I thought I'd post a sort of different hunt report. This fall, my wife Kyla took the first deer, a mule deer doe, off our own property out near Stettler. Why would a doe be worth a report? Well, Ky had given birth to our second daughter (Senna) 2 1/2 weeks earlier.



If it looks like Ky and Senna are lying on a dining room floor, it's because they are. Events overtook the birth plan a bit.

A couple weeks after Senna was born, we headed up to Stettler with Ky's mother. With the mother-in-law to babysit, Ky and I could do some hunting together when the little one was asleep. Fortunately, we could start hunting as soon as we stepped out the door and we could expect to find deer without having to go more than a km from the house. Ky had a mule deer doe tag and I had one for a mule deer buck. We both carried whitetail tags out of policy, not because we expected to see one.

The hunt on the first afternoon was cut short by a phone call saying Senna had woken up and was hungry. This came just after we'd made contact with the herd of mule deer does that usually hangs out on the north end of our property. While Ky headed back, I snooped around to see what was there. Now shooting a doe out there is not much of a trick most times, and Ky had decided she wanted to look for a big dry doe. This would both put more meat in the freezer and provide her a more interesting hunt. I found a candidate for her on the fringes of the herd and got out of there without spooking the whole lot of them.

Day two gave us a couple of hours in the afternoon to hunt. We did a "bounding overwatch" hunt to the north again. One person would take up a shooting position and the other would stalk the next bit of cover. It almost worked, but I moved before Ky was in place (In my own defense, she was out of sight when I moved ahead). Just as Ky got to the spot she'd had in mind, the old doe walked out of the clearing in front of her and into some trees without offering a clear shot. The timing had been off by just a few seconds, but the doe wasn't spooked and Ky figured she knew where it was headed.

The afternoon of day three saw Senna and I both asleep, so Ky headed out on her own. She took a big loop to get the wind right and still hunted some cover at the south end of the property. The doe stood from her bed at 30m and ran about 20m after the shot.



The shot was pretty well placed and the deer even ran into a clearing I could easily get a truck to.



Our oldest daughter Kallia summed it up best, "Good job Mummy!".



Dean

Congradulations on a sucessful hunt, nice deer and looks like some good heathy meat for them kids to get raised up on.