When to Act Like a Farmer

As legal shooting time expired, there were several deer in the field ... including a nice 140-class buck that I had passed up at 20 yards.  I didn't want to tag this early, and I really wanted to give my wife a shot at this buck.  But he was still there, still chomping away on those green soybeans....along with two does and two other smaller bucks.  To make things more delicate, I had shot a doe and she was laying dead not far from where the 140 was feeding.  How was I to get out of there, without him seeing me, and then, on top of all of that - go retrieve my doe??  Well I DID catch one lucky break ... at the very last moment of legal light, the biggest of the three bucks disappeared into the thick brush along the edge of the field.  I had to come up with a plan, and here's what I decided:

I waited until it was pitch black .... total darkness had set.  I slowly crawled out of my makeshift blind, slowly walked into another soybean field behind me, and walked clear out into the middle of this new field.  No deer could see me from here .... I bent down and slowly walked to my truck.  Now I had to get my doe.  Right in the field where the buck had disappeared.  This was going to be tricky, but I felt there was one gutsy option....since I was hunting right behind the landowner's house, and the deer are used to him clanking around around there, I simply drove my truck up the access road, with my headlights on.  I shut the truck off, slammed the truck door, and took my deer cart down and got my doe fast.  I took her out of the field, and drove elsewhere to field dress her.

In this case, I felt the best way was to not be sneaky at all ... if I could pretend I was the farmer coming out into the field and checking fence or something else, then to me that was the wisest choice.  I'll fill you in on how the deer act in that field in a future entry.  Until then, be sure to have a plan once legal shooting light expires on how to get out of the field if deer are close ......good luck hunting!