Rudolph's First Day of School

This video montage is just some stuff from this Fall that I never got around to posting.  The first series of events is a group of deer I spotted around noon after leaving my treestand and truckin' for home.  There were at least 4 bucks in the group.  One dink, two average bucks, and one big-bodied king-of-the-hill with super tall brow tines.  The way they were acting I knew there had to be a hot doe around, but I never did see her.  I decided to try to go around them and slip down into the draw to try a stalk.  I managed to get into the dry creek bottom undetected, which I thought would be the biggest challenge.  It went downhill from there though, as I could no longer see where the deer were.  I ended up first bumping the dink out at about 15 yards.  After things calmed down I worked further up the creek bed and saw one of the average bucks coming towards me.  There is a short clip of him in the video, but I put the camera down when I knew he would be coming into range.  I thought maybe the big guy would be following him, and I wanted to be ready to shoot not film.  He came up to about 25 yards before realizing I was standing there.  He freaked out, blew at me, and took off.  I looked up out of the creek bed to see that all the deer followed him, including the one I was after. 

The next buck in the video was filmed from my Northeast treestand.  He was coming straight towards me along the same trail they usually follow.  Once he dipped down to cross the creek I took the camera off him and positioned it in the shooting lane I expected him to cross.  He hadn't read the script and decided to take a different route, passing about 35 yards North of me.

The end of the video is my favorite.  The footage is pretty blurry due to the fact that my camera is at full digital zoom at close to 1000 yards away.  It's the most intense buck fight I've witnessed, but the bucks are both dinks!