Finally !

[sussex 5,776]

With mornings now  starting in the middle of the night I was up at 4am and out twenty mins later for a meet up with my stalking pal to see if we could add a few more to the cull , a quick coffee and with what seemed a cunning plan we set about the morning ..We had met in the middle road of the estate and I was going to do the top part and he was doing the furthest wood and fields to the bottom which ment he drove down a few hundred yds more ,as I was unloading my kit the phone went , “ there are twenty odd in the back field “.....quick change of direction and I was back up the track to work myself through the old farm buildings and come out above them . Glassing them from the window of an empty farm building and with a good rest any one of them was a fairly straight forward shot , 19 bucks , from full blown master bucks down to last years buck fawns they were grazing in a diagonal line coming towards me , with my mind made up to take what looked a big pricked with nothing but a couple of buttons I put the ir on target , but before I could squeeze the trigger a shot rung out from down in the lower wood , the wind had carried the sound up to my field , my whole group split and run in panic in every direction ..about a dozen had jumped the fence into the next field and run straight across to stand at the boundary looking back , some had actually run down hill towards the sound and two youngsters did a lap of my field before hopping over the fence and trotted into the middle of field and stopped about 250m away .The bunch by the fence stood and watched for about twenty minutes before settling down and slowly one by one joined the two youngsters , a change of position see me a hundred yards further across the top of the field before I took up position laying prone on a  dung heap ! thankfully it was several years old and dry , the deer were now 140 m straight in front of me , I needed them to be at least twenty metres nearer to me to give me back stop ..Me and the dog laid there for just over an hour and a half before eventually, after several false starts some of them started towards me , the big bucks seemed content to stand were they were , it was the younger ones that came closer ..at 120 m my original buck was clear of the group with good backstop , a little whistle see him stop , look up and then collapse as the 6.5 hit home ..

checked , loaded and ready for gralloching I met up with my pal , he had finally got to drop a doe that we had been after all season , she looked like she had been in an rta , her back leg was hanging of her other leg was injured and her hip looked like it to was damaged , how it managed to get about was beyond us . Being injured she was ultra cautious, and although we had seen her two or three times earlier in the season we hadn’t been in a position to put her down . Our last sighting was in January and we had assumed she had died of her injuries, we were wrong , she had survived against the odds but was a crippled wreck , the bottom half of the leg had gone , the other leg was twisted out and she was all but dragging her arse along the ground . A 230m neck shot was the only one on offer and she was finally despatched by my pal ..a good morning 

My buck was a two year old and weighed in 87lb in the larder . The doe was gralloched and dropped off at a mates place for dog food .. 

[forest of dean redneck 11,183]

Patience is rewarded

great write up and well done on the cull .

[j j m 6,480]

very nice bud

[The one 8,396]

Makes you wonder how she survived just shows how resiant deer are 

[sussex 5,776]

7 minutes ago, The one said:

Makes you wonder how she survived just shows how resiant deer are 

When you see the size of the scar it’s amazing it never got infected while it was healing ..the leg was lost right through the joint and she had worn a hard pad on it where she was walking on it ..She must have been in agony for weeks ..