A goal of mine for this year was to harvest a fully mature buck in New Hampshire during the early season.
This has been something that I’ve been
trying to accomplish for a number of
years now, but once those mature bucks
lose the fuzz, they seem to turn into
ghosts until the does bring them back
out of hiding. The last few years, NH
has had a great mast crop, and I believe
that lead to a decrease in deer movement
simply because they did not have to look
or travel for food. That robust mast crop
and the fact that I blew out my knee last
summer pretty much crushed my hopes
of killing a 4.5+ year old in the early
season in 2010.
This year, I hoped, would be different.
The hunt for the “Skinny 8” began in the summer of 2010 when I scouted out, using aerial photos and long sweaty hikes in the summer heat, a new piece of public land that I was sure got little pressure and held mature deer. Unfortunately, when I blew out my knee, I wasn’t able to run cameras like I wanted to, or even hunt this spot until late October. Once I could walk again, I hobbled the ½ mile out to the primary scrape I had found that summer in my new spot and hung a trail camera over it. A week later, I checked it. BOOM! Three mature bucks on the scrape. The first picture was a daylight picture of a wide 8 pointer with little mass. I have been reluctant to assign names to deer over the past few years because every time I’ve done this I’ve had no luck seeing the deer, never mind killing them. So, I just referred to him as the 8 pointer.
On October 30th, I climbed into my best stand with the intention of killing one of the three mature bucks I captured on the camera the week before. My rear wasn’t in the stand 10 seconds when one of those bucks came cruising in, but it wasn’t the 8 point. I proceeded to miss him at 8 yards on video, but that’s a whole different story. Fast forward to Thanksgiving morning: I’m in that same stand and had just passed up a 2.5 year old when I received a text from team member Rick Sprankle with a picture of a great 8 pointer that he had just killed. As I looked up from my phone, I see a familiar wide racked 8 pointer coming down the ridge. Unfortunately (but fortunately in the long run), he never closed the distance more than 60 yards, and I never got a crack at him with my bow. I continued to get numerous trail camera videos and pictures of him throughout November into December.
The Skinny 8
by Brett Joy