One Toed Buck

One Toed Buck
            I had just moved to a new home out in the county and my new neighbor was an old retired lawyer who owned a forty that bordered my little acre of land. The forty had been part of his parents’ original homestead where he had been born many years before. He told me he was retired, a widower and he had purchased the old homestead as a familiar place to spend his summers. He was quite a unique old gent with one arm, the result of an accident in his youth on a road construction crew and also the reason a poor farm boy was able to go to college and become a lawyer.
            He actually carried a 28 gauge Remington and walked his land hunting partridge with one hand and his stub of an arm to rest the gun on! I sometimes walked along with him and soon was told I could hunt on his land anytime I wanted. I told him I would deer hunt there since he would be gone by then and I wouldn’t be in his way. He said it would please him to know someone appreciated his land as much as he did.
            That fall I did some scouting and found several spots that looked like deer posts for the deer hunting season. I spent most of the season trying to pinpoint the deer movements. I subsequently spent the winter scouting more of the forty and by the next spring I had a pretty good idea where to deer hunt the next fall. I had shot a doe with my doe permit at another deer camp and made it into venison summer sausage sticks and when my neighbor returned for the next summer I gave him a good share of the sausage for allowing me to hunt his land.
            November arrived and on the opening morning I was sitting in my deer post watching a trail running between two small ridges. A deer slowly emerged and I could see it was a nice buck but it was sticking to the brush and avoiding the trail. Anxiously I waited until I had a shot and fired at the deer anticipating a quick kill and short hunt. I was rewarded with a deer jumping high into the air and stumbling off into the brush and me frantically trying to get a chance at a second shot to no avail.
           When I recovered from this drastic turn of events I found the spot where I had shot at the deer. As I scanned the ground I saw a spot with dirt and some blood and a piece of a deer hoof! I was astounded to think I had missed such a shot by so much. I soon found some brush and broken branches that hadn’t been evident in my scope. I could only theorize that my bullet had been badly deflected and hit the deer in the front foot rather than the shoulder I had aimed at. After much searching I gave into the fact I had lost the deer.
            Over the next spring and summer I found tracks of a deer with a badly deformed front foot. I was almost certain it was the buck I had shot at the past season.  Over the next few seasons there were no tracks from that deer and I wrote him off as a loss. I still hunted by that same trail off and on but never saw any deer there again. I found new places to hunt and forgot about the incident for several years.
            Since I was anxious to broaden my hunting opportunities I took up bow hunting and set about learning to deer hunt in the early fall with lots more cover to contend with and learning to close in on my quarry as I never had with a rifle. I practiced until my shots were good enough to shoot anything within a thirty yard range and later bagged my first deer with a bow that season. I again hunted during the firearm season but didn’t see any worthy targets.
            That spring I broadened my hunting experience again when I bought a 58 caliber black powder rifle and decided to try my luck with that for the next deer season. I practiced with the muzzleloader all summer and decided I was ready to try my hand at hunting with it. At that time you could hunt in the regular firearm season or wait until that was over and hunt in the muzzleloader only season in December. I opted for the late hunt and decided to hunt the old trails I had hunted in the regular season years before.
            Opening morning was cold and a light snow covered the ground as I sat waiting patiently in my post. I sat for some time before I decided to leave to take a coffee break and warm up back at the house. I was half upright when I saw a deer sneaking through the brush heading toward me. Frozen in mid stance I waited until the deer cleared the brush and stepped onto the trail. A nice buck and it looked like a good deer to make my muzzleloader hunting debut so I slowly raised my rifle and shot.
            I reloaded and approached the downed animal cautiously. Imagine my surprise when I rolled the deer over and saw the front leg. The foot was shot almost precisely in half, a one toed deer! I can’t prove for certain that the deer was the same one I had wounded with my rifle years before but the one toed foot was good enough for me to believe it was.
Chris