tami buck

Thanks to Tami O’Day for today’s guest blog. Great job Tami!

My husband and I typically only get a few days to hunt together because of his hunting and filming commitments, but we had aligned our time away from work this fall to give us 6 days.

The morning of October 31, he left for work at 3 am and set the alarm for 5:20 so I would be up when he came back at 5:30 am. He went to work, got 2 hours in, called me at 5:25 to make sure I was up “because it feels like a great day to poke a hole in a buck.”

We pulled into the farm at 6:10 and did our pre-hunt camera interviews with light rain hitting the windshield. At 6:20 we headed in and reached the tree about 20 minutes later. The overcast sky left the food plot quite dark as we watched things come to life. At 7:45 Clint asked me if I heard a grunt coming from where we had entered our food plot with a drag rag earlier. Moments later he caught a glimpse of a deer following our trail through small saplings along the edge of a CRP field that shielded the roadway to our plot.

A few minutes later Clint said, “It’s a buck and a big one.” I reached for my Mathews bow and watched, eager to get a good look at the buck. A doe made her way to a spot 25 yards from us, but I still could not see the buck. From his camera stand a bit higher than mine, Clint could see the buck hitting a mock scrape he had created a week earlier.

Finally as the buck moved toward the doe, I was able to see his body and antlers. The size of his body was enough to tell me he was an old buck and definitely one we wanted to take. With the doe distracting him, I was able to draw but did not have the shot; I needed for several more seconds. Finally feeling confident I could make the shot, I touched my release. I heard Clint whisper, “You hit your sleeve hard.” The buck staggered, spun and dropped. We had about 45 seconds of commotion out in front of us with what looked like a spine shot.

Clint kept telling me to get another arrow in the buck. While the shot was less than desirable, I was able to quickly fire another arrow and finish the job. I am not proud of the first shot, but it is real life hunting and I am also not ashamed to admit that perfect hunts are never guaranteed.

By 8:10, with the rain picking up, we descended from our stands and put our hands on a very nice, mature Iowa whitetail. He is a main-frame 10 point with 5 scoreable points below his brow tine on the right side. A rough green score puts him at 170-2/8 inches, with 12 inches of irregular points and nice mass on the first two circumferences of each side.

–Tami O’Day