The Ones That Got Away

Over the last fifty-five years, I have killed 128 deer, and most of them are logged into a “Deer Diary” my mom gave me for Christmas in 1993. The funny thing is that when looking at some of the entries, I don’t recall the successful hunts at all, but I vividly remember the deer I missed or failed to recover early in my hunting career.

When I started chasing deer in the 1960s, my favorite hunting spot was a palmetto swamp near Dugdemona River in Winn Parish. One cold morning, my oldest brother Danny, Lester Walker, and I entered the swamp before daylight. I was carrying Pop’s 16-gauge Browning automatic loaded with buckshot and decided to sit on a log at the edge of an open meadow.

After a few hours, I heard deer hounds coming my way and a beautiful buck, with antlers gleaming in the sunshine, crashed through the palmetto and loped across the meadow about forty yards away. I cut loose with three rounds of buckshot, but the deer splashed into the shallow backwater and disappeared. The dogs soon arrived and followed it into the swamp.

I just knew I had hit him and yelled for Danny and Lester as I waited for the dogs to hush once they found the dead deer. But they never hushed and eventually went out of hearing.

The three of us looked for blood, hair, or other tell-tale signs that I had hit the deer but found nothing except where one buckshot had hit a limb. Trying to make me feel better, Lester said, “Well, at least you were aiming at the right height.” To this day, I can still see that gorgeous buck bouncing across the meadow.

The only thing worse than missing a deer is not recovering a wounded one. That always weighs heavily on me and I go to great lengths to try to find them.

One day, I was walking through a clear cut and heard my neighbor Wendell Chandler’s dogs heading my way. Soon, about a six-point came over a hill into view. I had a 30-30 Winchester 94 and took a couple of off-hand shots when the buck passed by about 125 yards away.

I was looking for blood when Wendell came up. We found a steady, though not heavy, stream of blood that quickly petered out to scattered drops. The tracks showed that the deer was running fine, and Wendell guessed that I had probably just nicked it.

I wouldn’t give up, however, and drove around to a road the deer was headed for. Driving slowly along, I finally found where it had crossed, and it was still dripping blood.

Collecting my brother Danny, we trailed the deer for a few hundred yards to Dugdemona’s Big Slough. My young mind was convinced that the deer had probably laid up and died once it felt safe on the other side, so I stripped down to my underwear and entered the slough.

The water was so cold it felt like fire but I pushed through to the other bank. Fortunately, it was only about mid-drift deep so I never had to swim. On the other side, I walked around the woods barefooted in my underwear but couldn’t find any blood or sign of the deer. Reluctantly, I finally gave up and crossed back through the bitterly cold water.

The one lost deer that bothered me the most took place when I was about twenty years old. I was hunting with J. M. Green, another neighbor, who always had some fine deer hounds.

I was shooting a Mossberg 12-gauge pump but only had two shells left after missing a couple of deer earlier. Suddenly, a nice buck tore across the road, running low like a race horse in the home stretch. I fired my two shots, saw hair fly off the deer, and the buck stumbled but ran out of sight through a clear cut.

J. M. came up and we followed a continuous blood trail for a couple of hundred yards through the clear cut until we had to stop at the swamp’s backwater.

Determined to find the deer, I went home for my hip boots, returned and waded out into the water until it got too deep.

I was devastated. It was the biggest buck I had ever shot at and the thought of it getting away to die in the swamp greatly depressed me. Some weeks later, J. M. told me that another hunter had found the big 7-point dead on a dry hammock not far from where I had to give up the search.

Fortunately, I became a better shot as I grew older, traded in my shotgun for a scoped rifle and have not lost a deer in several decades.

Dr. Terry L. Jones is a professor emeritus of history at the University of Louisiana at Monroe. For an autographed copy of “Louisiana Pastimes,” a collection of the author’s stories, send $25 to Terry L. Jones, P.O Box 1581, West Monroe, LA 71294.