venison

Saturday I went hunting for the second time, first time with a gun tho. my dad's buddy from work had won two hunting passes for the Ravenna Arsenal, but couldn't go to both so he gave one to us. it was so much fun! (you mean you had fun sitting in the woods waiting for a deer to walk by on a 30 degree morning, and had to wake up at 4am to do it? yepp.)

the Ravenna Arsenal is 22,000 acres. there were about 90 other people with us, plus our guides. each pair had their own assigned hunting area. ours was 6B which was a very long but not real wide stretch of land. after sitting through a short meeting, and dad eating a pumpkin doughnut, we made the drive out to our locations and began the hunt.

on the drive to our parking spot, we came across this abandoned car. to which I was freaked out because it's straight up horror movie style. like Michael Myers is going to come out of it and kill us all. dad says to me "this isn't really a hunt, you're on Scare Tactics" (which is funny if you know what tv show that is)

in the morning we sat in our area and hoped a deer would come by. my dad saw one more than 100yrds away too far to shoot it. then we decided to walk a bit around a field when we came across two little does, they took off running as soon as they saw us. that's when we found a better area to scope out deer. we sat there for a while when a nice sized doe came running right at us. it was about 50yrds away when my dad saw her. I tried to get the gun up and pull the trigger but there were so many trees in the way it took me a second to get her in my scope. right when I was about to get set she took off running. if I would have seen her earlier or if she didn't run off I probably could have popped her.

after that encounter we decided to trek back to the car for lunch.

after lunch we didn't have too much time left to hunt. so we decided to walk all the way down to the other end of our land and push back, since we hadn't gone down that way yet. we came across an abandoned building that had signs everywhere not to enter, so of course I went inside and dad took my picture. and then we hit the old railroad tracks. about 10-15 separate tracks, I've never seen so many in my life. it was so cool. we walked across those, saw a cat, and headed into the woods. we saw two more deer bedded down, but they heard//saw us and took off running before dad could shoot. we walked back up through the woods and then decided to call it a day.

overall, we saw 6 deer, 2 coyotes (on the drive to our parking spot), and a cat. it was such a fun day with dad.