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Seeing a buck on a trail camera is one way to get a deer hunter to sit in a stand even when the temps are in the single digits and the wind is howling.
For me that was during the opening weekend of the 2024 muzzleloader season. The ladder stand was 20 feet in the air and swaying in the wind that day. I had added extra layers but the wind was going to win, no doubt.
Three does showed up to keep me from climbing down. Nothing like seeing deer to warm up a deer hunter.
I watched the doe and two fawns feed below me. I had the safety off and the gun was ready to fire if one of them grew antlers.
They fed, I waited and time passed in the woods. I had set out the scent gland of a buck taken during the rifle season. One of the fawns walked right up to it and jumped back after getting a good sniff.
As the three deer ambled off I thought about getting down and heading back to the truck. That’s when I heard hoof steps behind me and turned too fast to look. What I thought was a spike buck loped off and was gone. But there was one more deer walking right under the stand.
This was the eight-pointer that was on the trail camera. I knew this right away because that was all I could see at first, antlers. Not the biggest buck in the forest but definitely a shooter.
The buck kept walking and then turned broadside, not far from the stump with the scent on it. I took aim and pulled the trigger.
The muzzleloader I use has three parts to the “bullet.” There’s a primer, the gunpowder pellets and the lead sabot. The primers are known as 209s and are the same ones you find in shotgun shells.
Before loading the gun that morning, I had put a primer in and pulled the trigger to clean out the small passageway that led to the powder.
But when I pulled the trigger on the buck, the primer didn’t do its job. The gun didn’t fire. Of course the buck heard this and jumped but I made a grunting noise and it stopped.
I reached in a pocket to grab another primer. But that pocket was empty. The buck was getting antsy. Another pocket, there, a primer. I cracked open the gun, pulled the defective primer out and slid in a new one. But when I closed the action on the gun, the buck had enough and bolted.
Now what? Throw the gun off the stand? That sounded dramatic. Climb down and start heading for the truck? But five deer had already come through.
I had to know that the same thing wouldn’t happen again, though. So I took aim at a tree and pulled the trigger again. BOOM!
Once the smoke cleared I reloaded and smiled. Maybe it just wasn’t my day. Or that wasn’t my buck to harvest.
But everything up until that moment was a hunter’s dream. I wasn’t going to let a primer failing turn it into a nightmare. So I leaned back and waited. The hunt continues.
