About 6-8 years ago, we just started flintlock hunting, so I was out with some friends in the late flintlock season, it was snowy,and I was stillhunting a laurel patch that's always a late-season yarding area, trying to either run some deer out to the other guys, or sneak up on one.

So, I was on some tracks of a small herd sneaking out through the laurel. All of a sudden, I hear a shot out ahead of me, and I kinda scurry out there to see my buddy standing there, gun-in-hand, looking kinda pretty sad. Hetook a whiff on a big doe, and he says there must have been five deer in the herd, at least one buck.

"Which way did they go?" I ask.

"Right back in there past you." He says.

So I say "You're crazy, they didn't go back in there." "I'll show you, I'll track 'em, they must have doubled back somewhere else."

So back I go, following these deer tracks that circled right around my old tracks (maybe 40 yards away from where I ran through), then they ran back out -right down my bootprints! Sure enough, to add insult to injury, there lay a small 4 point shed right in the edge of my own snowyboot-track. It still had some moist blood in the center. He must have knocked it offwhile escaping through the brush.

I came out and tossed it to my buddy and said "There's your buck - go ahead and tag 'em."

If my memory serves me, it was the last day of the late muzzy season.