By Eric Davis, Sun Contributor

The muzzleloader season in the Southern Zone for deer in New York is just over a week long and starts the day after regular firearms season ends. Due to the Monday start, there is only one weekend during the muzzleloader season.

This gives hunters who work Monday to Friday jobs only two days to try to harvest a deer with their muzzleloader.

To increase the odds of having an opportunity at a deer, the gentleman who taught me to deer hunt organizes some deer drives on the property we hunt. In 2012, I was done with my Bachelor’s degree so I was home on the weekend of the muzzleloader season and had a muzzleloader to use so I could participate.

We had a crew of five hunters total so we all rotated through who was sitting and who was walking during the drives. On the third drive, I was sitting in “The Old Man Stand” when a small doe came out from the brush as gave me a 40-yard broadside shot. I pulled the hammer back on my muzzleloader, settled the crosshairs just behind the shoulder and squeezed the trigger.

The hammer sprung forward and set off the primer but the powder in the barrel did not ignite right away. This delay between pulling the trigger and the powder igniting resulted in me flinching in anticipation of the recoil from the shot. As I flinched, the powder ignited and my bullet hit about six inches in front of the doe’s head. The deer and I were both lucky that I didn’t end up making a bad shot. After the shot, the deer took off and I was disappointed at what had happened. I had loaded the muzzleloader that morning outside, so there shouldn’t have been any condensation inside the barrel that dampened the powder. To this day, I’m still not sure what caused it.

After the walkers made it to the end of the drive, we gathered and decided to do one more drive on the other side of the road through a large goldenrod field with pockets of rosebushes below a patch of woods. I was given a position to sit and watch on the top corner of the goldenrod where there was a small grassy field. Based on my experiences during drives in the regular firearms season, this position never saw deer and I figured my hunt was over. I was still upset over what had happened with my shot on the doe on the previous drive but I knew I had to quit thinking about it.

The drive started and I was half paying attention because I wasn’t expecting to see any deer when some movement to my left caught my eye. I turned my head and it was a good-sized doe walking out of the woods across the tractor path and into the goldenrod field about 100 yards away. I shouldered my muzzleloader but I had the magnification set on 4x from the last drive where you only could take shots that were less than 60 yards. As I pulled the gun down and tried to crank the magnification up to 9x, the doe finished crossing the path and I lost sight of her in the goldenrod.

A few seconds later, another doe came bounding across the path and never even stopped to give me a shot. Then I noticed something white coming out of the woods. They were antlers. Then the body of a deer appeared in the tractor path. I quickly shouldered my muzzleloader and held it against a sapling to help steady it. I pulled the hammer back and thought to myself, “Don’t flinch!” I pulled the trigger and the deer disappeared in the smoke that came out of the end of my barrel. The gun didn’t delay in firing and the shot felt good to me.

I was guessing that the deer took off the way it was facing, which was headed directly towards the walkers. A few minutes later a shot rang out in the middle of the goldenrod. One of the walkers had found the buck and finished it off. After dragging it to the edge of the goldenrod, he told me that the deer should be mine as I would have easily found it based on the blood trail if he hadn’t stumbled on him as part of the drive. I ended up having the buck mounted after debating whether to mount it or just have a European mount done with the skull. I tried to score the antlers this summer by myself and came up with 133 7/8 inches.

I don’t know why those deer happened to be going from the woods into the goldenrod at 11 in the morning, but I am thankful that I was in the right place at the right time.