Bill Reaska’s 9-pointer

EDITOR’S NOTE: Here in the words of Putnam hunter Bill Reaska is the story of his hunt for a 9-point buck.

I used a vacation day to hunt the opener on Friday, Nov. 21, 2008 but was side tracked when I had to repair a broken water faucet early in the morning that froze and broke on the side of my house. So Friday was shot (no pun intended).

Saturday I arrived late in the timber that I had hunted since I was a teenager and met up with six hunters and saw a seventh hunter in a tree and no deer. By noon on Saturday I was disappointed that I had wasted half of the opener.

So I went to town for lunch and thought that perhaps the deer in the timber may have been over pressured due to so many hunters. I thought maybe the deer had instead gone around the small town as they had in the past. In the past they have moved into a small abandoned cow pasture on my family’s farm. So at 3 p.m. I crawled into a familiar locust tree that had produced many deer for me in the past. I had to remove some of the larger thorns which had grown-in since my last visit to the old locust; then I reset my portable wedge stand and let out two light doe bleats.

At 4:20 p.m. a doe came down the hill through some Osage orange trees and multiflora rose bushes with this brute in tow. When he raised his head licking a low branch at a scrape 25 yards away; I placed my Remington 870 hard sights on his engine compartment and squeezed the trigger. As soon as the smoke cleared I noticed the buck was in trouble and trying to following the doe back into the brush. Instinctively, I placed a second volley into the port side to take the pressure off both of us.

Some say you need to think outside the box; sometimes you need to think outside the tree stand.