My dad and I saw this buck last Saturday, one week before Maryland's gun opener. At 5:45 a.m. on the way to my stand on the top of the ridge (about 400 yards above where we saw him one week prior), I squirted some Tinks 69 on a fresh "feminine hygiene product" and proceeded up the mountain to my stand. At 7:10 a.m., I looked straight down the mountain to see this guy coming up my trail. He gave me a ~60 yard shot and I dropped him in his tracks with my 30-06 Rem ADL. He's not the biggest on this board, but for a Western MD deer I was really happy with him. Not very wide, but good height and very nice mass...
The best part of the story is that I've been pushing some QDM measures on the rest of our hunting crew for about three years now... Basically, we try to let the little bucks walk now (we used to kill anything with three inches or more) and now we try to kill 5 points or better. I can't count the number of bucks I've passed up over the last several years. Out of nine hunters, four of us killed bucks and they were aged by the MD DNR when we dropped them off at the processor. Three of the four were aged at 3 1/2 and one was 1 1/2. It's so nice to kill some big-bodied deer and for once, we were the envy of the town! I hope now that some of the other guys have killed some mature deer it will only get better. For my area, QDM has been a four letter word for a long time but I'm hoping that will continue to change for the better.
Oh, and my wife is sooo happy to have another one hanging in the game room! Here are a couple of pics:
