I was back home at the family farm this weekend for deer season. The deer population is WAY down this year due to disease the last couple of years. My sister and I both took small bucks, and one of the other guys we hunt with got a pretty big 4x4, but other than that we just didn't see much.
Regardless, I always come back in a good mood from puttering around the farm. I'm just a weekend farmer (if that) but it's a nice change of pace from staring at a computer screen all day. I got to spend time outside, do a bunch of shooting, catch up with some old high school friends, and just generally enjoy life.
The one thing I really wish I'd gotten a picture of were the bald eagles. We dumped the guts from our deer out in the pasture about 300 yards from the home place, with the plan that we'd shoot some coyotes over them. I didn't get around to looking for coyotes, but we did have four bald eagles show up. I never get tired of watching them.
Here's a shot from Saturday evening in the deer stand. I only saw three deer all weekend - one doe Saturday morning, another Saturday evening, and a small buck Sunday night. It was still nice to just sit outside, read a book, and relax.
On Sunday I set up the steel at 700 yards and did a little long range work. I'm still trying to get the hang of this precision stuff, but I'm getting better. Here's a shot of my rifle on the beanfield after banging the gong for a while:
And here's the gong. This is a 12" plate, and I was able to hit it pretty consistently. All of the hits stringing horizontally across the bottom half of the plate are from my .308. The wind was gusting back and forth from zero to 10 mph across the bean field, so even though I kept it pretty tight vertically I was back and forth across the plate. After burning through a few .308 rounds I brought it in to 100 yards and banged away at it with my old .38-55 for a while. That's what the rest of the marks are from.
I only had Saturday and Sunday to hunt, so after not taking anything all weekend I decided on Sunday I would take whatever meat walked withing shooting distance. I'm really more concerned with having some meat in the freezer than having a giant rack for the wall, so when this little guy walked up I let him have it. Strangely enough, even though he was little he was a pretty darn tough deer. I shot him once and he kind of just stood there like nothing happened. After another minute I shot him again, and he trotted about 25 yards away and sat down. After that he still took several minutes to die. It's amazing how much damage a deer can soak up. I thought maybe I'd missed his vitals, but when I gutted him he had two .38 caliber holes through the lungs. Now, an antique round like a .38-55 doesn't do as much damage as a modern high velocity caliber, but I was still really surprised.
He's not nearly as big as last year's buck - even after gutting that one it took two of us to lift him onto a 4 wheeler. This guy wasn't much of a challenge just by myself. I dunno, maybe the gym is paying off
