Here is one fine trophy whitetail muzzleloader hunt, as told by hunter Dan Grant:
I have been an avid hunter since the age of 16. My parents let me take one day off from school and that day I shot my first buck, an eight point 202 lb beauty by 1978 standards.
Fast forward 32 yrs later…being self employed it doesn’t leave me with much time to hunt during deer season. I managed to take 1 day off during the regular rifle season and shot a nice little 5 point opening morning 10 minutes into the hunt. As muzzle season approached, the plan was to hunt the final Saturday back at our hunt camp. I arrived Friday night looking forward to the next day’s hunt and was the first to find the feathers in bed that night, as it had been a long and busy week at work.
The next morning, those who got up out of bed headed out to their respective stands and watches. I decided I would poke my way around the perimeter of our area and see what, if any, tracks could be found in the fresh snow. The wind was in my favour and I approached the back fence line. Fifty feet from the corner I heard the crashing through the bush inside the fence row. Busted! I thought, but I pulled out my grunt call anyway, blew 4 times, made my way to the turn on the trail, crouched down and waited. The deer had stopped, turned and began to make its way out of the bush onto the trail 25-yards in front of me. My first sighting of this buck was of his head and rack stretching out of the brush, and turning to look at me. In a cloud of smoke the deer disappeared, crashing again through the brush to my left as I quickly reloaded and ran back down the trail in case he tried to cross behind me.
Did I miss this deer? I wondered
The silence was deafening, my heart pounding, as I went back to where he had crossed. No tracks in the snow on the trail, no blood at all then I saw the snow off of some branches and a track where he had landed inside the bush. One drop of blood on the snow was all I could find, so decided to look a little further.
I didn’t have to go far, 100 feet from that spot lay my first deer ever taken with a muzzle loader, and what a deer it was!
There is a sign on the wall in our camp which reads “Tailspin Hunt Camp: where the legend grows”…I can vouch for that now! (Dan Grant – March , 2011)
Thanks so much to Dan for sharing his story.
Footnote: Dan Grant’s impressive muzzleloader buck was scored recently for the Boone & Crockett Club, to the tune of 169 6/8” B&C. As one can imagine with a buck measuring so close to the benchmark 170”, the numbers were calculated and recalculated several times.