I have three muzzle loading rifles, but I rarely hunt with them and have only shot 2 animals with them.
In the early '70s I broke my leg while skiing in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. It was a bad break that put me in three different casts for six months. For something to do while I was recovering, I bought a CVA kit and built a .45 caliber percussion Kentucky rifle.
Two weeks after I got out of my last cast, was the opening of what I remember as Colorado's first muzzleloading deer season, so a couple of friends and I went on our first muzzloading deer hunt. Fresh out of my leg casts, I was slower than my friends and we got separated.
It was an overcast day that turned to a drizzle, but not a hard enough rain to quit hunting. I remember taking cover under a large sage brush and holding the lock of my rifle under me to keep it dry. Not long after the drizzly quit I continued through the sage brush and jumped one of the largest antlered mule deer that I have ever seen.
He wasn't more than 30 yards from me when he jumped up, and I almost instinctly raised my rifle, cocked the hammer and fired. There was a click...pause...BOOM. The drizzle gave me a hangfire. I had been shooting Trap every week that summer so I had learned to lead my target and follow through.
I reloaded my rifle and began following a slight blood trail. Then I heard a shot and a few minutes later another shot. I continued in the direction of the sound of the shots and found my partners standing over the buck. His antlers were in full velvet, 30" wide with 4 tyical points on each beam plus eyeguards and 7 more "trash" points.
One of my partners was very excited and asked if I had seen that buck. I replied, "Yes, I shot him." We then examined the buck and found 3 bullet holes. One bullet had entered the left side of his chest, one bullet had just nicked his lower leg, and the bullet that finished him had gone in the right side of his neck. I had only seen his left side and my partners had only seen his right side.
When we dressed him we found that the bullet in his chest had nicked both lungs and lodged in his off shoulder. It was my patched ball that I had cast from wheelweights so it hadn't expanded. The hit in his leg was superficial and would have healed. My partner made that shot as the buck jumped a barb wire fence by them. The buck ran past my partners and stopped in a draw with his head down and caughing blood from the lung shot. My partner then shot the buck in the neck, hitting his spine and killed him.
We took that buck back to Steamboat where we processed him and we each had a box of cut and wrapped venison. My partner that had aslo shot the buck had a sporting goods store in town, and he wanted to hang the antlers in his store. We agreed and I took my box of meat with me back to college in Fort Collins.
The next summer I went back to my summer job in Steamboat and went into the sporting goods store to see my friend. I didn't see those deer antlers on the wall and asked my friend where they were. He said "back in his shed." So I went to his house and there the antlers were on top of his shed and the weather and birds had destroyed most of the velvet. I was suprised that a dog hadn't hauled them away. I looked inside his shed and there was his box of meat that bugs had gotten through the paper wrappings and had ate all of the meat.
So at the end of that summer, I took the antlers home with me where I cleaned them up, stained them, and put them on a plaque on my wall. Years later I had them mounted and enjoy looking at them every day, some 40 years after we shot him.
