Unread postby bowright » Tue Mar 08, 2011 2:05 pm
New to the forum, but thought this would be a good place to introduce myself.
I met Matt back in 2008, at the Iowa deer classics. Our personalities and humar are very similar, and we hit it off great. Ever since then, I have considered Matt a good friend of mine. We have shared the turkey blind a few times, and have had quite a few adult beverages over the years while telling stories. I invited Matt down shotgun season, as he had been hunting public ground, and in the part of Iowa I am in, there is plenty of private ground to hunt on. I took him to one of my favorite farms, which holds alot of big deer.
Slingshot (as Matt nicknamed him) started with me back in 2006. I picked up his matched set of sheds in the spring, and that fall is when I got into trail camera's. I estimated that he was a 3 1/2 year old when I found his sheds then. That fall, I got alot of pictures of him, but never saw him during daylight hours. Matter of fact, every picture I have ever gotten of this deer for the last 4 years, were between the times of 12 am and 4 am. He never was a daylight roamer, even during the rut, but he was a fighter, as around the 20th of November, he would show up in front of the camera, missing most of his rack. He never was a giant (score wise) whitetail, but he did have a tank of a body on him every year. I never laid eyes on this buck, all through the years. He even disappeared for one year (2009 season), but to my surprise, she showed back up in 2010. He was a ghost of a whitetail, which I would have been more than happy with harvesting. Matt was the lucky guy who finally had the oppurtunity at him.
I've often wondered how many times that buck has slipped by the orange army that we have here during shotgun seasons. He was a smart whitetail to survive the area he was in, and definitely a fighter. I wonder what young bucks will actually stick around now that he is gone.
Congrats again Matt on a whitetail of a lifetime!
