Being out of venison and having multiple venison recipes in Cooking Wild in Missouri, I felt some pressure going into this deer season. I went to my parent’s farm, and took the season a little more seriously than usual.
Opening morning I was out before dawn, even though I was exhausted from checking in for duck hunting on four of the previous six mornings. It was a little chilly before sun-up, so it felt like deer season. And I experienced my usual opening morning routine of hearing shots ring out from distant hillsides just after first light, while I sit for a couple hours, seeing nothing but a skunk.
When I got chilled enough, I took a walk. I met up with my nephew Eric, and he gave me a ride back to my truck. On the way back, he looked to his side and noticed a deer running parallel to us, a couple hundred yards away. He stopped the Kawasaki Mule, and got out and put up his rifle, as did I. He ID’d it before I did. “Nope, it’s a small buck,” he said. I then had it in my scope, and I agreed. It was at least a four pointer, maybe a six, but not an eight.
Many counties in Missouri now have a four-point rule, including the county that I was hunting in. Any buck taken must have at least four points on one side. That rule saved this young buck’s life.
I took another walk later that morning, and jumped up a doe along a creek bank, but didn’t have a good shot at it. My father and brother were harvesting milo, at least they were doing that when they weren’t repairing the combine, and it seemed like they would be likely to run out a deer. I watched the first round, but it looked to me like it would be difficult to predict where the deer would run out, so I gave that up as a method. Good thing, too. They ran the field all day, finishing up with the lights on, and didn’t see a deer in it all day.
However, toward the end of the day, my father was waiting at the grain truck for my brother to fill the tank on the combine, and he decided to go sit in the woods and see if he might see a deer. He got out his gun, and started to walk to a spot by a tree, and three deer ran up to him. We’re pretty sure that they were the same deer that Ann and the boys had seen running away from the county road minutes earlier. He fired one shot and got it. This was minutes after I left that same field, after having been hunting all day. Dad hunted approximately two minutes or less and had a deer. I heard his single shot from another part of the farm, where I sit and saw nothing.
But all was not lost. I followed my Dad’s advice and picked a spot on the edge of the field. Just after sundown, a big doe stepped out into the field and I got it. Dad had just finished field dressing his, so we hauled this one up the house and strung it up on the tractor, and I field dressed it, just before sitting down to a fantastic dinner that Ann made. Then my brother and I took both deer to a local processer that will butcher and package a deer for $65, a real bargain if you ask me, and we got to take two deer at once. In retrospect, it was good that I didn’t get one at first light, because I enjoyed the rest of my hunting. It was a good opening day.
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