaching them to hunt and so on. They said that their grandfather had that buck mounted for their memory of that day. It took about 6 months for them to get the mount and when they got it back their grandfather made a wood sign to hang with the buck and the sign had all 3 of their names and the date of the kill. Their grandfather passed away by that weeks end.
Boy am I glad I just shook the old mans hand and told him Great job. When I was standing over that buck thinking, something just told me not to say a word so I didn't. As we get wiser with our age, think before speaking I guess. I hope you guys enjoyed it.
