Your first one - Tell us the story of your first deer!!

[TexasPete]

Lots of blood, sweat and tears (and money!) has allowed me to harvest my first yesterday. It was a great day to be out in Hocking Co.

Quartering away shot 11 yards out under my tree stand -- the buck didn't know what hit him. I let the arrow fly--a solid hit, and the lumenok danced through the edge of the woods maybe 50 yards. He bedded down and keeled over within moments with my glowing red nock pointed in the air!

What made it even more exciting was that Mushi was with me and he filled a tag too. Two deer in one morning is a nice hunt!

Safe and Happy hunting!

Pete

[Split_G2]

Wow, excellent stories guys. Thoroughly enjoyed reading each and everyone of them. Thanks for taking the time to put them up.

From the time I was 4 years old, I have gone deer hunting, altho I was not allowed to actually "hunt" them with a gun in my hand until I was 12. Late compared to some and really late compared to todays youngsters. I lived under the strict hunting thumb of my father, a man you had to prove you had what it took, a man who took his deer hunting very serious and a man to this day I will swear that before his passing that he forgot more about deer and how to hunt them than the vast majority will ever know. The man was a master.....and not just because he was my dad. My uncle was also very good at this hunting game too.

I'm just shy of 32 years of age now, I have gun hunted and bowhunted with a weapon in my hands since the season of '92, with the last 13 years being very intense and maticulous hunting. I have been fortunate enough over the years to kill many deer. I've killed some small deer, killed some big deer and even killed an elk with my bow, created a lot of great memories over the years but my first deer still tops them all. There's not one thing about that hunt that I don't remember, I probably learned more about how to hunt deer on that hunt than any to this day. Because I can remember every single detail, it would take forever for me to type and for you to read, so I'll give you the short version.

December 5th, 1992, 6:53am my dad and I arrived at our hunting grounds to a very cold, soggy, damp woods with a half-heavy fog laying over our grounds like a blanket. As we loaded our guns, he told me that we had perfect hunting conditions to spot and stalk or maybe even track a deer down....it would be my first attempt at either. Dad was incredible at tracking deer, he was a big Benoit Boys fan.....for those of you who don't know the Benoit Boys, I highly suggest you look them up because those guys know how to get it done on deer and get it done on old mature bucks in areas old mature bucks are very few and far between and they have been doing it for generations!!!

Anyways, little did I know that my dad was right, we were going to track a deer down and exactly 5 hours and 50 minutes later, at 12:43pm, from a distance of 40 yards I delivered a Winchest Super X 20 guage slug, courtesy of my Winchester 1100 20 guage, right thru the deflation station of a small 5 point buck. Just after sunrise, we spotted this buck bedded down across the hollar 150 yards from us with no way for us to do a spot and stalk. With luck on our side, the buck didn't bed long but because of the distance I couldn't shoot and had to watch the buck ease out the hillside, out onto the gasline and into the next hollar over. Instead of just going to where we last saw him and getting on him so I could possibly get a shot, my dad took me over to the very spot where the buck was bedded and upon arrival at the bed, his exact words were "boy turn your ears on and keep your mouth shut, you're in school now and I'm the teacher. Do that and you'll shoot that deer." Man, was he right!!!!

Of course we knew the general direction the deer went and the path he followed. We tracked that buck for around 800 yards before we found him in his new bed, completely oblivious to our existence. The track job to get to him sucked, I just wanted to run him down and kill him already but that track job was my hunt of a lifetime. He knew we were gonna find that buck, he knew I was gonna get my oppurtunity but he wanted me to understand how and why I killed that buck. On that hunt, I learned why that buck bedded in that spot. I learned how and why you pay attention to the wind. I learned that not every smell in the woods is "just a smell in the woods" and that I was smelling deer. I learned to distinguish specific tracks instead of just seeing all tracks as "deer tracks", I even learned how to distinguish my bucks track from all of the other tracks that I seen. I learned that nothing in the deer woods is accomplished by speed. I learned why my buck likely took this path or that path to get where he was going. And the 2 most important things I learned that day was.......never accept "just cause" for an answer as to why deer do this or why deer do that and that everything in the whitetail world can be explained, everything a deer does, it does it for a reason and its up to YOU to figure it out. And I'll never forget these words "the day the hunt becomes all about the kill and not about the hunt itself, what it takes to get a kill, is the day you need to hang it up because this game just ain't for you!!!"

That deer to me was a world record and I shot the deer as far back on the 296 acre farm as you could get from the road and in the deepest hollar on the property. Getting the deer up outta that hole and getting it to a spot where dad could drive the truck to it and pick it up was miserable at best.....a miserable, muddy, steep ass mess but at the very same time, in a situation so miserable, I have never recieved so many hugs, so many high-fives and heard so much laughter. Both he and i were at the heigth of our glory.