Eric Tester – Minnesota

Dejected, I walked back to my truck where I saw the landowner mowing the lawn. He told me that I was leaving at the perfect time to see deer. I told him I had been winded and wouldn’t see anything else. He quickly redirected my attention to my 6 o’clock where a doe and button buck were standing in my watermelons. I grabbed my bow (with the arrow still at the ready) out of my truck and started to stalk as stealthily as a 6’1″ 294 lb. man can do. I knew where they were going so I took the long way around some brush and dead cars to head them off at the pass.

The doe had wisely kept going into the woods but the button buck had stopped at about 45 yards and was standing broadside trying to figure out what I was. I quietly dropped to one knee and told myself the hours of practice were now going to pay off. It was time to show the world what kind of hunting machine I had crafted myself in to. I slowly started my finely honed draw and got about two inches of pull when the tension alerted me that I had not taken my finger off the trigger. I heard an anemic “wenk” and watched my arrow fly 10 feet at about five miles an hour. Insult to injury, I had not brought any other arrows. On the bright side, the deer just stood and stared at me. A game of cat and mouse ensued as it would look away, I would take a slow step and then freeze as it would look at me again. After what seemed like four years but was actually about 30 seconds I had made my way up to my arrow. I slowly slid the arrow through the whisker biscuit (which deployed the mechanical broad head), got it seated on the string, pushed the blades back down, and made a fist tight enough to crush titanium so as not to pull the trigger again during my draw.

Finding myself at sunset and in a small ravine next to giant oaks that were blocking all the available light, I came to full draw. Problem #2, the bow does not have fiber optic sights so I can’t see my pins to save my life. At full draw I start pointing my bow at the sky to try to see my pins. When I found them I moved to the deer only to find that a brown deer against the brown forest is somewhat hard to see with one eye through an ancient peep sight that has the aperture of an electron. I quickly started shifting from one eye to two eyes, tilting my head back and forth over and over trying to lock on to where the deer was, at which point the deer kept watching me in sheer amusement, sure that someone who was obviously so profoundly mentally handicapped posed no threat. I finally made out what was the white of the tail and moved my shot over about two feet to the right. I pulled the trigger and heard a resounding “WOK”. I told myself, “OMIGOSH! I THINK I MIGHT HAVE HIT IT!” I heard thrashing and stood to my feet and saw the tremendous commotion of this deer doing its best “Curly Shuffle” as its front legs pulled it in a circle while it acted like some kind of nauseating blood sprinkler.

I don’t know if it was 400 practice shots or if God really wanted to provide: A. meat for our family and/or B. salve to my shattered ego, but somehow, despite myself, I had spined my very first deer at 35 yards.

Being a warm night I had to hustle to get this thing butchered. Having never done anything more than cutting a hotdog up for my kids I now found myself up to my elbows in deer carcass until 1:45 in the morning teaching myself the do’s and don’ts of butchering. Feeling exhausted and nauseous I hit the hay 7 hours after pulling the trigger, vowing to my wife that I would never hunt again.

I’ve been out 15 times in the two months since.