Story - My First Pistol Buck



This was my first gun hunt at Red Star. I took the 7mm mag and the .40 out to see what the woods had to offer. The first evening I sat on a clearcut switchback road where we saw some bear tracks. I didn't see anything that night, but I would swear that I heard an elk bugle. The next morning Brent showed me another area to hunt where an "old road" was. When Brent says old road, he means at one point about 100 years ago someone rolled something with wheels over the trail one time and abandoned the area because it was too rough. I walked in, sat on the ground, and waited for the woods to wake up. After about an hour, I had a button buck and doe chasing each other full blast just playing around. A little while later the wind changed and started blowing towards the trail I was watching. I got up and moved down the ridge a little to the other side of the trail and started kicking leaves around the base of a tree that I was going to stand by. As soon as I got my back up against the tree I noticed a deer over my left shoulder. I was standing with the stock on my shoe and the barrel in my hand. The deer walked parallel to me and when he got about 3 feet from me his head popped straight up. He didn't know exactly what was going on, but he knew something wasn't right. I knew I didn't have time to raise my rifle and get it on him before he was off in the thicket, so I reached for my pistol. When I popped the snap on my holster the deer turned to run away. The next thing I know, I drop the rifle with my left hand, draw the pistol with my right hand and shoot 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 times. I am not sure which one of those hit him, but he fell down and started kicking. I ran about 5 yards and caught up to him and put a final one in him. After looking at him, the legality of it all was questionable. If you closed your eyes, you could feel 3 points on one side, but they might not have measured. I got him gutted and tried to get him on the fourwheeler. I had to climb up on the wheeler and fall backward off the other side in order to hoist him up on there. When we were skinning him, we noticed that he still had an acorn in his mouth.

 

If you are ever worried about drawing and firing in a stressful situation, don't. I have had several instances where I had my gun drawn before my brain could catch up. Hitting anything is another story. My accuracy rate drop to about 5% under stressful fire.