Jeff, Jacob, Brennan and I (Justin) headed up to the cabin in Barton City, MI.  We hadn't been up there deer hunting in a while, but during turkey season I would always see a lot of deer around so we figured we would give it a try.  We got up north around noon, so we decided to quickly get our gear loaded in the cabin and then head out for a quick scout and sit for the night not expecting much.  One thing we noticed was that there were a ton of apples on the trees.  We knew a bunch of good federal land to hunt so we drove around until we found some apple trees and then scouted a little.  We found this one apple tree on Walker Rd. that didn't have any apples underneath it.....so we knew that deer had to be coming in there every night to feed.  We decided to sit down right there.

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It was slightly raining that day so you couldn't hear much.  Brennan was quite bored as usual and I took the photo where he is laying back right before this buck walked in.  All the sudden I looked up and this little buck was right under the apple tree.  Brennan had the crossbow, pulled up and made a pretty good shot....at least we thought.  The deer only went about 40 yds then hunched up pretty bad, so I figured he shot him in the guts.  We tried to load another arrow and get another shot in, but we didn't have time.  We called up Jeff and Jacob and we started tracking that night since it was supposed to rain really hard.

 

We tracked the deer for several hundred yds with decent blood, but at one point we saw some deer eyes and a deer get up in the direction that the deer was headed.  The deer slowly got up and walked away.  We thought it might be Brennan's deer, but we weren't sure.  We went over to the area where the deer was bedded down and found blood, so we backed off for the night.  Of course it poured that night.  

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Jeff decided to go hunting and Jacob, Brennan, and I woke up around 9:00 am to not interfere with hunting too much and headed out to track the deer.  We asked some property owner's if we could access their property because we thought the deer maybe went that way.  We basically looked for blood and the deer for about three hours.....NOTHING.  I told Brennan and Jacob I was going to make one more pass through a thicket and then we would head home.  Walking through, I looked down in a bed and found a speck of blood...the blood looked very fresh so I was trying to figure out what was going on.  Before I could even think I looked up and there the deer was, lying dead right where Brennan was holding it in the photo.

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We persevered and I feel we always owe it to the animal to try as hard as we can to harvest the deer.  It really payed off this time, this was Brennan's third deer and second buck.  We had a great time up at the cabin and will always remember the smile on his face while holding his buck.

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Oh ya...we wouldn't have done it without Jeff and Jacob's awesome tracking job!