I love hunting. I always have. One of my most memorable experiences was about three years ago when my dad shot the “270 Buck.”  It was early on opening morning of gun season.  My dad and I had our orange gear on, ready to get into the tree stand and face the cold morning.  My dad parked the truck on the side of a logging road.  From there, we got out, shutting the truck doors as quietly as possible, and loaded our guns.  Walking down the road a ways, we found the trail to our stand that we had prepared earlier that fall. Cautiously, we picked our way silently past tall pine trees and through the brush. It was very difficult to be stealthy because dead pine needles and a thin layer of snow concealed dead, crackly sticks.  We made our way to the other side of the pine grove to where our two-man tree stand was set up. We chose to strap it to a large white pine. It was overlooking a spot that had been clear cut by loggers a year or two prior.   
My dad and I climbed the twenty foot ladder. When we got to the top, we each strapped our safety harnesses to the tree.  Our tree was swaying in the wind making me feel a little unsteady.  The view we had was simply amazing! To the edge of the pine trees on the other side was about 250 yards and about 650 yards to the left. To our right was a small beaver pond and some marshy grass. In the clear cut area was a sea of thin, eight foot tall, gray poplar trees.  On the other side of those, there was a fairly open strip of ground. North, past the clear spot, were thick woods that get swampier and swampier as you get deeper.
We got into the stand while it was still fairly dark, with only traces of dawn showing. The other side of this clearing was still shielded in darkness and by the light snow that had started.  After twenty minutes of sitting it was finally light enough to shoot. The snowfall had increased slightly in intensity and turned into large fluffy flakes.
Our binoculars were out, and we were ready for the morning.  We had been scoping out the area for about a half hour after daylight when we saw something running from west to east across the other side of the clear cut. It was a doe. We got our guns up and ready to fire when we saw the buck in hot pursuit of the doe from about 30 yards behind.  My dad said, “Carl; shoot it!”  I was nervous and uncertain. It was the first chance I had ever had to shoot a deer with my gun, but there was a problem.  My breath had fogged up my scope just a little and I couldn’t spot the deer through it. I started panicking and my heart started to race as I was frantically looking through the scope. I ended up telling my dad, “I can’t find it in my scope. You shoot.” He did exactly that. His first shot either hit the deer in a non-vital area or missed, we still aren’t sure. The second shot knocked the buck down. We assumed it was dead but were still inclined to watch the spot where it fell. After the buck went down we turned our attention to the doe. We both shot, however, we believe our bullets hit some brush and didn’t meet the intended target. The doe had disappeared from view by this time, and we presumed we had a buck down for the count.
Another twenty minutes later, the action started up again for a bit. Somewhere along the far edge of the poplar trees, a doe came into view. We aren’t sure if this was a new doe or the same doe from just minutes earlier.  This time I was ready. I had my adrenaline pumping and gun ready. I pointed my gun at the deer and shot…. It didn’t go down. My dad and I both shot a couple more times but couldn’t seem to hit it. Some of our shots were so close together, my cousin Shane who was a quarter of a mile away said, “It sounded like a machine gun coming from your stand for a little bit...”  Unfortunately the doe seemed to have escaped. It was just after that second doe left that my dad returned to looking around through his binoculars and I was still controlling my adrenaline and excitement from the whole ordeal when it got interesting yet again. I saw the buck that had been shot get up, run about 30 yards deeper into the woods, and fall down behind a tree. My dad was looking somewhere else and didn’t see, so I got his attention explained what I saw.  After about ten minutes of pointing, conversing, leaning side to side with binoculars, my dad finally caught a glimpse of the deer’s rear end.  We had no idea if the love-struck beast was still alive, which drove my dad to stand up on the seat of our tree stand for a better view past the tree. Sitting down, my dad explained that he could see the deer laying on the ground with its head up looking around.
We knew we needed to make a finishing shot. Dad stood back up with his gun. With his right foot on the seat and left foot on the flimsy shooting rail, he peered through his scope in search of the deer. Remember, the snow is still falling, the weather is still cold, and the wind is still swaying our tree.  He sat back down to explain the shot he was about to take, partly for my sake and partly to help talk himself through the situation. My dad went on to explain that he would have to shoot through a gap between a couple pine branches that were no more than six inches apart. The deer was laying down behind a log so he would have to go for a neck shot. Breathing deeply, he said to himself, “Okay, I can do this.”  He climbed back up to his seat, aimed down his gun sights for a few seconds, then he lowered it. My dad whispered sharply, “Carl! Stop shaking. You’re vibrating the whole stand.”
Dad was right. I was shivering and cold.  I was shaking the shooting rail where his left foot was perched for stability.  Doing my best to contain my shivering, I sat there and looked up as he took aim. BANG! His thirty aught six went off. After a second, my dad looked down at me and said, “I hit him. I think I broke its neck because the head is flopping around all over the place.”  It was this seemingly unrealistic shot, which we measured to be 270 yards, that gave this buck its name.  With the knowledge that the deer was still alive, we decided it was best to take another shot at it.  Standing up on the seat for the last time, my dad said he couldn’t see the deer any more.  With that, we decided to wait a couple of hours to let it bleed out. By this time it was about 8:30 AM.  
Around ten o’clock was when we finally unstrapped our safety harnesses and crawled down from the tree stand. From there we picked our way through the thick sea of poplar trees to investigate.  We were very careful to keep our eyes peeled in case the deer decided to pop up from somewhere and make a run for it.
The first thing we investigated was the doe we shot at earlier. After we plodded our way to the spot we thought the doe ran, we looked for tracks. A short search yielded some tracks and shortly after that I spotted some blood from the doe. The trail was very light and we didn’t have much to go on. For an entire hour or more, we tried to follow its tracks and circle around in search of blood or hopefully a dead deer. Our efforts yielded nothing. My dad concluded that the doe didn’t sustain a very serious injury. We figure it was hit with a small bullet fragment that broke apart when hitting brush. The fragment only had enough penetration to draw a small amount of blood.
With our search for the doe abandoned, my dad and I turned our attention to the buck.  My dad walked over to the spot where he thought he first shot the deer while I found its tracks and followed them. My dad ended up finding the deer just before me because it was lying down about fifty yards away.  To my amazement, it hadn’t bled out and died.  The buck was still kicking its legs a little and twitching its head.  He had to shoot it two more times point blank in the heart before the deer finally died.  We radioed back to camp for some assistance dragging it out of the woods. My dad gutted the deer out and we started to drag it by the horns towards the logging road.
After about fifteen minutes of struggling to pull the buck over and around large stumps and fallen trees, my cousin Chad and Uncle Aaron arrived to assist us.  After an hour of struggling to haul the deer through endless thick brush and trees, we came out to the road. Finally, I got to go back and tell this story to my relatives.  The buck wasn’t any trophy to speak of, but I couldn’t help but feel a sense of pride after it was all over.