Experienced hunter and Evening Sun Outdoor Chenango Columnist Eric Davis shows his harvest from the recent 2023 deer hunting season. (Submitted photo)

Personally, deer hunting this fall started out extremely slow. I was underprepared for bow season as I didn’t check my stands until the last couple days of September and only hung a trail camera for a week and a half. I woodwork on the side and had been busy with some orders in August and September combined with still carrying some negativity from losing one of my friends (and good hunting buddy) in 2021.

What did help me was finding a couple of teenage boys who wanted to learn to turkey hunt this spring. One day I mentioned the Youth Deer Weekend to them, and they were very excited with the idea of going deer hunting. So, I had them shoot my .243 rifle to make sure they were comfortable with it before the hunt. Being teenage boys, they refused to hunt together with me, luckily a friend of their family offered to take one of the boys while I took the other. Unfortunately, their family friend had a medical emergency right before the Youth Weekend so only one boy got to hunt with me. We saw 6 deer in the afternoon, which included my hunter having a brief opportunity to harvest one of them. However, my youth hunter couldn’t get the deer in his scope in time before it was out of the shooting lane. It took a minute to figure out why, but he had been exhaling right onto the eyepiece of the scope while we waited for it to come out from behind some brush. Hopefully that is a lesson he will remember for the rest of his hunting career.

As gun season got closer, the boys’ mother texted me asking about season dates and taking the boys out during regular season. She shared with me that they had been asking multiple family friends (who hunt) to take the boys hunting and they all were suddenly “busy” after saying they would throughout the summer. I have written it before, but I got into hunting after my dad passed away when I was thirteen and had to rely on other hunters to take me, so I knew how the boys felt because I had been in their shoes twenty years ago.

I had already planned on going to Watkins Glen on opening day, but I committed to taking one of the boys on the second day of gun season and Black Friday. We didn’t see any deer on the second day, and I had to postpone Black Friday to that Sunday as my wife got sick on Thanksgiving. I spent more time in the woods without a rifle trying to get one of the boys their first deer this season than I spent hunting myself.

Things changed last week for me though. Last Wednesday I had to take my wife to an eye doctor appointment in Syracuse and we had gotten some fresh snow Tuesday night. I told my wife if we got back in time, I’d like to hunt in the afternoon since I hadn’t hunted much by myself. We got back just after lunchtime. I grabbed some food, changed into my hunting clothes, and headed to the woods.

Just after 4:00, I dropped a nice doe with my rifle. Then this past Saturday I went to Watkins Glen to do some deer drives. I was chosen to be a sitter on the first drive and as I sat there, I heard a loud crunch to my left. I saw a deer coming through the brush and could tell it had some antlers but couldn’t tell how big it was. When it got into a clearing, I got my binoculars on it to see it had one good antler and was missing the second antler. As it broke into the hardwoods from the brush, I stopped it and shot. The buck dropped in its tracks. When the drivers came out of the brush lot I got down from the stand and we went over to check out the buck.

When we got to it, we realized its second antler had very recently been shed because there was blood on the pedicle (part of the skull the antler grows from). We continued with the drives after I put my tag on the remaining antler. Once we finished the drives, we headed back to the buck so I could field dress it. As I worked on gutting it, the other hunters headed into the brush where the buck had been bedded to see if they could find his other antler. Right as I finished up, the others emerged from the brush and asked me, “So what is the other antler worth to you?” as one of them displayed the antler to me.

Then to top off the weekend, on Sunday I got a text message that one of the teenage boys had shot their first deer!