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In 1991 I had been deer hunting for six
years, almost exclusively on the game lands of the
Uwharrie National Forest of North Carolina. I had gone
through many hunting partners before my friend Ted
Leonhardt and I hooked up in 1990 to become "permanent"
hunting buddies. Hunting in Uwharrie was hard. Although I
had gotten a couple of shots off with my bow, I rarely
even saw deer at all. I know that I was getting pretty
discouraged with hunting during that time period. Then,
sometime around October of 1991, my father called me and
told me that a friend of his, Arnold Kirk, had offered to
let me come hunting on some land that he had recently
purchased. I called Arnold, and we arranged for me to
meet him one Friday after work, and we would spend the
night down in a camper on his land with two other guy: his
brother Gerald and another fellow named Frank Mack.
Arnold's dog, Misty, was also along. Arnold asked that I
not shoot any small bucks, but that I was welcome to take
a doe if I saw one. Wouldn't you
know it, but on the first morning out all I saw was one
spike buck. I don't remember seeing anything that evening.
I do remember being pretty discouraged. My first
time on private land, and I still hadn't gotten a deer. To
my great excitement, Arnold invited me back to hunt with
them again the next week. This time I was able to drive
down to the land on my own, having learned how to get
there the previous week.
We spent another great night in the
trailer, and then the next morning I went hunting on a
ridge where Arnold had seen a ten pointer the previous
year (thus the name "10 point ridge"). Following a
long trail of bright eye reflective tacks, I found my way
to the stand, an old climber stuck in a white oak tree. I
climbed high up into the tree and began my watch. By
10:00am, I still had not seen any deer, and my frustration
with hunting had reached it's highest level ever. I
think I even had a tear or two in my eye and was about to
climb down when I looked up and saw three does walking
through the woods 80 yards away.
I raised my rifle, adjusted the scope to
9 power, centered the crosshairs exactly where all of the
magazines had told me to, and fired. When I
recovered from the recoil, there were no deer left to be
seen. I waited about 15 minutes, then climbed down
the tree. After reaching the ground, I ran over to
the spot where the deer had been and immediately placed a
piece of marking tape where I thought the deer that I shot
at was standing. I looked all over the ground for
over an hour, but couldn't find any sign of blood or of
the deer itself.
I made my way out of the woods and back
down to the camp. Everyone was waiting for me, thinking
that I had gotten me a deer. I told them that I
missed, and they asked me many times if I was sure.
"Pretty sure," I said. Arnold said that he would
walk back there with me and look, just to be on the safe
side. We took Misty with us, his young cocker
spaniel puppy. She almost immediately found a
single drop of blood. "You hit that deer," said
Arnold as he called me over to where Misty was nosing
around in the leaves. We turned her loose while we
searched the ground to try to figure out where the deer
had gone. Only a minute or two later, we heard Misty
bark once, and Arnold ran over to her and saw that she had
found the deer. It was a small doe, but I couldn't
have been prouder if it had been a 10 point buck.
We had a long long way to drag the deer,
and no roads had been cut on the land at that point, so
with Arnold's direction, I field dressed my first deer.
We hauled it back to the camp, where I showed it off to
Gerald and Frank. When I got back to work on
the following Monday morning, I didn't say a word to Ted.
I simply whipped out the picture below and showed it to
him. Ted made a blown-up copy of it on one of Winn
Dixie's copiers, and he still has that black and white
reproduction to this day.
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