| Whitetail Buck |
| Hunter: | Kernel |
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| Location Taken: | Page County, Iowa |
| Story: | |
| 99 Iowa Snowstorm Buck
Equipment: Ruger Super Blackhawk HUNTER, Tasco 3x Pro-Class scope, Burris 30mm rings, 300gr Hornady XTP .44 Mag handload will V-V N110 powder. The buck was taken on my family's farm in Southwest Iowa. It was late in the season and the weather had been awful (but typical). It was about 15 degrees and blustery. A major front was moving in and it had been spitting a strange granular type snow (it looked like lawn fertilizer) all afternoon. I was hunting from a ground blind tucked into a fenceline next to an old hedge tree. One side of the fence was an 80 acre field of CRP switchgrass. The other side of the fence was a harvested soybean field. Deer love soybean stubble. He drifted out of his cover at about 4:45pm (three does had already been feeding in the field for 45 minutes). Cautiously he moved into the bean field and started to feed. The wind stopped and the snow changed to huge fat flakes that drifted down like feathers from a broken pillow. I watched him for about half an hour thru my Nikon 7x50 binos. I wanted him to move closer, but it would be dark soon and I had to take the shot. It hit, but he bolted over the hill. I waited 15 minutes, then I followed the blood trail to the top of the next rise. By this time it was after dusk, thru my binos in the twilight I could see him 400 yds away in shallow ditch between two corn fields. He had run about 800 yds from where he'd been first shot. I'm glad I hadn't pursued to quickly, I probably would have pushed him into a larger timber about an 1/8 of a mile away, in the dark I'd never had found him. By the time I got him loaded into my Explorer there was 4 inches of snow on the ground. That night the front moved thru, leaving 16 inches of heavy snow that covered the entire farm. -- Kernel |
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