A Pleasant Surprise
Learning Archery Part 6
Now that I had gotten my first archery harvest, I was even more hooked! I couldn’t wait to get back out with my bow! I was lucky to have a pleasant surprise later in the season.
J and I decided to head out to a foothills unit that still had an archery season for whitetails. Our plan was pretty simple, we were going to still hunt some treed areas in between cut blocks. We hiked all morning in a spot we were familiar with and didn’t have much luck, saw a few deer but only caught glances of movement and no real shot opportunities arose.
J did manage to arrow a grouse that morning so we at least had a nice camp meal to look forward to! Around mid afternoon a large storm began moving in so we retreated to the truck. After sitting through the heavy rain and thunder it was clear that the storm wasn’t going to pass quickly.
So, instead of sitting in the truck and eating our Mountain House meals, we made the not so hard decision to drive 30 min back into town and grab some real food. This included some tortillas and salsa for our makeshift grouse tacos!
We did some map scouting for a good spot to camp over night and decided on a new to us area that looked promising for the morning. We pulled in, ate some food and had just gotten out a pack of cards to kill some time. Then, surprise, my luck continued!
We happened to look up and notice that two whitetail does had strolled out of the trees and were feeding across a cutline right by the truck. Seems that a pickup truck is the perfect hunting blind for whitetails haha.
I was not about to pass up a gift doe if I could get a shot, so as the two does were feeding on the passenger side of the truck I slowly opened my door and crept out the opposite side. J then passed me my bow and release. I crept to the back of the truck and peered around to get a range on the closer doe. Another 40 yard shot. So I got my arrow knocked and slowly inched my way so I could see around my “hunting blind” and was able to get a shot off. The arrow passed clear through the doe and she ran off into the trees. What was neat about the way this went down is that J was able to record the impact from the passenger seat of the truck.
After reviewing the shot footage that night, it was super crazy to see just how much a deer can drop. Even with expecting the drop, and holding a bit low I still hit high lung. I’m really glad that J was able to record that as it was a great learning tool.
The doe made it about 40 yards. A quick drag over to where we had parked the truck and we were able to get her quartered up and hanging on a pre-existing meat pole just before dark.
As we marvelled in how much things can change, from a terrible storm to a filled tag within a half hour we fried up our grouse and enjoyed some tacos and a beer on the tailgate. What a great surprise!
The next day led to 3 more grouse with our bows, which is so much fun and a great way to practice shots in the field.
I only had 1 more tag left for the 2017 season and it was looking like I was going to have a nice freezer full of meat! Something I had been looking forward to since our journey into hunting began 2 years prior!
This was a quick one as the hunt was pretty quick, but shows once again that sometimes just putting yourself in the field can lead to an pleasant surprise!
Thanks again for following along, let me know if you like the format or if there is something you’d like to see! – R
