Reload!

On a cool fall afternoon in 2012, my Dad and I sat in a buddy stand behind my aunt’s house just across the PA border into Ohio. This was during the early inline muzzleloader season, and I was looking for my first muzzleloader deer. Soon after arriving, we heard ATVs riding on the power line behind us.

Now, this isn’t the first story I have told with the same tagline. If you follow the blog and have read the stories, you’ll recount that this has happened to me in the same location on one other occasion. Luckily, they both had similar results.

We debated leaving but reluctantly decided to wait it out – and I’m glad we did. The ATVs managed to kick up two doe our way. We heard them coming through the woods, and had to turn around in the stand to see them.

I was using the tree as a rest, and as the deer moved toward us through the timber, I took aim. I had my sights on the second doe, and she began to work her way broadside. When she stopped in an opening broadside, I put the crosshairs behind her shoulder and squeezed off a shot.

Both doe stood still for a few seconds. Then they began walking again as if nothing had happened. “Reload!” my dad said.

After a clean miss on my first shot we frantically scrambled to reload the muzzleloader. Finally, we got the gun loaded and I found the deer in my scope.

This time, I put a perfect shot on the deers quartering away shoulder. It tumbled down a ravine and down into a creek bottom. We then went to retrieve a deer that at the beginning of the day, we never thought we’d get. Once again, you never know what will happen in the deer woods, so get out there!