I felt my phone vibrating in my pocket and almost didn’t reach for it not wanting to deal with a call at 2:30 p.m. on a Sunday. Realizing I wasn’t doing anything else at the time, I decided to at least look to see who was calling and saw that it was Ron. He doesn’t have a particular pattern to his calls but Sunday afternoon wasn’t a typical time for him. “Hey Ron,” I said when I answered per usual. After a short pause he replied, “Are you sitting down?” “No, I’m just standing here but if I need to sit down I will,” I said with a half laugh. What Ron said to me next caused my heart to skip a beat and rendered me temporarily speechless. “Jack and Shawn were out shed hunting this morning and Jack found a dead big buck that might be yours.” Shawn is a state trooper that lives near the Fisher Farm and hunts the swamp some, and Jack, his teenage son, also hunts there. In fact, I was there the morning Jack got his first buck a couple years ago.
I didn’t know what to say but managed to mutter, “You have to be kidding me,” while thoughts of that fateful night on December 27 ran through my head. “Now I’m going to hang up and send you a picture,” Ron said sternly, “and you give it a good look and tell me if you think it’s him.” I replied, “I’ll know immediately if it is.” A few moments later the photo arrived and there was Jack holding up a giant 8-point rack that I immediately recognized as the deer I thought got away from me after a marginal hit. I recognized his height and width, and how his main beams tipped upward at their ends. I verified with Ron that it was indeed the buck I shot, and he said he’d make arrangements to pick it up from the guys later that day.
The next morning I contacted Officer Nate Rust of the Delaware Natural Resources Police to inquire about how to properly take possession of the rack. It turns out it was a pretty easy process. He instructed me to punch my tag and report the deer through the Delaware game check system, and that would take care of it. I did that right away and Ron promised to steward the dead head until I arrive in a little more than a week for the Delaware Forestry Association Banquet. Other than being a little stinky, the rack is still in great shape and shows no signs of having laid in the woods for a couple months. Another lucky break.
I’ll have more to say about the situation in a later post once I’ve had a chance to handle the head myself. So far I’ve had mixed emotions about the situation ranging from jubilation to sadness because I wasn’t able to recover the meat. Now that it’s a few days later, I think I’m satisfied that I put in a good effort to find the deer the night I shot it, and I accept that this type of thing happens from time to time no matter how prepared we are as hunters. I believed that a day like this could happen, but realistically I knew it would be against all odds. For now I’m just looking forward to seeing the deer in person and deciding what I’ll do with it next.