We all make dumb hunting mistakes

There are few people who can tell me they've never made a mistake when going head-to-head with a mature whitetail buck. I've made some really colossal and stupid mistakes.

Making a little mistake that means nothing is not bad, but when a mistake costs you a shot at a good buck at spitting distance, that is something a person will live with forever.

Preaching to the choir is easy because you've made some mistakes, as have I, and we well know the feeling of anger and frustration at ourselves when we mess up.

Fess up! Remember some of your bow-hunting mistakes?

One year a nice buck came past me every night. My stand was in a cedar tree atop a 10-foot knoll. My stand was eight feet up the tree, and when I sat in the stand I was about 20 feet above the trail the buck followed night after night.

The buck was upwind of me, and never looked up at that cedar tree. One day I could hear the buck grunting as he followed his scrape line. He stopped, broadside to me, and as I made my draw, the arrow fell off the rest and rattled through the branches to the ground.

The buck looked up, and then went back to pawing his scrape. I nocked another arrow, began my draw and again the arrow fell off the rest. That buck never hung around long enough to see what made that second tinkling sound.

The question often arises about shooting other critters while deer hunting. I no longer do so, but once while sitting in the same tree stand as noted above, twigs and needles kept falling down on me. I looked up, saw nothing, and five minutes later down came more bark and needles.
I looked up again, and this time saw a big porcupine scratching around on the tree. Not thinking, I drew back, aimed and shot the porkie. It wobbled around, and suddenly I realized what could happen. The animal could fall on my head.

I stepped to the extreme edge of the stand, got two hand-holds and one toe-hold, and down he came onto my stand. A foot nudge sent him toppling over the edge where fell to the ground with an audible thud.

The porkie waddled off, walked down by the scrape below me and died. No deer came visiting me that night.

I could have been wearing a wounded porcupine on my head.

Another time I was in a different stand near an open road that was bordered by a small field, and I was watching a buck 100 yards away. A late arriving hunter came down the two-track trail, knew I was in that stand, and waved at me as he drove past. It's a normal reaction, and I waved back. The car disappeared, and so did the buck. The buck had seen my friendly wave and skedaddled for heavy cover.

Once I was bow hunting in late December, and was sitting in a hay bale blind near a corn field. I have asthma and hay fever so I downed a Benadryl pill to keep from sneezing, crawled inside and soon there were deer in the corn and eating away, unaware of my presence.

One deer was a nice buck, and I'm inside the hay bales, trying to get a shot at the deer. I needed just another inch or two for a shot, and darkness was coming. I tried to force the issue without making any noise, and damned if the two rectangular hay bales didn't move a bit. The small bales moved several inches, and there I went, falling out of the blind and almost on top of the buck.

It's questionable who was more surprised: me or the buck.

All the deer ran off, and at Show and Tell after hunting ended, everyone had a good laugh at my expense. I laughed too as I replayed my smooth move for the other hunters.

Falling out of a ground blinds really requires skill.

One of my dumbest moves came several years ago. We decided to take a different car than the one we normally drove to our hunting land. I'd taken my bow out of the car to shoot a few arrows, and put it back in the car.

The dumb thing was I had transferred everything, including Kay's bow, into the other car. Habit, being what it is, made me put my bow in the car we normally used. I dropped Kay off at her stand, and drove to where I would hunt.

I got my hunting clothes out, got dressed, grabbed my back pack, and started looking for my bow case. It was forehead slapping time as I remembered putting it in the other car.

I spent that afternoon and evening watching deer through my binoculars and spotting scope. It seemed as if all of them were laughing at me, but it was probably just a figment of my imagination.