Phillip went to Camp Butner Christmas afternoon to hunt. He shot a deer on Saturday (Dec 27). I left the daycare on Tuesday and went to Raleigh to have dinner with some friends and then drove to deer camp around 8:30 pm. I was all prepared to camp out, but he got a hotel room, knowing I am not a camper. :)
Wednesday morning we got into the woods around 8:30am.....I sat in a ladder stand (I can't use a climber due to my knee) and he was in a climber about 8 feet away in another tree. It was incredibly windy and there I sat 15' in the air, swaying back and forth. We didn't see any deer, so we got down and headed back to camp. Because it was so windy, the tarp had blown loose on one side, so Phillip had to fix that, then we drove into the next town to have lunch.
We drove back to camp to get ready to go hunting for the afternoon/evening on base. We were going to sit in a blind on the edge of a field. On the way to the field Phillip was complaining that he didn't think we would see any deer. Not a minute after that, three deer walked across the road we were walking on...lol....Once we got to the spot Phillip sat up the blind while I watched for deer. The gun he expected me to use was HUGE. It was a muzzleloader and very heavy. Once we got in the blind he showed me how to hold it. We sat for 45 minutes before we saw a small deer (in picture above). I asked Phillip if I should shoot it. He told me if I wanted to, so I aimed at it, but I was nervous and was shaking, so couldn't get a good shot, so I didn't shoot. The deer looked up suddenly, and we saw a huge buck, too far away to shoot. The wind was blowing toward him, so we are sure he smelled us, and ran/limped off. We think it had been shot at or in a fight and was injured. A short while after anothe small deer came out and I decided I would shoot this time. I aimed and shot. not 5 minutes later ANOTHER deer came out. Phillip shot at that one. We waited about ten minutes before going to see if we had hit them. We didn't find any blood or signs we had hit them. Phillip then told me that he hadn't sighted the gun, so there was a good reason why I had missed. I still felt bad I had missed. THe game warden knew we were out in the field so he gave us a ride back to the truck. We dropped off stuff and headed back to the hotel.
We got up at 5:30am and was in the woods at 6:30am. It was SOOOOOO cold! I wore three pairs of pants, a wool shirt, wool sweater, Columbia fleece jacket, Camo fleece jacket, down jacket and camo coveralls, 2 pairs of socks, ear muffs, hat, face mask and tobogan, gloves. I WAS STILL COLD!!!!!! We sat up in the tree stands again. We heard deer but never saw them. We got down at 9:30 am and had to take the ladder stand apart and carry it out...we got back to camp around 10:15am and started taking camp down. We deceided to go ahead and go home since it was too cold and we had seen deer and shot at two.
All in all it was a good trip and I have a whole new appreciation for hunting and I think I enjoy it. I don't think I would do it as often as Phillip does it, but I will definately go more often that I have. I have pictures off of Phillip's camera of me looking like a sumo wrestler in all my clothes I will post later when I download them.
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