BBD!!!!

For those who don't know,

BBD = Big Buck Down!

That's right! I was finally able to get a wall worthy buck! Woot woot! Okay okay, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you all about it.....

We'd gone out hunting every chance we got hoping to find "the buck". We rode the 4-wheeler back into the mountains, hiked back into uncharted territories, scouted, glassed, drove, all over our area, everything. No luck. Sure we saw some younger bucks but that's not what I was after. Not this year.

Since we have Dedicated Hunter tags, I wasn't feeling as much pressure to get the job done this year, which was nice and made the hunt more enjoyable. Still frustrating that we weren't finding anything, but enjoyable!

Yesterday was the last day of the hunt so we decided to try one last ditch effort and drive up Willow Creek canyon to see if anything bigger was out and about. We drove pretty much to the top, stopping to glass every so often, but there wasn't anything. Dang. Maybe next year. Accepting that it just wasn't going to happen this year, we headed back down the mountain. 

At the opening of this canyon is some fenced off property. The people who live there have a large and beautiful home, paved road to their house, and a big beautiful gate that keeps you out. At the gate there is a call box that allows you to call the people in their home for whatever reason (mostly so they could open the gate to allow guests in I would imagine). Coming out of the canyon we saw a big group of deer just within the fence of their property and decided to stop and check them out just for kicks.

"That's a pretty nice 3 point", Marcel said pointing him out.

"Um.....he has a cheater!! No wait.....he has DUEL cheaters!!" As you can guess, he was pretty excited! With news like that, so was I!

"No way!!!" I replied staring at him through the binos.

"Too bad he's on private property...", I said, my excited dwindling.

"We could just ask and see if they'll give us permission", Marcel said. 

"The worst they can say is no!"

"Yeah it wouldn't hurt I guess!", I agreed.

So we pulled up to the call box, Marcel got out and paged the house while I kept my eyes on our big boy. The woman on the other end of the call was a bit leery to give Marcel an answer and was kind of giving him the run around, but as soon as he said it was his wife's tag the woman's mood lightened greatly and she said, "Oh for her? Yeah go right ahead! And good luck!"

I let out an excited squeal and Marcel knew as soon as he got back to the car that I had heard the answer, judging by my giant goofy grin!

I hopped out of the car, loaded the gun, got set up, waited for a clear shot, and got him! He laid down by a tree, then sat up like nothing happened. So I took another shot to try and put him out of his misery sooner. Didn't work. Third shot. Didn't work, and he got up and ran off farther up into the trees. Being a hunter that has only needed 1-2 shots in my past hunts to get the job done, I felt terrible. I don't like being the cause of an animals suffering, and for whatever reason, my aim was off. Marcel called his buddy Jeff (who brought his 2 boys with him) to come help us track him down. At this point it was starting to get dark so we tracked until it was too dark for even flashlights to be of help. Jeff found the end of a blood trail and Marcel had spooked the buck out of a spot he'd been laying down in so we decided to back out and pick up where we left off in the morning.
Needless to say, I hardly slept. It was a LOOOONG night for sure. I took work off today and Marcel and I went out and hiked up to where we stopped tracking the night before. It was much easier to follow the blood trail now that we could actually see! We went about 225 yards from where we started when I looked ahead and stopped.
"Is that a rock?", I asked Marcel.
He looked up at where I was pointing and said, "No, that's him!!!"
We whooped and hollered, hugged and kissed, then went the last 25 yards to our prize!

 I can't even tell you what a relief it was to find him! Also finding him so close to where we saw him last the night before means that he didn't suffer long, which made me feel a bit better!

 So happy to have more meat in the freezer and another beautiful buck to put in our home!