Deer Hunt and Family Visits

A couple weeks ago Dad flew down and we headed up by Bemidji to do some hunting. My parents own some land up there. Neither of us have been lucky enough to get a deer yet, but that was bound to change this year. I wasn’t looking for the Boon and Crockett deer this year. In fact I was just looking to put some meat in the freezer. So Saturday morning is when the season opened, and dad and I were out in our stands waiting for the sun to come up. I didn’t see anything until 10:30 that morning when 3 does ran by in front of me. The plan at that time was to wait for a big buck. We hunted the rest of the day without any luck. That night the game plan changed from a big buck to any decent sized deer. The next morning we headed out just before day break. Dad’s stand is closer to camp than mine, so he split off to go to his. I kept walking towards mine and got almost there when I heard a shot. The tough thing about hunting down in MN, is there are shots all the time from every direction. I’d heard plenty of shots the day before I was sure belonged to one of the people hunting with us. So I thought it might have been dad shooting, but wasn’t sure. I got up into my stand and waited for the big buck to arrive. Well after about 45 min a doe came running into the clearing in front of me. I raised the gun up and sighted in on her. I was debating weather she was the one I wanted to take this year. Since I didn’t really and was only looking for some food, I decided she’d be as good as any. She paused a second and I put one right behind her front shoulder. She went down right away, and didn’t get up again. Sometimes when you shoot a deer, they will run a long ways before they die. This was not the case. I was shooting the rifle I use for Moose, so I’m sure there was enough shock value in the bullet to stop her in her tracks.

I went to go get my dad to help clean the deer. When I came up to his stand he was nowhere to be found. After a little searching I found him over working on the deer he’d shot right at daylight. The shot I’d heard was him. He had just gotten into his stand, turned around and there was the deer, which turned out to be a small buck. So cleaning deer was on the menu for that day.

So we began the process of cutting up the deer.  They are basically just like a moose, just much much smaller.  It was snowing out and pretty chilly, so the hands got pretty cold.

We finally got it all boned out and into coolers.   Wayne gave me a ride with the meat back to Baxter.  The next few days we took the big pieces of meat and turned them into roasts and stew meat, and the scraps we brought into a meat market to get made into summer sausage and pepperoni sticks.  We just picked them up a couple days ago and they are delicious.

The next weekend Erin and I went down to the farm for a visit.  It was nice to catch up with everyone.

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