The 4 year old comes into our bedroom around 3:30 this morning and takes up 2/3 of my side of the king bed which my wife already takes up 2/3 of. So I’m left with 1/3 of 1/3 of a king size bed. I can’t fall back asleep. so I was thinking about where I would be if I was a buck, that's been pressured and hunted for 2 months and decided I'd be in a swamp where no one can get to without crossing a deep creek and if they try I could escape before they saw me. So, I got there this morning with a plan to do a loop about 3 miles. I hunted through some bottom land swampy willows stuff and didn't see much sign so I started to climb the hill towards a bench I thought they might be laying on. I started following a trail deer had been on and I came around the uphill side of a big rock and saw a deer butt about 80 yards in front of me. I put the binoculars on it and saw there was two more and they were all bucks. I had made my mind up sometime in the night as I was studying the topo map that if I had a chance I was going to shoot a deer, no matter the size today. Well of course now I'm second guessing myself but I could tell 2 of them were at least as wide as their ears. I come up on them freehand but I can't hold study so I tell myself I need to move ahead 5 yards to a tree I can use as a rest. So I creep forward not taking my eyes off of them and they turned quartering away but didn't bolt. I put my crosshairs on the buck furthest to the left and also the furthest downhill. I shoot and the woods erupts with deer everywhere. As the smoke clears I saw the buck that was in the middle bounding away, the upper buck was actually going up hill and back towards me and I thought I had seen the buck I shot at roll head over heels downhill. There was a commotion like a deer falling downhill but I couldn't see anything. I thought there would be a dead deer at the bottom of the hill. I reloaded and the upper buck is just staring at me about 40 yards away not knowing what had happened. There is a doe at the bottom of the hill that I hadn't seen until then. I sidehilled up to where I thought the bucks were at and could see where the deer slid downhill so I glass down the hill hoping to see a dead buck, but I cannot. I look all around for blood but I couldn't find any so I followed the skid downhill and see where two deer had gone down the hill. At the bottom one of them turned down an old road and one went across the swamp. So I followed the tracks on the road, not finding blood after a couple hundred yards I went back to where I shot and decided the deer were further up hill than I had when I looked. So I mentally marked the tree I thought they were at and went to it. I could see 3 sets of tracks leaving and one was the slide marks I had seen before. I followed all the sets of tracks for a distance until I couldn't find them anymore or I was satisfied there wasn't any blood. My rest felt good, my shot felt good. The only thing I can think was he was quartering away enough that he was able to turn and I shot in front of him. I straight line distanced him from where he was when I shot to where I shot and OnX said 67.5 yards.
