Deer Hunting

[Blazerman]

With rifle season coming up I thought I would share some past experiences of my hunts from long ago.

I first started hunting as a teenager back in the seventies and hunted every year for probably 25 years. There was a group of us that grew up together on the same street and we had been hunting squirrels and rabbits for a while so one year we decided to give deer hunting a try. We all managed to borrow rifles and had been shooting them and we thought we were ready.

One guy in our group had an uncle who had a farm in Lewis county Missouri, which is in the northeast corner of the state, so we headed up there to see what kind of place it was.

We drove up on the Friday before opening day to check the place out and it turned out his place was mostly pasture with a small section of woods where a creek ran through.

Before sunrise, after parking by the gate, the four of us stationed ourselves around the section of woods and waiting for it to get light. I remember it was cold and windy so I sat on the ground behind a big log trying to get out of the wind. It must have worked because I fell asleep and was woken up by a twig snapping and when I looked up, there was a big doe and two smaller deer not twenty feet away. I almost jumped up and ran at first, because they were so close but managed to stay still and watch them until they had moved on. Does were not legal to shoot back then unless you had a landowner tag. Looking back, I am not sure I was ready to shoot a deer on my first hunt anyway so I was happy to let them walk away.

I did eventually shoot a small eight point buck from that small patch of woods but once we had hunted there a few years we decided we needed a better place to hunt.

So one morning during the season we loaded up and started driving around looking for a better spot.

During the drive we crested a hill on a gravel road and when we got to the top we could see a group of deer feeding alongside the road at the bottom of the hill. When we stopped, we had stopped in front of a farm house with a driveway on the road. After checking out the deer and being so close to this house we decided the only thing to do was knock on the door and ask the land owner if he would mind us shooting the deer.

I will never forget him looking us over then looking down the road at the deer and back at us and he finally says, “Let me get this straight. You were driving down this road and saw these deer and now you want to know if I mind if you shoot them”. We said “yup, that’s right”. He then said,”of course you can shoot them. You can shoot every deer you see as far as I’m concerned. I call them wood rats because all they do is eat my beans and corn and there are way too many of them. I’m just amazed you stopped to ask”.

So one of the guys proceeds to get out a rifle and shoot a bucket racked 8 pointer. All the deer, included the one he shot, run into the field next to the road. We then ask the farmer if we can go get the deer and he says sure.

That turned out to be the beginning of a long mutually beneficial relationship. That was probably about 1977 and we have been hunting on his farm(s) ever since. I say mutually beneficial because in turn for letting us hunt we ended doing farm chores pretty much all year on the farm and the landowner has become a good friend.

Although I quit hunting once my son got seriously into fall sports, the others guys still hunt there along with their sons now. And all of them help with the chores.

The first few years at his place were kind of rough. He has over 800 acres of pasture and timber with crops planting in the bottoms by a creek. When we first started hunting there we asked him if anybody else hunted it and he said no. What we should of asked was does anybody have permission to hunt because all kinds of people were hunting on the property. Neighbors and friends of neighbors all knew he didn’t hunt so they all felt there was no problem with them being there.

I remember the first few years we had plenty of people walking around along with guys in the back of a truck driving through shooting at deer. Saw another group hunting from a dune buggy. We when asked the landowner about these other people he said guess there are more people hunting my place then I realized.

Finally we had an incident happen that made us think twice about hunting there.

While walking back to the woods after lunch one day we heard some shots coming from the other side of the hill. So we walked over to investigate and there was a guy standing by the edge of the woods staring into them. When we walked up to him we said “shoot a deer?” And he said “not sure, trying to figure that out”. It was very foggy with a light rain that day and we said, ‘what did you see, a doe or a buck? And he says “not sure, I didn’t really see it”. So we all looked at each other and finally said “well what did you shoot at? And he said “I heard a deer and shot at it”. We said “how did you know it was a deer”? And he said “you know what a deer sounds like, don’t you! I have been hunting long enough to know when I hear one”.

After that we told the landowner we might have to hunt somewhere else and when he asked why we told him about the sound shooter. He said “look, I have given you guys permission to hunt and not any of these other people. So from now on, every time you come across someone else hunting you tell them you know me and tell them I have said no one else should be hunting my place”.

It took a couple years of us telling everyone we saw what he said but finally we had the place to ourselves.

Since then we have taken a lot of deer off the place including many big bucks.

[Guest]

thank god ya'll got rid of the idiots.

Thanks for sharing