Missed HIM, yes HIM.

[Captain Jay Kavanagh]

Dang it.

Missed HIM, yes HIM.

Could not sleep last night thinking about my missed opportunity.

sitting overlooking a small food plot yesterday eve.

Spitting a little rain, not really expecting to see much, standing up in the stand stretching, and whoa nelly there he is.

he stepped out from the back edge of the plot about 250yds from me, walked and in the plot and looked around. got my gun up and cranked the scope, yep, he is a shooter, biggest buck I have seen walking.

he is facing me so not really a good shot, he turns and gets broad side and at the same time, starts to trot towards the right, long narrow plot so I don't think I am gonna get a better shot, so I let one go.

Missed him.

yes HIM.

I got to thinking about it on the ride back. I can't recall missing a deer at any distance since prior to 1994.

Oh well, I have been hitting the ducks better than I usually do, and I was Joking with a mate on the dock, on how I had not missed and that I was probably going to miss my next couple of shots, I just did not think it was gonna be at a buck deer with my tack driver.

dang it.

[scattered_grass]

What caliber are you shooting Jay?

[Captain Jay Kavanagh]

25 wssm Win Mod 70 Zeiss 3.5-10X50

[WAHOONBOX]

THIS MAY PLAYBACK IN YOUR MIND FOR MONTHS...MAYBE YEARS....


SORT OF LIKE BUSTING ONE OFF ON THE STERN...FIRST DAY OF THE WMO 93 ...WITH A GAFF IN HIM....I STILL GET COUNSELING FOR IT

[brandon558]

the kills are fun..but the ones you miss never seem to go away.

dont feel bad i missed a nice one this year as well. It sucks.

[fishocean]

Some Of my best memories are of deer that I have missed or screwed something up at the last minute. That is what makes life worth living! You will get them next time! Good LUCK!

[Jared D]

2002, Thanksgiving Day, Plymouth Maine (my families old farm). I come over a crest of a hill, the soft powder snow makes me silent as a ghost.... They also belie the buck and doe that had taken this trail in the past few hours. I do a long search over the hill side just to be sure nothing is in my immediate front.

I take a step forward when Whoosh.... I see what appears to be the biggest rabbit ever. Grey and white. Finally I realize its a deer (piebald doe). I yank up the rifle, as soon as I do that, whoosh, off goes a buck from the same thicket not 30 feet off my right shoulder. I try to find it in my scope. When I finally do, it stops (smart little bugger) and I blow past it.
I halt my swing and back up on it, and get its neck in my cross hairs. Its partially concealed in a thick stand of small 1 inch diameter alders.

I break the seer, recoil punches my shoulder. The deer is still there, I couldnt have missed at 60 yards. I throw the bolt open, this smart buck decides "oh crap, he's reloading" and takes his leave.

2 hours later, I have searched for any sign of a hit... blood, hair... I walk its track, nada. Only thing I can figure is I hit an adler. Never touched that *******. Still haunts me... but I will never forget a thing about that day. I remember the thunder of the rifle echoing across the valley in the 18 degree "heat" like I am there now. It keeps me coming back for sure. This will likely be the same for you. The ones I catch never haunt me like the ones I loose.

[nautiduck]

Last year I dropped my trusty .300 savage screwing up my scope big time. So decided to take my .30-.30 levergun with iron sights. Slow walking through the woods when I see Mr. White Horns break cover and bolt to about 150yds away. Ive been seeing pics on my trail cams of this deer for two years and Ive never seen him in the woods his rack is so thick it needs to go on the wall. He stops and I swear I can see his head. I pull up, sight right below the ears and POW! the rifle kicks and I see him tear off through the brush, so I walk up to where he was standing. Nothing, no blood, no hair, no hit. I cant figure for the life of me what happened even with the open sights this thing is dead on to 150yds. I turn to walk back and then I see it, the little tree leaning over that I stooped under had a nice big chunk blown out of the back of it. Son of a ***** if I would have had my scope I could have seen the damn tree in front of the deers head. It must have been leaning just right I swear to god it wasnt there when I shot. I have had one pic since then and it will probably be two more years till I see him again.

[weekender]

ah, the ones that have got away. They are many for me. The elk is the worst. Had him already mounted and hanging on the wall.

[Captain Fred Archer]

Oh yes, they will haunt you forever. Probably about fifteen or twenty years ago I missed what was probably the biggest buck I'd ever seen. It was up on a vast area of private land in the Catskill mountains up in New York State. Twenty thousand acres owned by some extremely wealthy New York City chief executives. It was a trout flyfishing club that included the headwaters of a very famous trout stream. None of the owners hunted, but my best friend of many years, Howard Lambert, was a member and he gave me permission to hunt there. The only other deer hunters were the caretaker and his family, who lived on the property.

In the northeast and I suppose in a few other areas, there are two species of whitetails...the Virginia's and the original Northern version, which are much bigger. They are the ones that are found up in Canada and they are tanks! This place had Northerns. I killed some big bucks up there, including a matching pair of big ten pointers that were big racked, heavy, and murder to drag off the mountain.

The one that has literally haunted me for so many years came sneaking along behind a big azzed doe (the Northern ones get real big too). He was just staring at her, stopping when she stopped and looking around when she did. They were real nervous (turned out the caretaker and his brothers were doing a silent drive and they were sneaking away from them). I was in a Baker portable. The deer showed up well to my right, not to my left where I expected them to be. This was brushy, heavily forested country, so I had my good old Win '94 carbine with corelocked 180 grains with me. The site was a Lyman peep with the big ring out, which was better for me for fast shots. I killed a helluva lot of deer with that gun and had a world of confidence in it.

I had to twist around in the stand to get a bead. I did it slowly because the doe and buck were actually almost at eye level with me. I had to shoot lefty, but that was no big deal. The shot was a piece of cake. Maybe forty yards. I went for my favorite on standing or walking deer that were nearby - in the middle of and the lower part of the neck. Usually puts them down like a stone.

The doe steps through an opening in the brush. The buck follows and as he steps through, "Blam!", I squeeze off.

Neck shots are usually devastating and almost invariably knock the animal flat as a pancake. But this buck ran off. I couldn't believe it, but he was a giant animal and I figured he would only go a tiny bit and pile up.

Long story short, no way. Like the others, no blood, no hair, no nothing. Finally I noticed a sapling about halfway back to my stand that I guess I didn't see that had been cut in half by that big slug and deflected it somehow.

And the nightmare began. And all of these years later there isn't a week that goes by that I don't remember and visualize and dream of that deer and wonder exactly how big he was, or how many points. I'd learned long before that to never look at the rack or try to count points on a buck that I intended to take and other than being blown away by what I did see, I'll never know how big he was.

About an hour later I took a nice 8 point. Shit! The way I felt, you'd have thought it was just a little spike.

But ya know, memories of animals like that are truly a big part of hunting and I remember that one a lot better than I do a lot of other big bucks that I shot.

I guess that's why they call it hunting and not just shooting or killing, eh?