I feel it is time for me to defend my honor. If you look at the post titled "My first archery buck" you will see the buck that I harvested 9 days before my wife got hers. And not that we are keeping score but if we were I think mine might be bigger.
The story starts with us hiking to the top of the area that we were hunting planning on putting a ground blind next to a water hole. About a third of the way up I spotted something moving in a wash a couple hundred yards away. After a closer look I saw my wifes buck bedded under some scrub oak in the bottom of the wash. We had to make a long loop to get the wind in our favor. When we got there, 45 minutes later, the buck was not in the spot that I had thought he was. We checked it out thouroughly. So we went a little further down the wash, Staci was about 10 yards in front of me at this time. She peeked over the edge of the wash to look into the next sacrub oak and sure enough there were two bucks, her 4 point and a small three point that she had already passed the night before. They were only 10 yards away, if that but they were about 15 feet below us. She stepped back and drew her bow, then began walking forward to the edge before she was able to shoot they jumped up and she hurried a shot and missed low.
The bucks ran about 500 yards and bedded down at the head of another wash in some very tall weeds with just the top few inches of velvet covered rack visible above the weeds.
We decided that we would cross the wash and recover her arrow and then make another large loop to once again get the wind in our favor. It seemed like a great plan until I took my first step into the wash. Out of the scrub oak that I had originally thought held the buck explodes a MASSIVE 4x4. He had everything that you want in a buck except my wifes arrow
I could have slapped him on the butt as he ran past me. Now I won't lie to you I considered grabbinmg him by his huge velvet covered rack and wrestling him to the ground just like you see in the rodeos, but I have a bad shoulder and was fairly cretain that it would have ended badly for one or both of us.
Obviously no arrows were shot as we both sat ther with our jaws pretty much hanging in the cactus.
So we put our original plan, or was it our second plan, into action. We decided that we should take a shorter route as it was hot and I am not exactly the picture of physical fitness. We used every bit of unsuccesful archery antelope hunting experience we had in this stalk. We spent a very large portion of it on our hands and knees , no we were not praying, okay, so were a little bit after all I was not sure my heart could take another close call. The other part of the stalk we spent on our stomachs, I believe I mentioned the cactus earlier.
Finally we found ourselves 42 yards away from a buck that had no intentions of getting up any time soon. Being the very patient people that we are, we decided that with Staci at full draw I would blow my Hyper Lip cow call. The first time I blew the call he jerked his head up, the second time he stood up, that was a big mistake on his part. A very short tracking job later and a very long photo session later my wife put her tag on her first deer. Not a bad start if you ask me.
As you can see I am not a man of few words, but hey you asked for it.
Henry