ORIGINAL: mofireman

I was getting bored with the current farm I've hunted for 20 years, so last summer I began to explore other options in the area. I found a fairly small piece of public hunting land about 15 miles from the house, so i started scouting it a little bit. Found a decent amount of sign while scouting and even kicked up a few deer!

So I hunted there from time to time and saw deer every time out. Sometimes just one or two deer an outing, but better than I was seeing on the farm I usually hunt. It's the type of area where the parking lot has 4 foot tall wooden posts installed in the ground all the way around the parking area to prevent people driving back. The walk to the better huntingspots has to be between 1/4 and 1/2 mile probably.

Anyway, I was there on an evening hunt and actually had a doe and a yearling coming into the edge of the woodlot where I was positioned in my climber. I kept asking myself, "man do I want to drag a doe all the way back to the parking lot from here?" A lot of it was up a slight incline too. I must have pondered the thought about 4 or 5 times before she worked her way into about 20 yards. Finally I decided I just couldn't pass up the opportunity for the meat, so I shot. And missed[:-]. She jumpedand ran about10 yards and then began to come in even closer to the stand. The second shot hit the vitals and she ran about 25 yards downhill and piled up.

Now came the fun part. It was probably 85 degrees and humid that night. I cleaned her out real quick and drug her the 25 yards up the incline to my tree and low and behold, I was huffing and puffing! Slightly embarrased I called a couple friends who ended up not being available to help me out that night. Not sure of what to do, I began the trek to the parking lot to try and devise a game plan. Once there I loaded all the stuff in the truck and decided to check the lock on the gate just to make sure it was locked......it was! For some reason, I thought I might just check one or two of those wooden posts to see if they were loose enough to pull up. Fortunately one was...I couldn't believe it...someone was looking down on me. With just my parking lights on, I slowly and quietly navigated my way to where the doe was and loaded her up as quietly as possible into the bed of my truck. Once loaded, I quietly navigated my way back to the parking lot and quickly put the post back in the ground.

Afterwards, I felt a little bit guilty, because I knew I shouldn't be driving back there. Call it bad planning on my part or whatever, but it saved me a ton of work. Needless to say, the next week I ordered the $149 game cart from Cabela's because I never wanted to be in that predicament again. I have not had to use it yet, but I know it will come in very handy and it had the big wheels with durable tires on it. Should save my poor old back a lot of abuse when hunting out there in the future.

Hope I didn't bore you all...just wanted to share a story that led to me buying a game cart.