Deer season has been great for me this year. I've gotten a doe, a button buck, and a 10pt buck. I got the doe and small buck opening morning of a 3 day hunting trip. I'm sitting in my stand in some timber along a creek an hour before sunrise. I can hear the deer coming for a long time but I can't see them until the sun starts to come up. When there's finally enough light to make out shapes, I see there are 5 deer laying down all around my tree. I thought they were all does so I thought this is great, maybe a buck will come along. Just about sunrise I hear two guys talking about 300 yards away and so did the deer and they all stood up and were about to run. I shot the two largest, which I had already picked out just in case. One turned out to be a button buck. That's when something happened I've never seen before. All the other deer ran except one of the does. She hung around for a long time stamping her feet trying to get the two I shot to stand up. I could've easily taken her, too, but I didn't want to use all my tags opening morning. So I stand up in my tree stand and start waving my arms and tossing sticks at her and she won't go away. I climbed out of my stand and looked at her and she turned and ambled away. I field dressed the two deer with a Marbles/Loveless Sport. I know field dressing doesn't involve a lot of cutting but the knife field dressed two deer and would still shave hair, I checked. Ergonomically, the knife isn't that great. The handle needs to be about an inch longer for me. I really liked the performance of the 52100 steel, though. It immediately started to stain but when I got home I applied some Flitz and it's good as new.
I shot the 10pt on the last day of the season. That was exciting. I could hear it coming from behind me and I knew it was a deer. When I could see it out of the corner of my eye and I could see antlers. I turned very slowly and had the "heart shot" in my crosshairs. It was only about 40 yards away and broad side to me with nothing between us. I shot once and it turned and ran like the wind back the direction it came over a hill and out of sight. I sat in my stand for about 15 minutes kicking myself for missing that shot. I thought I missed but I kept telling myself there's no way I missed, I couldn't believe I'd missed. It occured to me the responsible thing to do would be to go look for blood. I went to where he was and looked for a long time and finally found a drop of blood on a leaf. Whew! I didn't miss. I tracked him the direction he ran. I found him about a hundred yards from where I shot and had hit him where I was aiming. The adrenaline was coursing through me while I was tracking him I took a thorn tree limb to the bridge of my nose and didn't realize it. I had a thorn sticking out of my nose for what must've been two hours before I saw it in the mirror of my truck. I knew my nose ached while I was field dressing and dragging to my truck what turned out to be a 225lb deer, but I didn't give it much thought. I field dressed this deer with a Blackjack Woodsman. Now I really like this knife. It was cold enough that week that I decided to let it hang a couple days and process this deer myself. I field dressed, skinned, deboned, and sliced steaks with the Woodsman and never sharpened it. All the cutting I did, except for cutting the bone for round steaks (which I did with a bone saw) I did with this knife. There were times during processing I wanted a longer blade but I wanted to do the whole thing with this knife. Next time I'll have a second, longer knife, for processing. If you process your own deer, the work doesn't start until the shooting's done. But I'll do it again.
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Bill
"There's nothing friendlier than a wet dog"
"The more people I meet the more I like my dogs"
