The_Mountaineer
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| Joined: | Fri Feb 4th, 2005 |
| Location: | USA |
| Posts: | 717 |
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Fellas I must apologize in advance for taking so long to put this together. With the holidays and my forgetting of the digital camera, it took quite a while to put this story together.
Regular firearm buck season had passed and I had taken a nice 12 pointer on my family’s property. It worked out well I thought but now my attention turned to hunting the does. I’d already been trying for several weeks during the archery season, but luck just wouldn’t have it. The only thing I could stick an arrow in was a foam target! Taking a big adult doe can be just as challenging as any other type of deer hunting. Let’s face it, a doe probably has a better chance of surviving five or more years than her male counterpart whose headgear will draw the attention of many a hunter. Having experienced a half dozen hunting seasons or so, does can be extremely wary and aren’t given enough credit when it comes to challenging quarry. So, I was to take up pursuit for one. To further challenge myself, I was going to be hunting with my slug gun – a Remington 870 12 gauge pump with fully rifled cantilever barrel and topped off with a Bushnell Elite 3200 3-9X scope. I bought this gun for hunting in shotgun-only states such as the neighboring state of Ohio but had never connected on any deer with it. So, I opted to use it, even though I could use any of a variety of centerfire rifles I keep in my arsenal. Armed with this, I was hoping to take my first shotgun deer.
The morning hunt came and went rather quickly. It was damp from the rain that occurred the night before and I opted to stillhunt. The area I chose was a North-South running oak ridge that deer often travel of a morning and evening on their way to and from a bedding thicket which lies on the end of the ridge. It has a wide bench that makes pinpointing their exact travel lane tricky for bowhunting but is well suited for slug gunning. The wind is almost always westerly and a crosswind approach is almost guaranteed for hunting. I snuck my way through cautiously, and kept my eyes on the wind and for deer. I didn’t leave at the crack of dawn as I needed to see where I was going and had to start when good shooting light was available. I wasn’t looking hard enough though and I busted deer out of a sparse greenbrier patch that the deer were nibbling on. These three deer made trouble for me all the way out the ridge. In woodlands, I find that deer may spook anywhere from 0 to 300 yards in advance of the hunter. Since it was quiet, the deer were spooked but just sorta galloped about a 200 yards and stopped. Of course, since the cover was plentiful, I couldn’t get a shot and I’d end up bumping them further along the ridge. It was almost a shuffleboard game. I’d move, bump the deer a little piece out, and then pursue them only to bump them again. I just couldn’t see them in advance and was admittedly moving faster than I should’ve been and not using my binoculars as much as I should’ve. It’s always a hard lesson to learn for the stillhunter. I finally worked my way to the end of the point where it started into the bedding thicket and decided to call it a morning as I had harassed the deer enough and would opt for another strategy in the afternoon since it started warming up with clear skies and wind which is unseasonable for early December.
That evening, I opted to stand hunt. I was hunting a kill plot that I had planted turnips in around mid-September. I hadn’t hunted it at all yet. However, I opted to allow a few guests to hunt it who were successful in seeing and harvesting a few deer. I was hoping it may pay off one more time. The stand is a tower stand that we built on telephone poles and is quite comfortable though not completely finished. We are still looking for windows to install in it cheaply. Without them, it gets a bit windy and cold so I had to bundle up pretty heavily to keep me warm until dark. I was going to be hunting for about five hours and as any stand hunter can tell you it takes discipline and patience to become little more than a wind vane while waiting on deer to show. Luckily, I could move to some extent from the cover of the walls of the stand to monitor different directions and to stretch.
About two hours before dark, I saw my first deer, a small five point buck who managed to survive the two week slaughter of regular firearms buck season. I was encouraged to see him though he wasn’t legal game. Next came a lone spike about 200 yards out. I fully expected him to turn and make his way to the turnip plot but he simply kept moving along the edge of the woods obviously with other plans on his mind. Minutes later, another buck, a forkhorn, came through going along the exact same path as the spike with absolutely no interest in munching on the nice turnips I had planted for them.
This was troubling me. Here it was a perfectly good food plot that extended about 100 yards long and easily covered by my slug gun and not a single deer seemed interested in it! Deer were obviously using it before. We’d seen their tracks, caught them on game cameras, seen them feeding in the plot and even took a few in the plot itself. Was it hunting pressure? I had to wonder.
Regardless I knew that 200 yards is a bit much for my 12 gauge. I had practiced out to 150 yards but that was all. Had I known this situation was going to present itself, I would’ve practiced even further! Unfortunately, practice wasn’t an option now and why I always preach people to shoot lots of ammo on the range at varying distances and stances. I wish I had done more myself!
As these thoughts troubled my mind, a doe finally came out in front of the stand. I looked her over carefully and could tell she was an adult doe, not a huge doe but she would do. Unfortunately she was following the same route as the spike and forkhorn 200 yards out! If she continued on, she would stay just out of reach. I prayed she’d come to the plot. She started to turn and closed the distance somewhat but still didn’t move into the plot and resumed her travel to where the two bucks had went. In about 30 yards she would be over the hill and out of sight. I had to make a decision. Was she close enough to take with my slug gun? Yes. Was it a shot that I could pull off? Yes, but just barely. I guessed the deer to be at about 150-175 yards and decided I’d take her in an open patch of ground. I followed her through the tall broomsedge and hoped she’d turn my way and close the gap. She kept going further down the hill and the window of opportunity was closing fast. I knew the Remington Premier Core-Lokt slug was about 6-8 inches low with my gun at 150 yards and I simply needed to hold on the spine of the doe to keep it in the vitals.
I rested the horizontal crosshair at the top of the spine as carefully as I could and when she stopped I squeezed the trigger. POW! The gun went off and the deer went out of site. I looked and looked through the scope and could just barely make out the white of the doe’s underbelly. The slug had dropped her in her tracks! Great! My first slug gun kill! I unloaded the gun, got out of the stand and paced off the distance. 184 paces which is about 151 yards for my stride (122 paces equal 100 yards for me). Next time the rangefinder is coming with me! Though I don’t suppose I estimated too far off by slug gun standards! The slug had entered high in the shoulder, clipped the spine and exited the far shoulder. This was excellent performance for a slug, especially at this distance. I couldn’t recover the slug obviously as it had passed through the deer but I did notice some small fragments of the slug near the surface of the exit wound. I wasn’t surprised especially after seeing all the bone it went through. I was a happy camper and this doe made the first of many more deer to be taken with the slug gun I hope. For those of you who don’t relish the thought of hunting does, consider the antlerless season as an opportunity to try out new gear, especially guns and ammo.
Here’s me and the slug gun doe.
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Montani Semper Liber - Mountaineers are always free
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