Funny Hunting Stories....

So there was this doe that got hit by a car and was nursed back to health and released into the woods. She walked right into the yard and hung around likely for the water. We had 4 dogs and a goat. I was surprised the dogs ignored her for the most part. She was attractive to the bucks in the area.

 

The next year she gave birth to two fawns. They disappeared. Probably coyotes got them.

 

years ago, my wife worried me to death to take her deer hunting with me. so i finally relented, and we got her a rifle and all the gear she would need. taught her to shoot pretty good and so every thing was in place for the next deer season when it rolled around.

so the opening day of deer season, we get up early and made the drive to the deer lease and i get her set up in her stand, and told her i would come and check on her if i heard her make a shot and help her with her deer if she got one. so ventured a little farthe and made my way to my stand. well a couple of hours go by and i hear a shot in the direction of her stand. so i get down and made my way to see what she got.

well when i happened upon the scene of where she was, she was in heated argument with some cowboy.

the wife: "It's my deer and i'm the one who shot it, and you're not taking it!"

the cowboy: "Okay lady. I'm not going to argue with you anymore about it. It's your deer, but can i at least have my saddle?"

this is why you don't take your wife deer hunting!

(not a true story!)

 

This didn't happen to me but to my niece's husband. He was sitting in his portable ground blind deer hunting. He was watching out the front window and had his rifle positioned for that window.But he also had a side window open. Suddenly a small buck stuck its head through the side window. My niece's husband whipped his head around and he and the buck were literally nose to nose. The buck immediately bolted and before he could get his rifle into position for a shot, the buck was long gone.

 

As requested, the video shoot cellular interuptus story.

About 10 years ago, a friend of mine came up with a concept for a new hunting video series, and pitched it to me. Rather than go to all kinds of places most hunters dream about, why not show them, mainly the viewers in Erie county PA, Warren County PA, Erie County NY, Chautauqua County NY, and Cattaragus NY, that they have plenty of good hunting opportunities right here at home. To me, it sounded like a good idea, and no one else seemd to be doing so, except around certain towns in these places. So we started the planning stage, got our gear toegther, and started with a dew scouting and pre season videos. We got some nive game footage, shot some beautiful sights while out there, and even slipped in a few Lake Erie and other bodies of water, fishing videos.

next, he went to talk to sponsors, and got a couple small local shops, to sign on. one LGS, a few bait and tackle shops, and an archery pro shop. he did better than I thought he would.

Now, we shot some small game stuff in September, and some Spring turkey hunts in May of that year, but we were waiting for the rut to start, and the start of Archery season. when it did, we filmed several days of hunting, more than a few shots had to passed up, because, even though Ed had a shot, I didn't on the camera, and he had decided to pursue one deer that year, nothing less than the big buck out by his BIL's place. he also filmed for me, and I took an early season 6 point, age 4.5 years, and passed up a few does, saving my late season tag, antlerless, for the muzzle loader season. I also managed to fill ponje of my doe tags on a day we didn't film, so by the time shotgun opened, my freezer was full.

his still wasn't.

the first Saturday of shotgun, we went out to the woods, and snuck in about 04:00, and got set up, right over the bedroom of a big buck. i was up first, and when he came back up the trail to bed down, I waited for a good broadside shot, and as soon as I conformed it would be on film, I pressed the trigger. Clean hit at the base if the skull from 20 yards, DRT. after dressing and taking him to the house, so we could hang him to drain, until I went home that night, we went back in, to another pair of stands on the property, and I took the camera gear up with me, Ed took his shotgun, and settled in.

he didn't see but a spike, and two doe all day, and had to pass on the doe, because they were out of view on my end. no clear shot for the camera.

About 16:30 it started getting cooler, and the light was just starting to fade, and we were thinking about calling it. After we checked through coms, what the other was thinking, i told him to wait, as we still had about a half hour of legal light left, we decided to stick around, and enjoy the quiet, before heading home.

i never would have catured the following events, he we mot, and had Ed turned of the VOX settoing on his two way.

As i'm sitting there, filming a squrrel playing a couple trees over, I hear a soft beep through my ear piece. i look over, and I see the light of a cell phone, and hear Ed answer it. Turns out it was his wife. I only heard one side of the conversation, but it was a good on, judging by his replies. then I saw movement in the brush under him, and moved the camera to pick it up.

As he's talking with his wife, which the camera mike is also picking up BTW, a doe walks out, right under the stand, stops, and looks up. Then a second one does the same, followed, as soon as they moved on, by a nice 8 point.

All three of them stopped, sniffed the air, and looked right up at him, as he's talking with his wife, and just doesn't even look down. that's all he would have had to do, to see them. by this point, my lip is bleeding, as I'm trying not to LMAO, and blow the shot. I wanted to see how this played out. I even locked the camera in it's pracket on the rail, and slid my shotgun up to the rail, but I just could not keep still enough for a shot, between watching the looks on the faces of those deer, and hearing the half of the conversation i was getting.

Shortly after that, the deer moved on, and ed hing up. he then called it, and climbed down, took the gear from me, and then I climbed down. We went to his BIL's barn, pulled down my deer, and I checked my messages, which let me know I was needed at his place, to help his dad process his buck, so we loaded up, and left.

once we had all 3 between mine and his dad's two, I went in, pulled the memory card, and sat down at his sister's computer, to pre-screen for an edit. Soon enough, I got to Ed's hunt, and called over his family. Including him and his wife.

never saw a couple turn so red in my life. must have been one hell of a conversation for that end result.

After everyone, especially Ed, got their laughs over it, I looked right at him, and said, :"next time, hang up and hunt." At that point, he asked me why i didn't shoot. My reply:

"I was too busy LMFAO. I couldn't hold still enough to get a shot, without risking hitting you. that buck, as you can see in the video, was close enough to chew on your boot laces. tyhe bigger doe was even closer."

"i didn't hear you laughing, otherwise, i would have looked."

that's when I pulled down my lower lip, and showed him the bite mark.

We did this for a couple years, but it never really caught on. I still have the master discs from the shoots, and enough bloopers and bonus stuff to make a package of it, and we wound up giving copies of them to family and friends aor Chritmas each year.

When Youtube came out, we even considered a channel on it, but I'm glad we didn't with recent events. it was fun, we had about a dozen of us, filming real hunts, no BS, only show it when the big deer comes out, shooting for mass, or anything along those lines. Also made a few target practice sessions recordings in that time. We had a lot of fun doing it, and to us, that's what mattered.

Ed gpot even two years later, when he filmed a hunt in my back yard, where I lived in NY. All i am going to say about that one is, it involved the apple orchard in the back of the property, four arrows, four clean misses, with the buck I was shooting at, sticking around until sunset.

it's not that I didn't practice from elevation, I just didn't practice from the right elevation.

And I'm still convinced, had I had one more arrow with me, I wouild have had him on the next shot. Each time I fired, he'd take a few steps, look around, and go right back to browsing.

As a result, I now practice from the stand.

 

Back a few years to the time when we had students from the Republic of Sarth Efrica, namely, a couple of Air Force intell students. One of them that I'll call Rian, was a very keen shooter, and living in the Natal Highlands when he wasn't on duty, he'd be out every day he could on the high veldt shooting stuff to feed his father's stock crews. Suffice it to say that being stuck in UK for twelve weeks was less than fun for him, and he was getting cabin fever, to say the least. I took him range shooting a couple of times, but it wasn't the same, even though I had a couple of real African rifles with real history, one of them with his own Boer people.

Enter our USAF exchange officer, one of the finest people I'd met in my life at the time. He was from Wyoming - big sheep country - and he made the promise that he and Rian would go off some day and bag themselves a nice big Dall ram.

Well Rian went back to RSA, and my USAAF pal went back to wherever he went to, and I forgot all about it for a couple of years.

Then, totally out of the blue, I got a phone call from my American buddy, back on TDY in UK for a couple of weeks and itching to tell me what he called the 'best hunting story' I'd ever heard.

Well, we met up over in the O club of a neary US airbase here in UK, and I got to hear the skinny on this hunt. This is what he told me - First of all [he said] I wasn't there, but my brother-in-law was the hunt jefé, with four others, and Rian. All on horses, of course. On the third day out, the boss-man, about 3-400 yards ahead, spotted a good head ram about half-way up a draw which was probably accessible if you were pretty determined, and offered Rian, the Uitlander guest, the first shot.

What happened next was so totally unexpected that it will probably still be talked about as long as anybody there is still alive, but it seems that Rian leaned forward, planted his fist on his horse's head, right between the ears, and lining up on the Dall about 400 yards away, by the simple expedient of placing the forend on his fist, cut loose a shot from the 7mm Remington Magnum rifle he'd been loaned for the hunt.

The horse jumped straight off the ground with all four legs, about five feet, 'tis said, and ejected a stream of horse-s*** about twenty feet along the trail, before dumping the surprised Rian on the trail and taking off for points East.

What the *** was THAT about??? - screamed the boss - why didn't you get off and take the shot from that log? You've just ruined one of my best horses with your stupidity, you dumb Dutchman!!!! And so on....... It took three hours to find the horse, and another couple of hours to calm it down and make camp for the night.

To cut a long story short, Rian had a good excuse for his 'method' as he called it. He assumed, wrongly, as it turned out, that horses over in the USA used for hunting were used to gunfire in close proximity, although that 'close proximity' was actually between the ears of the animal in question. Back home in Efrica, he said, all the family horses were stone deaf, having been taken out and 'shot over' as soon as they were broken in, beginning with .22 and ending up with more aggressive items of shootery, like his own .375 H&H. His own twenty-year old mare, called 'Frootjie', only responded to heels, thigh pressure or a need to eat. She would not have noticed, he remarked, if a bomb had gone off beside her, especially if she had been eating at the time.

tac

 

Back in 2002, I was dating an old friend (And yes, she and I are still friends, and my wife and I are on her client list, at her vet clinic, as she and her family are also on mine, for the bike repair business), and we had both taken opening day of the NY firearms deer season, off, and headed up to her parant's place to hunt. Her parents were alos up there, and both filled tags early, so they went back to the house, to hang the deer they had gotten, for processing later that night.

As we had gone in the woods at about 04:00 Hours, and been in there for about 5 hours, we decided to head in, and have an early lunch, then get back out about 10:30, so we would be back in, and settled when the city hunters were heading out around 12;00 to 13:00, to go into town, and eat, so we would be ready, if they spooked anything back our way. As we entered the house, we leaned the shotguns up against the wall in the entryway, off the garage, where they would stay at the same temp as they were outside, to prevent condensation. Both of us were carrying stainless revolvers, her, and SP101, me my 686, and kept them on in the house.

We sat and visited with mom and dad, had a bowl of soup and a sandwich, as well as a couple cups of coffee. Then, we both decided to hit the head, before going back out, and I went up first, then came back down the stairs, and went back into the kitchen to finish my cup. At that point, she went up.

Now, they owned (they have moved to PA recently, and sold both NY properties) a decent sized chunk of land, about 300 acres, mostly woods, with some open fields, and apsture land, and it was not uncommon to see deeer wanding in the pastures, with the horses, or coming right up off the back porch. As I sat there with my coffee, I looked over at the window, and saw an nice 8 point, checking out the garden, about 15 yards off the back porch. her mother went over to the window, looked out, and started to open it, motioning to me, so I set my cup of coffee down, got up, and walked over to the window.

Aparently, they had no problem with someone leaning out, using the frame as a rest, and taking a shot, so I figured, "what the hell?"

As she started to lift the window, we heard a shot go off, and saw that buck jump. Shannon, from the upstairs bathroom window. Then, the fun started.

The next thing we saw was her falling out of the bathroom window. Thermals and jeans part way down, straight into the snowdrift, along the side of the back porch.

Apparently, she saw the buck looking over towards the kitchen window, while standing up, about to flush and put herself back together, and decided she wasn't going to risk it taking off, so she slid the window up, while pulling her pants back up, leaned out the window a bit, enough to stabilize the shot, and found that she didn't have a good shot from that angle. So she leaned out a bit further, at that point.

And right after taking the shot, her boot slipped on the linoleum on the bathroom floor, and out she went. And man was she thankful for that drift that hadn't frozen yet, when she landed. All she got was a couple scrapes and bruises from the landing (thank God!), which did kind of lead to a side story from this one, a few days later.

The buck, She got it right through the LH lung, and the heart, not quite DRT, but it only ran about 30 yards, and dropped. Dressed him out, and hung him up, and we went back out that afternoon. I got a decent doe around 16:00 Hours, and we dragged her back, then got to work on skinning and quartering what we had shot, to spend the next day processing them.

And we still get a laugh out of that day, 16 years later.

Now, the side story.

She got some scratches and a bot of bruising, along her left cheek, and one of her co-workers, joking of course, looked at me, when I was there getting a checkup done on my mother's Yorkies, asked here if I had done it. without missing a beat, i looked over at him, and said:

"Now C, you know for a fact that I didn't. I'm standing right here, and I'm still breathing."

His reply: "oh, that's right. Her father was there."

Mine: "he only would have gotten to me, IF she left anything for him."

To put things in scale, Shannon goes about 110, soaking wet, in full hunting gear, and is right at the 5 foot mark. Her mother is a short Sicillian woman (She and her dad meet while he was over in Germany, back in the early 60's), and her dad looks like a blond version of Hagrid from the Harry Potter series. Everyone thinks he's the one you need to be afraid of.

Until they meet her mother, or her.

I have known the three of them for close to 30 years. I've seen dad p***ed off a few times (never at me), mom once, and Shannon a couple times. Luckily, never at me. her soon to be husband, who I have also know for a long time, hell, I set them up on a double date, with me and my wife, a few years back, still hasn't seen that side of her.

And I told him to pray he never does. She has dad's temperment, but, if you p*** her off, she has mom's rage.