Laura's worst deer recovery ever...

Have I got a doozy of a story just for you! This is how my father and I bond while we are bow-hunting…(you may have seen him on ROATV's 13th show while we were bear hunting)

            As most of you know, I have just moved to the great north of Wisconsin. Before that adventure came into being, my dad and I would travel 300 miles, one-way, up to his property to go bow-hunting for whitetail every year. This was by FAR my favorite time of year.

            A few years ago we were fulfilling our Wisconsinite duty of trying to fill the freezer like every other year. Well on this particular evening of hunting, my dad shot an 8 pointer. AWESOME! He tracked and located his deer before I ever got down out of my stand. Like the intelligent man that he is, he took his walkie talkie and hung it on a branch above the downed deer. That way, when we met up to recover the deer I could just page the other walkie talkie with my own. Voila! North woods GPS!

            This works…in theory…and probably not on a day where everything that could go wrong-DID GO WRONG. What was supposed to be a simple recovery mission turned into a giant mess that I will remember for the rest of my life.

            My dad and I met up at the hunting “shack” like normal after the evening of hunting. It was now very dark and it had started to rain sometime during our respective outings. My dad informed me that we had a deer to recover. He told me about the walkie talkie paging system. Perfect. I’m thinking this will take no time at all and we’ll be in the bar registering and celebrating in an hour.

            THIS DIDN’T HAPPEN.

            I figured I would drive my truck out to the north food plot and we could just throw the deer in the bed to haul it out. Field dressing a deer on a tailgate is a prime way to go about handling that chore plus then we’re ready to go register because the deer is all ready loaded to be transported. It’s win-win. It wasn’t very far into the brush supposedly, so what’s a little dragging? No big deal. I turned into the south food plot with my dad to go recover this deer…

            …And promptly sunk a foot into the mud. Apparently, it had rained a lot more than I thought. Plus, it was STILL raining. And remember, it’s dark as pitch. Unfortunately, my 4WD had NOTHING on this mud hole. I was stuck in the worst way. The next 45 minutes were spent pushing, pulling, and manipulating our surroundings to try to get my stranded pickup truck out of the deep mud.

            Thank God I drive a stick-shift because in the end it was our atv pulling and the truck rocking between reverse and first gear that got my truck yanked out. Now both of us are soaked, coated in mud, and we have not even gotten close to recovering this dang deer.

            Plan B consisted of hooking an archaic rusted trailer to the back of the atv. The problem was that the ball of the hitch was rusted to the atv and couldn’t be removed to make use of the hole and pin system the trailer had. Great. (this is sarcasm by the way) So, like any true ingenious hunters, we tied the trailer to the atv with rope.

            We’re on our way! We get to the north food plot and I start paging the walkie talkie. I get nothing. I tried numerous times. Not one damn sound. UGH. Seeing as how mother nature was so kind as to dump enough water on us to rival the great flood, there is absolutely no hope of a blood trail.

            So my dad and I start doing circles in the dark.

            It probably took a good 20 minutes before I stumbled upon his buck. My dad’s walkie talkie had fallen face down onto the ground.

            We drag the buck to the north food plot and into the dilapidated trailer. The trailer was no longer capable of holding the slide-in back closure, however. So, of course, on the way to the shack the deer slid out onto the trail. We haul the deer back into the trailer. I then spent the rest of the ride sitting behind my dad twisted around backwards, like some screwed up gymnast, hanging onto the antlers to prevent the buck from sliding out again.

            We get back to the shack and my back is killing me. My dad is going to start field dressing this buck… Until he informs me that he accidentally forgot his hunting knife in his tree stand. Oh boy. We both agree we are not going back to get it. I had a brand new hunting knife that was given to me as a gift from someone who didn’t hunt. I hadn’t used it before. The blade was pretty wide. I offered it to my dad.

            He promptly slices his left index finger from the end knuckle to the middle knuckle down to the bone on the first swipe of the hide. OH MY GOD. I run to get towels to stop the bleeding. (It’s a good thing he has an EMT for a daughter) He needed stitches but seeing as how my dad is an ex-paratrooper of the 82^nd airborne, he refused to get stitches. No amount of yelling, coercing, and bribing could get him to change his mind. But really, I should have expected that.

            The next half hour was spent trying to stop the bleeding. Good thing I pack a pretty extensive first aid kit when I go up north. I had some butterfly sutures that closed my dad’s gaping wound.

            With my dad being too incapacitated to field dress his deer, I undertook the task myself. I was being extra careful seeing as how I was using the same knife my dad cut himself with. I was almost done. I just had to cut the windpipe.

            To this day I still have NO IDEA how this even happened. I was incredibly conscious about everywhere that blade went inside the body cavity. I ended up cutting myself too. IN THE SAME SPOT OF THE SAME FINGER AS MY DAD. Yep, down to the bone, too.

            My dad didn’t think I was serious when I told him I just cut myself. He did when he saw the extra blood pouring out of my finger that obviously wasn’t deer blood. Now I needed medical attention. And probably stitches. Which I didn’t bother getting seeing as how I am the daughter of an ex-paratrooper of the 82^nd airborne. He stopped the bleeding and carefully applied the butterfly sutures to my injury to close my matching wound.

            It was probably sometime after midnight that we got into town to register the buck and have a beer…or several. Mud caked and bloodied champions that we were. But at least we were a team and got the job done. Even if it took half the night. I think that beer was the best tasting beer I ever had.

           

 We now have matching scars from that day and every time we head out to our respective tree stands we shake our scarred fingers and wish each other luck.      

  
        P.S. I got rid of that damn knife.