This wasn’t a call I took but a deer that was taken on my ranch. The hunter was my niece’s husband; I guess that would make him my nephew Jason. The hunter is an interesting story in its self, but I’m going to talk about the tracking first.

Jason made an excellent shot on this buck; he aimed low on the deer just as I instructed him to do. But he told me the deer didn’t as much as flinch. When I saw the wound I was sure it was a heart shot but the broad head barley missed the heart and took out an artery. Now let me be completely honest and say this deer could have been tracked by eye but there was very little blood at the start and would have taken some hands and knee searching for the first 40 yards besides I wanted to put Trapper on the real thing. The deer went around 120 yards and took three 90-degree turns. He took us through a dry creek bed and some pretty thick stuff I was on my hands and knees going through a large clump of brush where the heavy blood started, the deer took his last turn and went another 30 yards. Trapper had an intensity that I have not seen to this degree before. He was about 5 feet away from the deer when he saw it, he jumped on that deer and tugged on the ham so hard I thought he was going to drag that 150# buck home. From start to finish it took Trapper less than 4 minutes to find the deer and that is only because he had this old fat guy slowing him down.

Now for the hunter’s story, Jason has never hunted deer before this past Saturday. Matter of fact he never picked up a bow until three weeks ago. I would like to think that he had an awesome coach but he took to it like he had been shooting all his life. When he approached me wanting to bow hunt I told him he had a long way to go before he was ready to start hunting and that he may be able to get ready by the end of the season. Well at the end of our first practice session he was stacking all his arrows on the X, although I was impressed I still wrote it off to luck. After the second practice session he was doing the same thing. So I took him down to the ranch with me the weekend before the opener. I put him in my 20 foot stand and placed a 3D deer at 20 yards, every shot was right in there. We went to town and he ordered a Mathews FX. The bow came Friday the 27th and we stopped by on our way through town to pick it up and get it set up. He was shooting a 2.5” group when we left the shop that night. Saturday morning he didn’t see any deer, that afternoon we were shooting and did some fine-tuning that brought his groups in even tighter. I let him know if he wasn’t shooting as well as he was he wouldn’t have got to hunt this weekend. Well that evening at 7:15pm he arrowed his first buck on his first day to deer hunt.