The Gully Doe

Late yesterday afternoon I bagged my first wild deer of this season.

We set up on a hillside looking down towards the stream bed at the bottom of a steep wooded gully about 200 yards across. I had documentary filmmaker Helenah Swedberg along. Her process of trying to make the shot was every bit as challenging as mine.

I prefer to use natural concealment when I hunt. Pricey tree stands or box blinds are not my style. A large fallen tree provided an ideal natural blind to sit behind with a steady rest for my rifle. We dropped a couple of towels on the damp ground to sit on. A bit of new brush and some fallen dead branches obstructed my line of sight. I walked along the expected path of my bullet to clip branches and push aside dead wood.

The terrain would steer a deer towards us sooner or later. A pair of long ponds flanked us on either end of the gully and the stream connecting them. The steepness of most of my side of the gully made it unlikely that whitetails would cross at any point other than the shallowest crossing of the stream where footprints in the mud gave it all away. For this reason both my rifle and Helenah's camera were pointed right at the crossing.

Within an hour of dusk the woods came alive. Squirrels came down from their trees to feed and fight with each other. A great blue heron flew low and smooth from one pond to the other and I watched it from above, so close that I could have hit it with a rock.

The deer first appeared about 200 yards away at the edge of the woods. I wasn't clear on where the property line was over there, and besides that Helenah still had her camera set up pointing the other way. I looked at it through the scope and passed up a pretty simple shot hoping that something else would come along. We tried to keep track of where it was but it disappeared behind a thick tangle of brush.

The sun had dipped below the Blue Ridge Mountains. Official sunset was rapidly approaching. Here in the shade of the woods I started to worry about how much longer I would be able to see anything through my scope and whether Helenah's Canon 5D would pick anything up either.

And then there it was. Probably the same deer reappeared on the other side of the gully with less than five minutes of shooting light remaining. I contemplated waiting. It seemed to be headed in the general direction of the crossing that we were ambushing. If we did nothing and waited then it was very likely that it would walk right down into the open to the point where Helenah had pointed her tripod and camera at. But by then the light would be gone.

I whispered, 'deer, right there!' to Helenah. I looked back behind my shoulder and she seemed to recognize where I was looking at. The rifle came to my shoulder and I leveled off the crosshairs of the scope onto the deer.

The doe was about 130 yards away. She was standing almost broadside, quartering slightly towards me. Because she was within fifty yards of the property line I decided that I had better try for a spine shot in order to avoid any sort of legal problems with retrieving my deer. I didn't want her taking a single step before dying. The crosshairs centered right above and slightly behind the shoulder.

Then the gun spoke and the doe dropped like the proverbial ton of bricks and rolled a ways down the hill. Behind a fallen tree! I couldn't see her very well. I saw the white of her tail sticking out and inferred where the body was.

As always with anything that looks like a spine shot, I jacked another cartridge into the chamber and kept my eye on the scope and my finger hovering over the trigger ready to take another shot at a seconds notice if she started to get up. For at least a full minute, maybe more, I stayed ready for a follow-up shot.

I did this because a slightly flubbed spine shot looks exactly like the real thing. At first, anyway. If you look at an individual vertebrae on a deer or most other animals you will find a sort of dorsal projection of bone which is called the spinous process. If your bullet clips the spinous process without hitting the actual spinal cord then the deer will be shocked and knocked out instantly. The lights go out right away, exactly like a real spine shot. No struggling or kicking. But a minute or so later the deer will suddenly get to its feet and run away (unless something more vital has also been hit). A deer wounded in this way can be expected to recover completely but its still a hell of an awful thing to put an animal through for nothing.

Because of this risk, when you think you have a spine shot then you should proceed with caution and keep the gun ready to put another shot in the deer if it starts to get up. Do not be that guy who was high-fiving his buddy and whipping out the cell phone when the deer jumped up and ran off while the rifle was leaned up against a tree.

As it happened, the deer turned out to be dead four or five different ways. My spine shot had angled back after entering and done a full-on Grassy Knoll job on the doe. One single 180 grain bullet had knocked out the spine and then changed direction inside of the deer's body, traversing nearly the whole length of the body, ripping apart the very backs of the lungs, the liver and the digestive system before exiting right in front of a hindquarter, re-entering into the top of that hindquarter (perhaps the deer was twisting around from the force of the bullet?), smashing through the femur and then exiting again.

This sort of thing is why I hunt so often with a .30-'06. It keeps things interesting.

The only bad news on the human side of this transaction was that Helenah didn't quite get the shot on camera. But that's hunting for you. Wildlife photography of this type seems to really be almost identical to hunting. We're both trying to stay hidden and quiet and figure out where an animal is going to be in order to point a lens at it and push a button at just the right moment. It takes practice to get it right. In retrospect, I had enough time before dark that I should have waited at least a few more seconds until I had a clear signal from Helenah that she had the camera on the deer and was ready to go. Live and learn. We'll get it right on the next deer.


[Photograph copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers. This photo does not depict the deer that I shot during the hunt described. The doe in this photo is one that I photographed in Texas a few weeks earlier.]