Haunted

The editor of this magazine and I were discussing column ideas the other day. "Do you have any deer that haunt your dreams?" he asked. "Maybe as a result of mistakes you made." Take a number, there are legions. But, you really don't want to look too deeply into my nightmares, is was what I was thinking. "I'll look around to see," was my actual reply.

Here's one.

It was a cold morning in Texas and nothing was happening. I was shivering in a treestand beside Mark Drury, who was foolish enough to volunteer to try filming me shooting a buck with a muzzleloader. To be honest, I blame Mark for what happened that day. Not him specifically, but his camera. All video cameras have a hidden chip inside that generates some sort of magnetic field that affects a certain part of my brain, turning off my ability to think and act normal. I'm usually a pretty competent guy when hunting, but turn on a camera and I become a total drooling idiot.

Mark is not a "wait for it to happen" kinda guy, and neither am I, so when one of us suggested we get out of that frozen tree and go rattle up a buck, we quickly had a consensus. Half an hour later we did just that.

Because of the lack of suitable trees for cover, Mark was about thirty yards to my right. He banged his horns and instantly a big 10-point buck ran up and stopped to stare at his inert form. I love to hunt Texas and try to make it there for deer every fall. As a result, I've taken a lot of good bucks, but none at that time came even close to matching the one in front of Mark. He was huge--tall, wide and long-tined. The buck was twenty-five yards from me and so focused on Mark that he didn't have a clue about the .50-caliber delivery system lined up with his ribcage. Quite simply, he was dead and didn't even know it. I settled the crosshairs behind his shoulder, pulled the trigger with a satisfied little smirk on my face, and heard the worst sound in the world. It's physically impossible for a priming cap to be that loud, but I can still hear it echoing in my head more than a decade later. Misfire! A numbness instantly flooded my body and I had to struggle not to empty my stomach.

The buck was so focused on Mark that he only gave me a glance. So I slipped on another cap, cocked the bolt and "shot" him again. Misfire! This time he decided to leave, but not before he gave me a look of complete disgust. I swear, that buck stuck his tongue out at me before sauntering off with a slouch that would have made any high school rebel proud.

I'll be honest. That's not the first nor the last buck I've screwed up on. If you hunt enough, it's going to happen and anybody who says he hasn't done it either has not hunted much or is a liar. I've made my piece with this sort of thing happening, at least enough to live with it.

I remember one young man in our camp who missed what would have been his first buck. He had experienced a very tough year, starting with an almost fatal and physically disfiguring auto accident. His wife couldn't take the stress and left him, his boss fired him and the bank foreclosed on his house. He took it all like a Spartan and somehow believed that if he could just take his first whitetail, it would be the talisman that would turn his life around. But fate was not done messing with him, and due to the lasting effects of his injuries, he missed.

He was taking it very hard when one of our regulars--not the brightest guy in camp--decided to console him.

"Don't worry," he said, "If you stick with deer hunting long enough, you'll miss a lot bigger bucks than that one."

In some sick, perverted way, I agree with him. There will always be bigger bucks to miss. What haunts me about that Texas buck is why it happened.

I had a tin of 100 caps with me and in an unhealthy obsession I fired them all while waiting for our ride back to lunch and ridicule. None of them could make the gun go bang. At the lodge I grabbed some food and went off to be by myself. The fella who worked for the company making the muzzleloaders took my rifle with him. He came back a few minutes later with a smirk of his own. He had pulled the bolt and removed the breech plug to find a severely scorched cleaning patch blocking the path to the powder. Of course, this "PR" genius made it a point to gather up everybody on the hunt and loudly announce my mistake.

I should have pointed out why it happened. When I tried to sight in the rifle he had given me to use the day before, it didn't work. There were no back up rifles ready to go, so I had to swap the scope from the not-so-working gun to another rifle. It also shot poorly and was a lot of trouble to sight in. All the while the other hunters and guides were hassling me to hurry up so they could go hunting. I told them repeatedly to go without me, but they wouldn't, which put a lot of unfair pressure on me.

Anyway, in my haste I lost a patch. I don't know how, and that's what haunts me most.

Misfire Safety First

If you experience a misfire, always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction for at least a couple of minutes. It's not uncommon for a "hang-fire" to delay complete powder ignition. If a few more primers sill won't make the powder burn, pull the breech plug and push the charge out of the barrel. Never try to pull a misfired charge from the muzzle.