My son and I went hunting on family property in Ohio, gun season started on Dec 1 2025. Ohio is a state that only allows hunting deer with a straight walled cartridge or shotgun (yes you can hunt with a hand gun of a minimum caliber and barrel length). On day 1 we were on one of the properties, it has 3 tree stands. I started in the one up front, but moved after a couple of hours of not seeing anything and my son in tree stand number 2 saying he was seeing does. Ohio sells an either ### tag, but once you get a buck you have to hunt does after that, the county we were in as a 6 deer bag limit for the season. I walked towards the back of the property past my son and was standing on the ground, looking up at tree stand number 3, sketchy to get up especially for this 70 year old body. While standing there we heard shots coming from the adjacent field accompanied with some ricochets whizzing past. Luckily I was behind three big trees that the tree stand is attached to. I looked towards the stand my son was in and saw a deer running and his path was going to take him past me. I had my Marlin 1895 in 45-70 and waited until he trotted past and was framed in by an opening between two large trees. It was like slow motion, I had time to say to myself, hammer back, safety off and I got a perfect shot at about 40 yards. He dropped within 5 feet. When I went to see him I noticed a wound on his left side , I only saw his right side. It was low and just under his belly.
Later I Google Mapped the area, and the farm field beside us is very large, we didn't see any blaze orange, and figured the other hunters we shooting from the wooded lots on the other side at the buck that was trying to cross the field. The distance mapped out to anywhere from 300 to 500 meters, not an ethical shot with a straight wall cartridge limitation. We never saw anyone come out to check if they had wounded the animal either.
The buck was a nice 8 pointer, the Ohio game guys at the meat processor said he was around 3.5 years old. I brought the antlers home, the meat would take another week and a half to process and we had to get home. Once home, I decided to try to make my own European mount, found a 3D printer skull file and made this up.
We normally try to go every year to the property, but Ohio decided to increase thee cost of the deer tags from 80 bucks (non-resident) to 279 bucks, on top of the 189 for the hunting license (USD of course).
Hope most of you had a successful hunt this year.
Later I Google Mapped the area, and the farm field beside us is very large, we didn't see any blaze orange, and figured the other hunters we shooting from the wooded lots on the other side at the buck that was trying to cross the field. The distance mapped out to anywhere from 300 to 500 meters, not an ethical shot with a straight wall cartridge limitation. We never saw anyone come out to check if they had wounded the animal either.
The buck was a nice 8 pointer, the Ohio game guys at the meat processor said he was around 3.5 years old. I brought the antlers home, the meat would take another week and a half to process and we had to get home. Once home, I decided to try to make my own European mount, found a 3D printer skull file and made this up.
We normally try to go every year to the property, but Ohio decided to increase thee cost of the deer tags from 80 bucks (non-resident) to 279 bucks, on top of the 189 for the hunting license (USD of course).
Hope most of you had a successful hunt this year.
