Kentucky Deer Rifle Season 2009

By KentuckyHunter

I was really looking forward to the upcoming rifle season this year. I had so little time to hunt throughout the fall and only made it out a handful of days during bow season. Luckily for me I had vacation time scheduled for the first week of Kentucky’s deer rifle season, and I hoped to spend most of that time filling tags. The way the season fell on the calendar this year, I was able to get out on Veteran’s Day before the opener to set up my stand locations. My uncle has a 200 plus acre farm in Robertson County, Kentucky and that was where I was headed to on Wednesday morning.

I spent the first few hours of early morning hunting with my bow. Turkey season was also in, so I made a few calls while sitting in my ground blind. I heard a few birds a long way off, but there was no action in my area. Eager to clear out a few tree stand locations for Saturday, I left the woods around 11. The first order of business was to set up a target and see if my rifle scope was still zeroed. I have an old Remington Model 700 in .270 Win that I have used for the past eight or so seasons. With multiple rust pock marks in the outer barrel surface and scratches in the stock, it is not a looker. I am not sure of its exact provenance, but it definitely shows some abuse of previous owners. What it lacks in beauty it makes up for in accuracy. I have taken many deer past 200 yards with the rifle and I am confident that it will do its job if I can remain steady. It is finicky on what loads it likes though. For the first few years I had it I used inexpensive Federal Classic loads that have since been discontinued. The Classic line featured excellent bullet choices though and my gun really liked the Sierra Pro Hunter bullets. Sadly, I used the last box I could scrounge off the internet four years ago. I then tried some Remington Core-Lokt bullets, but they were all over the paper. Another guy at the range saw my predicament and gave me half a box of Federal Premiums with the Sierra GameKing bullets. My rifle also shoots these very well, but they are twice the price of the old Classic rounds. Being confident in my shot is important to me, so it is worth the extra price.

I tacked a target to a cardboard box and set it up on the edge of a wood line. The day was very windy and I was hoping that the woods would help buffet the worst of the wind. I set up about 100 yards away. On top of my cooler I set up my shooting rest and lined the rifle up with the target, which promptly blew over. After setting the target in a small depression, I lined everything back up and made a few shots. The zero was still true so I packed everything back up and started looking for my tree stand gear. I looked everywhere for my folding saw, but couldn’t find it and had to make a quick trip to Mt. Olivet. The town doesn’t have many businesses, but luckily an old hardware store was open. He had a cheap Chinese made bow saw for $5 and I left with hopes of getting a few shooting lanes ready.

One of my favorite locations on the farm is a gas line easement that is cut through two patches of woods. Robertson County is old cattle country. The land has large rolling hills which are typically clear at the crests for hay and the hill sides are grown up in hardwood and cedar thickets. The easement cuts a 70 yard swath down a hill side and back up the other that normally would be uninterrupted woods. Looking to the north from one hill side to the other along the open easement the distance is about 175 yards. To the left and down hill there is a large patch of woods where most of the deer come from. To the right and slightly uphill is a smaller 3-5 acre patch of woods that is a sanctuary for deer. It is littered with buck rubs and scrapes. Around the top is a hay field that winds its way around the small patch of woods and back around to the opposite hillside. The deer travel between the woods along the bottom of the hill where they feel hidden from view from the open hay fields. I normally sit on one hill side and use my pop blind. This year though the gas company hadn’t bush hogged the easement and the sumac trees were too tall to see over. I decided to set up my climbing tree stand in a tree along the easement so that I could look down into the cover. There weren’t many candidates to choose from, but I finally found a small pin oak that would do the job. I spent the next hour cutting back vines and scrub red bud trees in order to open up some shooting lanes. My stand was located on the edge of the smaller patch of woods. I didn’t have much of a shot along the easement on my side because of several large trees with limbs stretching out into the open, but across to the larger woods I would have many opportunities. Using my safety belt, I eased up the tree in my Ol’man climber and surveyed my situation. I made it up about 12 feet in the tree before I had to cut a limb out of my way. Moving up the tree a little more, the diameter of the tree began to lessen to where I didn’t feel safe going any higher. I would only be 15 feet off of the ground, but my vantage gave my views all the way to the bottom of the drainage and also the hayfield surrounding the woods. I was very confident in my setup.

Since I finished up at a reasonable hour, I decided to head to the Ohio River and Meldahl dam in Bracken County, Kentucky to see if the sauger were biting. There were a few guys up on the dam wall that seemed to be hauling them in every other cast. I had some small white Gulp minnows and made a few casts from the bank. Hang-ups are really horrible at this dam and you have to be in constant contact with your bait. After a few casts, I switched to a chartreuse minnow and got a hit. The sauger was the biggest I have ever caught and I estimate it weighed about 2-3 lbs. The rest of the afternoon was pretty slow, but I caught a 12 inch cigar shaped sauger around 4:30 pm. As I was packing up to leave two of the guys on the dam were also leaving. Looking at my sorry stringer, I asked if they would sell me a couple from their bulging fish basket of sauger so that I could have enough for dinner. Those guys were really cool though and just gave me a couple of fish so that I would have a mess.

Saturday couldn’t come soon enough for me. I don’t think I slept more than a couple of hours Friday night, and those with one eye on the alarm clock. Loaded up with coffee, I hit the road early. Parking my truck in a hayfield near the road, I got out my gear. I slipped on my blaze orange hat and vest. In one pocket I slipped a length of small diameter rope to hoist up my rifle with. In the other pocket I slipped my can type bleat call and small grunt call. In my pants pocket I stashed my deer drag. I call it my poor man’s Glenn’s Deer Handle. Using a 6ft piece of heavy nylon rope, I strung it through a hand width length of bamboo and tied a knot in it. I slipped a few bullets into my pocket and headed to my stand. The walk was only a couple hundred yards and only a little way to my stand, I heard a deer blow and crash into the woods! The deer must have been bedded down in the high grass and brambles of the easement. I slowly made my way down the hill and into my tree. As quietly as possible I climbed the tree with my stand and hoisted up my rifle. Before I did anything else, I pulled out my bleat call and turned it over. In the woods across from me I could hear deer walking around in the leaves reacting to my call. I quietly worked the bolt of my rifle, chambering a round and waited for daylight.

Just as the limbs of the trees were becoming visibly distinct, I pulled out my can call again and gave it two short bleats. Again, deer were moving in the leaves in the woods opposite me. Then, in an opening I could see a deer step out into the edge of the easement. I could tell it didn’t have antlers, which was perfect since I wasn’t really looking for a buck necessarily. If a big deer walked out, I would be happy to take it but my real goal was a young doe. I raised my rifle scope to my eye and could see the deer much better with the lack gathering ability of my scope. Bringing the cross hairs on its chest I squeezed the trigger and the deer headed back into the woods. Adrenaline had me shaking a little bit, but instead of getting down from the tree, I decided to wait a little bit and see what else would come out. About 20 minutes later, I heard some whimpering and baying from up the hill and it was getting louder. Soon I heard footsteps running in the small patch of woods behind me and a big doe emerged from the woods and ran up the opposite hillside of the easement. The barking continued and the deer looked at its back trail. The limbs of the trees were blocking my shot as the deer was on my side of the easement. I picked a small opening in the limbs and waited for the doe to give me a shot. Picking her way up the hill she entered my scope and my shot put her right down. At the base of my tree I soon had a mixed breed bird dog and an old beagle looking up at me. They looked up seemingly disappointed that I had ruined their fun. Within half an hour I had two deer down. What a great opening morning!

I climbed down the tree and tried to catch the dogs. They didn’t have any tags on their collars from what I could tell and they dodged my makeshift lasso. I walked down the hill and back up the other side toward my doe. As I looked around for the dogs, I could see that they had found my other deer on the edge of the woods. I headed over to my first deer and spooked the dogs away with a stick. The deer ended up being a button buck, which ideally I would not have shot, but in the early morning light I had mistaken it for a doe. I made short work of the field dressing and then placed his hooves above his head to make the drag easier. He was reasonably light and I headed up hill through the briars to my doe. After field dressing her, I finished dragging the smaller button buck to the top of the hill and the hayfield where I could load him up into my truck. I walked back to the truck and drove it around the hayfield to the deer. I heard a couple of shots not too far away and hoped my cousin or dad had some luck too. I then headed back down to the doe and started to drag her up. She was a big doe and I broke the bamboo handle on my deer drag half way up the hill. After I had the deer loaded in the bed of my truck, I heard a couple more shots and couldn’t help but think that we might have a really successful morning on tap. I drove back to my cousin’s house and saw him headed in from the field. He said he had just seen a huge buck tending to a doe a couple of hundred yards off and headed his way, when two dogs had run in and split the deer up. He had taken a running shot at the buck as it closed within 100 yards of his spot but had missed. We both looked across the road and my dad was heading out of his blind. He had also tagged a large doe and a button buck. We hung the deer up in the old tobacco barn and quartered them out for the ride home where the real work would begin of cutting, grinding, and wrapping.

I decided to take the next few days off and do some fishing instead. I had one deer already from the early muzzleloader season, so I now had three deer in the freezer. I went several mornings to Meldahl Dam and met an older fishermen there every morning who said he fished there almost every day starting at 4 a.m. When I got there he was always set up right on top of the dam wall. The dam runs out from the shore and then makes a right angle out into the river for 40 or 50 yards. The water rushes over the dam on the other side of this concrete wall and makes an eddy of water that runs back along the face of the wall and then circles back along the beach. The older fisherman was always right up again the wall and fished that area where the eddy started. We both caught a bunch of sauger and also some crappie and white bass. It usually only took a couple of hours to get a limit because he was nice enough to give me a few fish for my basket.

As my week was ending, I decided to try deer hunting one more morning. I went to the same stand I had on the opener and waited. The morning was pretty slow at first, but about 9 am I could see three deer walking through the woods to the easement. They started munching on some shoots of green grass at the bottom of the hill and I brought my rifle up ready for one to turn broadside. A large doe started up the hill and I put the cross hairs on her chest and snapped off a shot. She ran back into the woods, but one of the other deer ran a few feet and just looked around. I guess I was too shaky because I shot at that deer three times. I waited about 20 minutes before getting out of my stand and was really feeling unsure. My last shot seemed to hit the deer but it had not fallen in sight. I walked to the spot where I had shot the first deer and didn’t see any blood at all. I made a note of the spot and headed to where I had shot the second deer. At first I didn’t see any sign, but then I saw some hair. I headed off into the woods along the path it had taken, but I didn’t see any blood for the first 20 yards. I was beginning to get desperate when I saw a small pool of blood. Not a lot of blood and it was a dark color. I was not encouraged.

Instead of pushing the deer, I went back to the spot of my first shot and started to look for that deer. I couldn’t find any sign at all. I just started blindly walking where I thought the deer might go, and then I saw the white belly about 80 yards from where I had shot her. The shot had been perfectly placed, but she just hadn’t bled until she stopped. The spot where she had fallen had a huge pool of blood, but there had not been any sign leading up to her. I field dressed the deer, and she was absolutely huge. I hooked up my rope to her and started to drag her through the woods. I was drenched in sweat within a few steps. I got to a good shady spot and decided to let her cool in the morning air and I headed back to look for the second deer. I started searching again at where I had seen the hair. There was a good amount of hair, but no blood. I walked in circles for the next hour looking for more sign, but I never found that deer. I think I must of just grazed the deer and didn’t mortally wound it. The lesson for me is that I need to get myself calmed down before I attempt to make a shot. I was way too juiced after making the first kill and was not in any shape to take a clean shot. I think the deer was probably fine, but I should have made a better decision.

Dejected, I headed back to my deer and started to drag her out. I don’t know if I could have found a steeper, more briar choked hollow to drag a deer out of if I had tried. Just as I made it to the hayfield and was headed toward the road, the neighbor drove by and asked me if I needed help. He drove me back to my truck and I was able to get her loaded up. It took all I had to pick her up and swing her over the tailgate. Now with four deer in my freezer and my buck tag still unfilled, I might just call this season over. I don’t have any antlers for my wall, but I have many great meals of venison and sauger waiting in my future.