Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Pond Boss Hunting and Trapping Fall/Winter 2010/2011

Well, Esshups's Savage muzzleloader struck again this morning in Eastern WV! As some of you know, I came over to spend a couple of nights with Catmandoo and his wife and do some hunting, fishing, tractor looking, eating, and lying.

We headed out this morning a little after sun up and went out to see what we could see. Which ended up being pretty much nothing. After Ken did a walk around to see if he could scare anything up from the usual places, with no love coming from the deer, we ended up meeting up and decided to walk the perimeter of his property just to allow me to see the layout of his land.

We had made it about halfway around and were just trudging along through the woods, chatting, when he spotted about 7 deer that were as surprised to see us as we were them! They were about 30 yards away and 5 of them took off without a chance for a shot. Two, though, as it turned out, were young and stupid, and decided to stand there. Big mistake. Neither one was very big, but at least one of them was destined for the freezer. One was just at a bad angle, but the other one was a little better, so I leveled the Savage and let it fly. Suffice it to say, a .50 cal round entering just ahead of the left hindquarter and coming to a rest just inside the pelt at the right front shoulder did the trick. Unfortunately, there will be no tenderloin from this guy!

The deer dropped in place, but was still alive, so Ken got credit for 1/2 of a sack by putting a round through its head so it didn't suffer too much. It is now hanging, skinned, to drain a bit and dry off before we butcher later tonight.

Here I am trying to use the Condello technique with the deer, but I think all I succeeded in doing was displaying the results of the coup de gras administered by Ken!



Beginning the skinning process.



Post-skinning with some obvious .50 cal damage. Oh, well. The tenderloin may be gone but the backstraps are still intact. One hindquarter is a bit damaged as well, but there's plenty of good meat available.



And here's Ken holding the round that we recovered. As I was pulling the skin down at the right shoulder, I heard something fall and hit my knife and looked down and here was the round. I came through the muscle, but stopped just inside the pelt. Kind of a cool find.



We're now about to sit down to a lunch of Brunswick Stew, a meal that is evidently enough of an art form that Ken was required to do a 5 year internship before he was allowed to make it on his own! And the best thing? There's nothing funky in this stuff and none of it was made from roadkill!

So, we will load up again later and see if there are any other opportunities to add to the tally and will try again tomorrow morning, too, before I head back across the mountains for home.