Hi guys,

Just hitting my 100th post on the forums, so I figured I' d make it something worthwhile: first buck (or maybe just memorable hunt) stories. Here' s mine!

My first buck came several years after I had started hunting. We hunt in Florida, where seeing a deer with antler on its head can be a real event. I had actually hunted through two deer rifles (a .44 mag Ruger semi-auto and a .243 Win bolt action) and settled on my .270 Win Remington Model 700 SS before I shot anything of the whitetail variety.

It was a normal fall morning in Florida - reasonable and humid before daybreak, then the mosquitos came up out of the water and started really going to town. By mid-morning it was too warm for the jacket, pants, and cotton gloves I had on, but without it I' d be uncamouflaged, which was worse than sweating.

It was just about time for my dad to come pick me up at the stand, when I heard a little ' splush' in the cut behind me. A forkhorn had stepped out of the planted pines, along with a button buck. The buck was standing about 40 yards behind me, and over my right shoulder. Luckily, I' m a lefty, but it was still quite a twist around in my ladder stand to get the scope on him. I was so excited to have a shot I could make that I went completely into autopilot - the safety flicked off and the trigger squeezed itself as soon as I found the vitals. After the recoil and reload, I looked back to where the deer had stood before - nothing. The button buck he was with, though, had jumped twice and then turned and stood stock-still.

Then he did the young deer move of staring at the dead buck, stamping, walking three steps to the left, stamping, walking forward cautiously, twirling in the air and jogging away, etc, before he finally did that stiff ' deer on alert' walk into the bedding area. I figured from his behavior that the buck had dropped at the shot, but I had no idea what kind of shot it was, or where exactly he was... and worse yet, as you' re bound to do when you' re left to sit and think, I started to doubt my appraisal of the buck. Maybe he was only a spike? Maybe I imagined antlers?

Ten minutes later, my dad came walking up the road with his best hunting buddy (besides me and my brother, of course). The forkhorn was lying nearly in the road, so he called me down from the stand to check out my buck. I never came down from a stand quicker; I bet I darned near floated. The shot was good - the angle was so steep and weird that my .270 had hit the spine, then angled down and destroyed both lungs and the heart. I got the slap on the back and handshake every kid wants to get from my dad' s hunting buddy, and a giant hug from my dad. Then me and my dad both grabbed a leg, and took my first buck out of the woods. It' ll probably be the smallest buck I ever kill, but I' ll be darned if there' s a feeling in the world like I had that day.

BTW, how does everybody like my new sig? Just finished The Old Man and the Boy today; kinda got the good hunting memories stirred back up in me.