The 2019 hunting season started out with Cargo Cult hunting again. I spent days tromping around where there aren’t any deer just because it’s ‘the woods’ and that’s where deer live, right? It was a rough few days out in the woods.

Finding reliable sign isn’t easy and I’m still not great at it. A little scat here and there lets you know deer are around, but deer do a lot of their moving at night and scat is no guarantee they’ll be by during daylight hours. For bucks especially, you need to find clear signs of territorial marking or a lot of other indicators that an area is a high-traffic place for lots of deer. The mountains around Joyce are covered in deer scat but I have yet to find a more conclusive sign than that.

Tyson was the real MVP of this season. He found a rub and a scrape on the back 40 indicating that there was a buck patrolling the property. If he hadn’t spotted those I probably would have kept hiking around the mountains without seeing anything.

I spent a few days getting up before dawn so I could be in the right place when it was legal hunting hours. I expected that I would only see a deer right at dawn or dusk so it felt important to be ready to shoot as soon as there was enough light to do so.

One morning I walked out the door into about 30 elk that were eating apples out of the trees next to the house. I spooked the whole herd and listened to them crash through the brush to get away from me. A few of the cows got separated from the rest of the herd and I watched them take a route through a wooded creek. They popped back out of the woods in the field where I spent most of my time waiting and joined the rest of the herd that was bedded down in an adjacent field. I spent a few very chilly hours listening to them move around and smelling them on the breeze.

Around 9am I went back to the house. I was cold and I needed to use the bathroom. I chatted with Tyson while I warmed up, and when he had to join a conference call for work I headed back out the door.

And there was a deer standing in the main field, about 300 yards away. I used my rifle scope to check whether it was a buck, and I confirmed it was a 2-point (legal) buck. There were a few obstacles between the deer and me so I had to try to creep up and get a better angle for the shot. The deer saw me and ducked into the woods - in the same place those elk had passed through the creek.

I nearly ran to the side field on the other side of the woods. I crept around the last few trees slowly and saw the buck standing about 70 yards away. He froze and we stared at each other while I tried to get into a stable shooting position. I took aim at his heart and fired. He took off at a sprint back for the cover of the woods and disappeared.

My heart dropped. I thought the shot was good but if the deer could run off like that I must have missed or hit something non-vital. I called Tyson (still in the middle of his meeting) and he asked “Was that you?” - I told him it was, but I thought I had missed. I asked him to bring me my flagging tape so I could mark a blood trail (if there was one) and spend my day tracking down a potentially wounded animal. This isn’t how I had wanted my hunt to end.

There was no blood from the shot and no blood trail I could find. I waited as long as I could stand before walking into the trees and starting my long day of tracking.

Not ten feet into the woods, the buck was dead on the ground. He was shot directly through the heart and it was clear he had lost consciousness mid-sprint.