View from my stand

There was only a few minutes left of shooting light when the doe busted into the field in front of my stand with a buck right on her tail. They were circling around the field and then the doe headed straight on towards my stand. I had my new Thompson Center Omega up and ready but the buck was running straight at me. I was ready because I knew I’d only have a split second to make the shot when and if it presented. The doe turned to her left and the buck began to turn as well. I saw his shoulder coming around as I squeezed the trigger. As the smoke cleared the buck laid sprawled out on the ground in the broom straw. My moments of celebration were overcome when the buck rose to his feet and began to walk off. Now I’m kicking myself for not reloading my gun but at the same time I’m confident my shot was good and in moments this buck will be dead. The buck slowly walks out of sight at the end of the field into the brush.
Before it gets to dark I climb down out of my stand and go to the shot site but I can’t find any evidence of a hit. I look and look and find zilch but I’m still confident because I know where he stood momentarily before he walked into the brush at the edge of the field. A few hours later in the dark with additional help we had turned up no evidence of me even hitting this buck. I was confident I had hit him but the searching in the dark was futile.
The next day I returned still confident that I’d killed this buck but just not sure where he was. After reviewing all the steps from the night before and not turning up any sign I decided to try a grid search of the area. I spent a number of hours doing this through the field my stand overlooks all the way through the brush at the back end of the field and into the woods to the property line. I was disappointed I couldn’t find the buck I knew if I had hit it as hard as I thought that the buzzards and the coyotes would find it so the plan was to watch for them in the coming weeks. Well then the massive rains came in and access to that part of the land became nearly impossible so we never hunted back there again the rest of the season.

I should of posted this story back in November but it was to painful for me to even think about it never mind tell the story. Well why now? Some more information has come to light as to what happened to this buck. Remember the last time I saw the buck he walked away into the brush in the photo above. So join me for part 2 to hear the rest of the story so to speak.

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