Lifting The Curse

Luck is not something that I would describe as a strong quality for me. To be honest I’m downright rotten with luck. To make matters worse, I seem to always be teased with the prospect of happening upon luck only to have it whisked away from me at the last possible moment and always for the wildest reasons. When it comes to deer hunting, that rang especially true for many years. Specifically, my luck was atrocious when it came to harvesting a buck. This was all thanks in large part to the Missouri Department of Conservation instituting an ‘Antler Point Restriction’ across many Missouri counties. The Antler Point Restriction was expanded to 65 counties in 2008, and that just happened to include every county I would hunt in the following years. What this Antler Point Restriction required was that for an antlered deer to be legally harvested, it must have at least four points (of at least 1 inch) on at least one side of its rack. I never imagined just how difficult that was going to be. It got to the point that I thought I might actually be cursed like the Boston Red Sox,  Chicago Cubs, or any NBA team that Lil Boosie didn’t like in the NBA Finals. So that’s what it came to be called for me, ‘The Curse.’

                The first firearms season under the Antler Point Restriction was 2008. That year I was hunting at my grandparent’s farm, just like my dad and I, along with my cousins, always did. On this particular day, my cousin Andrew and I went back to the neighbor Billy’s property, who had given us permission to hunt the patch of timber just north of the farm. We climbed up in an old wooden stand wedged in the fork of a tree. We got up in the stand and waited for sunrise. The longer we sat there that morning, the more anxious we got for some activity. The only thing that seemed to be moving were the squirrels. We watched their curious behavior as they chased one another out of an old cow skull below our stand, even lining them up in our crosshairs and pretending to shoot them. After a while I turned around facing south, looking uphill through the trees with my feet dangling down through the ladder opening. Andrew was facing the other way, watching down the hill. He won’t admit it, but I’m pretty sure he fell asleep with his head hanging over the side of the stand.

Like I said, nothing was moving, so when I heard the steady crunch, crunch, crunch of leaves off to my left, I first dismissed it as more squirrels scuttling around. But then it became far too consistent and deliberate, almost in rhythm, to be the obnoxious and spastic movement of a squirrel. Did Billy have cows in here? The timber we were in did border his pasture, and there were no fences preventing the cows from getting into the woods where we were at (hence the cow skulls beneath our stand). That’s when I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, a large dark figure moving through the trees about 100 yard to my left. Dangit, Billy does have cows in here. But then a flash of white, and upon closer inspection as he moved through the brush, the biggest-bodied buck I’ve ever laid eyes on stepped into the open. Now, this is where I am convinced my cousin was sleeping behind me. I reached back and started tapping him on the leg, trying to get his attention without spooking the buck. But he was unresponsive, so I shifted all of my focus on the deer in front of me. By now he had turned and was walking almost directly toward me, still about 80 yards away. Slowly and cautiously, I raised my dad’s Remington 700 chambered in .30-06 that had been laying across my lap.

Remembering that dad had spent the last week drilling the new antler rules into my head, my first step was to count points. Because he was still over to my left, and angling toward me, it was difficult to get the gun up where I could peer through the scope at this deer (I must note that I am a left-handed shooter, so the angle was rather difficult for me as opposed to shouldering the gun on my right side). At about 40 yards he changed course and walked right out into a small opening out in front of me. I finally got his head lined up in the Leupold scope and focused on counting tines. Starting on one side, one…two…three nope. And then the other, one…two…three…what? That can’t be right, that rack is huge! That’s a solid ten pointer if I ever saw one! It was right. I counted again to be sure. And once more after that. In all probably a dozen times I counted his points. He had brow tines, he had G2’s, and then the main beams just ran out to the ends. To make matters infinitely worse, he got out where he was about 30 yards directly in front of me, with no brush, no low-hanging branches, not a single obstruction between us, standing broadside. He even turned and looked directly at me, staring into my soul as if to say, “Nananana boo-boo you can’t shoot me!” I swear he knew. He knew darn well what the new rule was and he knew I was there staring down the scope at him, powerless to do anything about it. After what seemed like an eternity, he finally turned and continued on his path as I watched him slip into the brush and out of sight.

That encounter turned out to be the first of many involving bucks that I could not legally shoot thanks almost entirely to the Antler Point Restriction. With each passing buck I became more and more convinced that I had some sort of curse placed upon me and deer hunting. I think I saw every different way in which a buck could possibly be considered not legal to shoot between 2008 and 2015, and I don’t believe that is too much of an exaggeration. Two years later in the same patch of timber as that first buck, I crossed paths with two other bucks at nearly complete opposite ends of the age spectrum, and neither of them were legal.

The first was a young buck, probably a year and a half in age. He was also just a fork horn on both sides. He came right in to my calling as I mixed in doe bleats with buck grunts periodically throughout the morning on opening day. That morning he came up to me twice, getting within about 40 yards both times. At this point I was hunting with a .223 bolt action, significantly smaller than the .30-06 I had previously been using, but nonetheless more than capable of killing a deer at that range (later that weekend I harvested a doe at that same distance with that same gun). I saw him again the next day when I set up at the bottom of the hill, facing a dry creek bed. I watched him come into view directly across from me and up the hill on the other side of the creek bed, and sat hopelessly as he followed the deer trail down into the creek bed and right out across in front of me right up until the point that he got down wind of me. At that point he stopped, looked around, bobbed his head a few times, and then turned and wandered back up the same path he took coming in. The last time that I saw him was right after harvesting that doe I mentioned earlier, when he walked up within 20 yards of us as my dad and I were field dressing her.

The second buck I saw that year was, as I mentioned before, on the opposite end of the age spectrum. A grisly and grayed old deer with ten inch spikes shooting straight back off his head, much like the goats my aunt used to have back at the house. Now, I know what you’re thinking. Are you sure it was a deer and not actually a goat? I can assure you that I know with absolute certainty that it was in fact a deer. He walked right by me inside of ten yards, either not knowing or not caring that I was sitting just to the south of his path. Without a doubt he was within shooting range, heck, I could’ve probably jumped up and tackled him he was so close!

With the joining of a new hunting club the following year came new properties to hunt, and thus the opportunity to rid myself of this cursed…well…curse! But as luck would have it, the new ground proved to only further my frustrations with the antler point restriction regulations. Our first year hunting at what we call the Lincoln property, dad and I watched hopelessly as a group of does darted across the meadow out in front of us. Granted it would have been tough to get off a clean shot through the trees from where we sat in his two-man ladder stand, centered in a peninsula of timber surrounded by pasture on three sides, but behind those does came a buck. This one gets a little more interesting; one side of his rack looked fairly healthy, and the other side was grisly mess of what I can only really describe as a knotted tree root sticking out of his head. We considered that in a time before the APR this buck would have been harvested as a cull deer, to get whatever may have been causing his mangled growth out of the gene pool. It’s distinctly possible that it was simply an injury or something that caused the abnormality and have absolutely nothing to do with genetics. Regardless, it would have made for a memorable first buck for me, but no dice. Another one that we had to let walk.

That same day dad and I set up for the afternoon hunt in an old box blind tucked into the west timber to yet again try our luck. We no sooner got to the stand when dad realized that he had left the tags in the truck. We were on private property and the odds of running into an agent out there were slim to none and leaning to the none side, but dad is a by-the-book kind of hunter, and the Missouri Wildlife Code at the time required that you have your tag on your person while hunting. So he started the long hike back out to the truck to retrieve the tags, leaving me by myself in the blind with orders to shoot one if I got the chance. He was gone maybe five to ten minutes when I caught a glimpse of movement off to my left. I looked up just in time to see the back half of a deer disappear behind a cedar, so I got the gun up and ready. This is it, and dad isn’t even here. As he stepped out the other side moving perpendicular to the blind I lowered the gun in defeat. It was a spike. But alas! Movement behind him! Following in his footsteps and trailing about twenty yards behind was another deer, and as it stepped around the cedar…another spike. But then came a third deer another twenty yards behind him. That’s gotta be the doe for sure. It wasn’t. It was a third spike. Dad made it back about thirty minutes later and regaled the story to him. He was every bit as disappointed as I was, but happy that I paid careful attention to the antlers and didn’t shoot. We didn’t see another deer the rest of the day.

The following year I had the incredible misfortune of experiencing one of the most infuriating encounters with a deer I’ve ever had in my life, as it relates to the antler point restriction. All the way down at the very southernmost end of the Lincoln property was a rickety old wooden stand that overlooked a tiny meadow to the west. Behind it was a big wooded hill. If I recall correctly I was either late getting to the stand or it was an afternoon hunt, because the sun was already out when I got there. I tied the pull rope to my rifle and climbed up in the stand, which had no form of railing and I later found out was only attached to the tree by a single bolt. A far cry from what any self-respecting hunter would call stable, but thankfully I had one of dad’s harnesses and I quickly attached it to the tree. As I leaned over to my right to grab the rope and start reeling up my gun, I caught a flash of white through the timber behind me.

At about 100 yards uphill he was almost eye level, which put me in a rather precarious position with my gun fifteen feet below me. As the buck slipped through the trees I slowly brought the gun up to me and quickly (and quietly) untied it. He continued to work down the hill, circling me while staying roughly 100 yards out, and I realized he was going to cross the open lane directly north of me. This put me in the perfect position as a left handed shooter to point the gun to my right. Sure enough he hit the bottom of the hill and stepped out into the opening. He then stopped right in the middle of that opening, perfectly broadside to me. At this point my heart was practically beating through my sternum.

This is it. This is finally the moment that I harvest a buck.

100 yards, broadside, with absolutely positively no obstructions of my view, and I haven’t been on the stand ten minutes. A hunter couldn’t script a better shot opportunity. I counted the left side of his antlers one…two…three…I just have to confirm the brow tines and he’s coming home with me. I gave him a quick, “mehhh” to get him to turn and when he did my heart dropped out of my chest so hard and fast I swear I heard it hit the ground below the stand. This deer actually had the audacity to not bother growing a set of brow tines. He was big, his antlers were wide, and the tines were tall. But without those brow tines he was nothing more than the world’s biggest six pointer and thus, not legal to harvest in the Antler Point Restriction Zone. I watched in utter disbelief as I had to let the eighth buck in the last three seasons saunter on down the trail unscathed. I’m going to be honest, I strongly considered quitting hunting altogether in that moment.

Being a full time college student presented very minimal hunting opportunities over the next couple of years and so I didn’t get to do a whole lot of hunting, and I had even less success in the few chances I got to hit the deer woods. And then came the 2015 Fall Firearms Deer Season. My last semester of college nearly complete, to say that I was under stress would be a gross misrepresentation of the pressure I was dealing with. I’m not really sure if there is really such a thing as poetic justice, but the events that unfolded during the opening weekend of 2015 may have provided the strongest case for such an existence. By this point I was mostly hunting by myself, as dad was committed to helping my sister get her first deer. It also meant that I wound up hunting an area where there was no stand to climb up in, so I took the ground blind my parents had gotten me for Christmas the previous year. To call it a bona fide piece of junk would be selling short.

I headed out opening morning to the patch of timber I would be hunting and worked to get it set up. In the process of attempting to get one of the sides popped out I somehow managed to snap one of the poles, effectively rendering the entire blind completely useless. In anger I wadded it up and threw it down, spending the next several minutes covering it with leaves before moving on to find a tree to sit against before the sun came up. I never saw a deer that morning, and got into it with dad at the midday break over the busted blind. I went out that evening and set up on the opposite side of the ditch from where I sat that morning, but as the afternoon droned on I found myself contemplating calling it quits more and more. But I stuck out, and boy am I glad that I did. I caught some movement out in front of me with about an hour left of daylight, and sure enough it was a deer. Not only was it a deer, it was a buck!

He worked his way along the ditch that ran across in front of me at about 60 yards, stepping out perfectly into an opening directly in front of me. I raised my gun up, peered through the scope, and commenced the well-practiced verse of counting points. He was facing right to left and quartering to me just a touch, so it was hard to make out the right side of the rack. I got a good look at the left side, however, and what I saw made me want to absolutely scream. No brow tine!?! Are you serious? When, WHEN will I ever catch a break??? I just knew I was about to watch buck number nine disappear into the night. Once again he had three legal points but no brow tine. I willed that tine to grow before my eyes.

I then focused my attention to that right side, which I previously could not make out clearly. He was wholly unaware of my presence, so I executed some tremendous patience as I waited for an opportunity to count that right side. He finally turned his head just enough and it was, one, two, three…four! BOOM! As soon as I saw that fourth tine I whipped the sights toward his body and let her rip. He jumped straight up in the air and took off up the hill, stopping behind a tree with just his back half exposed to me. I figured a second shot was in order so I took what was available and let him have it again, which it turns out was a clean miss on the second shot, which was rather confusing because upon firing again he barrel rolled down the hill toward me, jumped back to his feet, spun around, and darted off into the brush from the direction he had originally come. Finally! I was overjoyed. After years of anguish, heartbreak, and frustration I had shot a buck! But I knew the celebration wouldn’t truly begin until I laid my hands on those antlers.

I fired off a quick text to dad, letting him know I had shot one, and as I awaited his response I found myself face-to-face with a doe and her yearling that for whatever reason came to investigate the source of the shooting. Having only purchased a single tag (my one allotted Any Deer tag) I had to make sure the first one was down before chancing it with them, so I gave them a hearty wave of the hand and off they went. By this time the daylight was fading fast and I suddenly found myself facing a pretty amusing conundrum. I had no source of artificial light apart from the camera light on my cell phone. With what little natural light was left I went to work seeking out the blood trail. This is when the anxiety started to set in, along with its good friend panic. I wasn’t finding any blood. Not where I cracked off the first shot, not where I cracked off the second. By the time dad and his buddies got there it was completely dark and I didn’t have so much as a drop of blood to point me in the right direction. The other guys worked in from the far side of the timber while dad and I started with the area where I had last seen him run into the brush. The longer the search went the higher my anxiety levels skyrocketed.

“I’ve got him over here!” Dave shouted into the night.

At the same time dad and I both hollered back, “you’ve got blood?”

“No, I have…him!”

I took off like a bullet through the darkness toward Dave’s light and my, oh my was it the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life! As it turns out, the first shot from my .223 entered through his right side and through both lungs before actually ricocheting off of the ribcage on the other side and exiting through a thick mass of fat in his breast plate just under the neck. Because of the small entry wound of the relatively small caliber and the fat congealing the exit wound, he didn’t bleed out hardly at all. Instead his lungs filled up with his own blood and effectively drowned him. With the notable lack of a second entry wound we came to the conclusion that my second shot never hit him, and had I not taken that second shot he may well have dropped right where he was standing. But it gave him just enough of an adrenaline pump to carry him as far as he went, which in all truth wasn’t very far. I have to say it was a rather awkward experience having to field dress him there in front of my dad and his friends, namely because I was quite the novice at doing so (dad did most of the work on my first deer). But we got him cleaned out and I rode to camp on the back of Dave’s four wheeler, hanging on to the antlers as we dragged him back across the pasture.

When it was all said and done we discovered that on his left side he wasn’t simply missing the brow tine, but rather it had been damaged early in growth and was actually growing down to where it was about a half inch from piercing the top of his skull. So for all my troubles, all those years of riding the emotional roller coaster, watching in sheer pain as buck after buck danced on the grave of my hunting hopes and dreams, I finally lifted that terrible curse from my shoulders with a broken-brow eight point buck. Three years later I harvested what I can only describe as the world’s smallest eight pointer, but we’ll save that story for another day.