I moved back to Texas earlier this year, found a deer lease, and have been pumped up about whitetail hunting ever since. It really helped that my game camera captured a big mature buck on the SD card, so I’ve been daydreaming about bagging this buck since late August. So after coming up short on the opening weekend of the general deer hunting season, I headed back down to try my luck.
The big buck I was hunting had been on my game camera for some time, but then he disappeared for 2 weeks prior to the opener and I was deflated. At this point in the season, I was chalking up the missing buck to some other lucky deer hunter. But I remained diligent because, like my grandfather always said, “You just never know what will step out of the woods at any moment and turn a boring hunt into the hunt of a lifetime.” He’s gone now, but I take that to heart.
The morning started off bad — my alarm didn’t go off! As a result, I got to the blind late… around 8:15 am. As I got the blind things got better. I found 2 doe eating around the feeder, so I had to sneak around the back way to get into my stand. I was able to make it happen and thought my whitetail hunting trip was definitely looking up.
I was not in the deer stand 15 minutes when “my” came out of the brush — from exactly where I came in! I could not believe it. The buck stood just inside the trees trying to figure out whether to walk out into the opening or not. But he took a little too long to decide. Little did this mature buck realize that he was standing in the wrong place at the wrong time! The last time I was whitetail deer hunting at the lease I cut a shooting lane in the brush and the buck was standing right in the middle of it. Anybody want to guess on the buck’s score?