a worthwhile trip...

This happened the weekend of Sept. 17-18.

Gotta love "summer" deer hunting (not)!! Last weekend I took my 16-year old, 3 of his sophomore hs friends, and their 3 dads out for the second weekend of SD's youth deer season. I guess I had the most deer hunting under my belt so was the defacto guide. We hunted public land on either side of the Missouri River reservoir in south-central SD. My son was the only one of the kids who had gotten a deer before this trip.

Our group had 4 youth tags of which we filled 3, two of them being first time deer. The first one was a white-tail doe taken about 1 pm pushing a scraggly corn food plot on the east side of the river. Probably too stinking warm to still be out, after the boy's dad lead him through field dressing, I used my deer lift hanging from a tree in a nearby shelterbelt to quarter the critter up and get it on ice while I kept the tagged leg, hide, and head all attached to each other for evidence of the sex & age (the youth season only allows anterless deer to be taken).



After checking into our cheap but cool motel, we chilled the rest of the afternoon and regrouped after 5 pm to go over to a large public area on the west side of the river. I had never been there and thought I had it pictured in my mind's eye but it was much more open and less rugged than I expected. The filled out boy, his dad, my son, and I set up on a knoll that had good all around view. The last 45 minutes or so of light produced deer moving around and we glassed a certain pair down near where had been dropped off.



Too far of a shot from the knoll for T so I got to watch him use the lay of the land to shave off 40% 0f the distance and then watched him and the 2 deer as he finally took his over 225+ yard shot. I saw and heard the hit and we worked our way down and kicked around in the grass a bit until I finally stumbled upon the deer. I had never seen 2 fawns without a doe this early in the season and thought we were looking at adult deer as they moved through the grass but alas T had whacked a "light" one. Personally, watching the shot happen was worth more than the meat I got off of this thing. Field dressed this one and got ice on it when we got back in town.





Sunday morning was still and cool and T and I set up with his "ginger" friend who's dad was really a novice at deer hunting. After a quick shot miss of a white-tail coming past behind us and a half an hour after full sun up, the 2 boys and I headed west towards more rolling ground where we would make a right angle hook and head back towards the knoll area of the night before. The ginger ("E") had a .243 (the other 2 deer had been taken with .30 cals) with T following him with a shooting stick set-up with me in the back. Right before we were going to turn north, I saw the boys stop and look south and then E had my son give him the shooting sticks. I glassed south and saw 2 mulies standing on a small descending side hill and I watched them and I watched E trying to get steady to take a shot. What seemed like a looong time finally resulted in a round going down range of the 225-250 yards as I watched. I heard a hit but both mulies headed down the hill into a thicker vegetated draw. We walked down there and another mulie doe materialized (the 2nd deer up on the side hill was a buck) but I told them we had to look first where you shot to make sure this one they were seeing was a different deer--- a lesson we stressed over and over again last weekend. This old man again was the one that found the crumpled up decent sized mulie doe after the boys had sort of walked past her, a classic .243 hit of running about 50+ yards and piling up. I wanted to wrap things up more speedily so I gutted this one and the boys got to drag it the 300-400 yards to the truck after E's dad made it down to the kill site.



We met up with the other half of our party in another location and the 4th boy, who had several opportunities over the weekend, decided he was done for the day. Good thing because breakfast was calling my name! We got ice on the mulie doe for the 2 hour drive home and I spent Sunday afternoon cutting up the 2 deer that came home with me. It was nice to have a shower around suppertime.

Except for the heat, it was great memory making weekend seeing 4 boys become a little bit more like men and bonding with 3 other dads trying to teach and lead their sons on how to do things the right way in more than just hunting...