Hunter: Ty Phillips
Points: 9 (5L, 4R)
County: Dooly
Season: 2017-2018
Hunt Story
We hunted behind my uncle's cabin in a box stand. At about 5:20 pm, I told my dad I saw a doe. She was running down a shooting lane that my dad had mowed in the CRP behind the food plot. My dad looked at her and said that since her tail was sticking straight in the air, that she was being chased, and he told me to get my gun ready. As I was getting ready, a buck trotted down the shooting lane after her. He quickly moved on from the first lane into the second, and he began working a scrape. The doe kept going, and so the buck kept following her. I had an opportunity to shoot the buck if I was ready, but I wasn't, and he followed the doe into the third shooting lane. Knowing that this buck was one I needed to shoot as my first buck, my dad couldn't let the buck walk away, so he made a doe bleat noise at the buck as he was crossing the third shooting lane. The buck stopped and looked at us. My dad helped me get my gun steady, and I took the shot. The doe took off and the buck followed. They ran down a mowed road. The buck veered off and ran into a sapling tree as he disappeared out of sight. I started crying because I thought I had missed the buck. About 10 minutes later, my dad's hunting buddy, Jordan, pulled up to the stand. He convinced us that we needed to go look for the buck, and so we did. We first went to where the buck had been standing when I shot at him. There was no blood, but there was a large kick mark. We continued down the road and still found no blood. When we got to the place where my dad had seen the buck hit the sapling, we still found no blood. We looked around in the woods and still didn't find the buck. Suddenly, a 1 1/2-year-old deer came practically walking up to us. He stopped about five yards from us outside of the woods. We walked out of the woods, shooing him away. He ran through the tall grass in front of us. Suddenly, my dad smelled something. "I smell a buck, and I don't think it's that 1 1/2-year-old." He said. We took a few steps into the tall grass, and what I saw next made my heart skip a beat. There my buck was, laying right there! We celebrated, and I then cried tears of joy at the sight of my first buck down.
