Waterway Whitetails

It felt a little dirty, sitting by myself in Ryan’s ground blind on opening morning.

- Joe Shead

Not being there was his choice, though. His wife, Jen, also had a deer tag, and since they were splitting the babysitting, they opted to hunt a neighbor’s farm where they would both be closer to their two young children.

I passed some time that morning messing with my friend, texting a photo of a fired .270 cartridge with the blind in the background to make him think I’d shot a deer from his stand. The cartridge had been in my pocket since last deer season, but he didn’t need to know that.

Movement to the north interrupted my little gag. It was a deer, and there was no second-guessing this one. Tall antlers were readily visible even at a distance.

I slipped the phone back in my pocket, slowly tilted the rifle from its position on the front of the blind and waited for the buck to walk into an opening. If the buck kept coming, it would offer an easy 60-yard broadside shot.

When I peered through the scope, however, I saw nothing but glare. I hadn’t considered the rising sun, and I was looking directly into it. 

My chip-shot chance at a trophy buck was walking away. But then, as the big deer passed through the shooting lane it also passed out of the sun, and I found a shoulder in the scope.

I took the quartering-away shot, and the 8-pointer, an absolute brute that later dressed out at 191 pounds, literally dropped in its tracks.

Ryan’s blind, nestled against the far shore of a lake on a vast tract of public land in northern Wisconsin, was a good mile from the nearest road, and I had boghopped through the tamarack to get there, skirting the ice-bound lake as quietly as I could to avoid spooking the deer.

The inch and a half of ice on the lake was too thin to safely walk on much less drag a deer across. Yet I was no longer worried about scaring deer with noise, and breaking that ice sounded like a far better option than dragging a deer back through the boot-sucking swamp.