Nice work gentleman!
I finally have some contributions to make to this thread.....it's been a slow fall for hunting for me....as a result of spending a lot of time doing hunting related projects. It's weird because I feel like I've spent a lot more time afield versus the past few years despite like 96.5% of my time while afield wasn't actually hunting. It feels good for the time spent on hunting without hunting paid off once I finally spent some time hunting. This weekend was a memorable one for me.....
Friday night I drove down to Iowa along with a decent contingent of siblings, nieces and nephews, our dad/grandpa, and met up with extended family to whoop it up in a town of 300 I spent a week or two every summer in staying and doing chores for my grandma. It's cool to see all the stuff she made a mark on still standing despite many others no longer existing. We hunted the family ground on Saturday and shot the absolute piss out of the pheasants.....put up and saw a thousand plus birds easily.
Then after driving back up North on Sunday morning I made it out to deer hunt....walked a new tax forfeit parcel in our area for an hour or so before hopping in the stand for the last hour of legal shooting. I was on my phone joking with a chick about how I hadn't seen shit, needed to get lucky and have a really dumb deer show up fully expecting to leave empty handed, and then after looking up from phone with five minutes of legal dusk left to shoot, had a decent buck slowly walking broadside before standing the same maybe 50ish yards away. I wasn't sure if my sunflower heater going was loud enough to scare deer away....or if me opening a window, grabbing my gun, and pointing it out it would be enough to spook deer.....but all signs point to the answer being a resounding "No" based off this fukcer not having a clue and me drilling him exactly where I aimed....quite literally dropped him straight down in his tracks with one shot.....25-06 precision shot right to his spine in about the middle of his neck.
All in all, a great weekend of hunting...the most memorable I've had in a while, and about as much as a guy could ask and/or hope for......