TYPICAL DEER – MUZZLELOADER RECORD
1. Bill Austin 191-2/8 2012
Like many of us here in Southern Ontario, I hunt the farms in my area which annually rotate their fields from corn one year to soya bean the next.
The black powder hunt here in Middlesex County opened last year on November 05, 2012. I was going to miss the first Monday because I had to work. At my young age of 74 I’m still working part time at my driving job as it is in my blood, just like deer hunting. I had a load that had to be delivered to a customer Monday and work comes first. The friends that I usually locally hunt with, change from day to day because of their work commitments.
On Tuesday morning I was going to hunt a bean field with John and Donny McLeod. We had previously scouted the area and found lots of sign. Nothing is “permanent” with us as we usually just set up along the field edge beside a tree or other cover, depending on the sign we have found and the wind direction that day.
Tuesday morning was very quiet. We had only spotted two does and they were too far off from any of us for a shot. By 11am we decided to leave for lunch. We returned to our same spots around 3:30pm to hunt until dark. A flock of turkeys filed across the field after we got settled in and they finally disappeared out of the open area after about a half hour. A few minutes later a big doe came out. John was far over on the other side of the field and we both watched her feeding for quite a while. She was just too far for either of us to get a shot.
By 5pm the doe was slowly working her way towards me and I was watching her through the scope on my Thompson Center 50 caliber percussion “White Mountain” when all of a sudden a large set of antlers appeared at the side in my scope; he was coming towards me. The doe was watching him from across the field. When the buck got about 150 yards away from me he began to turn away and I had no choice but to take a long shot at him with this short barreled smoke pole. I fired and missed completely which ended the hunt for the night.
The next morning John and I returned to the field, but saw nothing. We headed back in for lunch around 11am and returned around 3pm. This time Donny was with us again, so we went back to the same spots we had been the night before. The afternoon was beginning to look like nothing was going to happen, just like the in the morning.
Just after 4:30pm a huge buck wandered out into the field about 500 yards from where I was sitting. John was closer to him, but from where he was sitting he couldn’t see the buck. I watched this buck pick his way towards me for the next twenty minutes.
By 5pm he had made it closer to me, to a point where he must have now seen John moving around. My heart was beating a mile a minute as I watched him through my scope moving closer to me. When he was at about 100 yards and right in front of me, he stopped and looked up. I took a deep breath and squeezed the trigger. All I could see was a cloud of smoke, but I was sure that I heard the “smack” of the cast bullet hitting its mark. As the smoke began to clear, I saw the buck running off to my right; he was almost to the woods further down the field. Just as he got there he stumbled and went down. He got back up, wobbled and went down again, this time for good!
I was shaking and trying to reload when John radioed me asking if I had got him. I said, “I think so.” I called Donny to come, while John was on his way over to me. When I got there the buck was laying with his massive rack sticking up in the air. It was some sight to see and little did I know that eventually he would be declared the largest rack in Ontario for 2012.
The slug had hit him right in the front of his chest and taken out the heart. After we field dressed him, we loaded him on Donny’s ATV. It was all he could do to keep the front wheels on the ground to steer the bike. It was dark by the time we got the buck back to my shop. We eventually butchered the deer ourselves, never thinking to weigh it. The rack scored 191 2/8ths net and 200 4/8ths gross. I had to go back to work the next day so the hunt was over for me for the year.
