Chris Ginn Creative Outdoors

Mike Clement from West Monroe invited me to do an archery hunt on his private land in Tensas Parish this past weekend. Since I don’t have a bow, I borrowed a friend’s Parker Cyclone Crossbow, shot it a few times in the yard and took off for the weekend.

Clement told me that he had the guys with FIELD X-TREMERS coming down the same weekend to do some filming. As I we were introduced, I realized that these were some of my former students and football players. What a pleasant surprise it was to share the hunt with John Rieger and Sean Vines.

The FIELD X-TREMERS crew, John Rieger (left) and Sean Vines (right) with our three deer.

After showing me some pictures of some awesome bucks on his property, Clement asked if we would only shoot does and cull bucks, two of which were of particular interest to him. He had been watching a couple of button bucks on his cameras that he just knew were over 2 years old. However, he couldn’t never convince anybody to shoot them because they were just “button bucks.”

He wanted one of them down to see how old they actually were, so I told him I didn’t have a problem shooting one if their paths crossed mine. And that’s exactly what happened later that evening. Clement’s line of thinking was that if these were indeed older deer, he wanted them removed from his herd.

After watching a spotted fawn take 30 minutes to close the gap between the edge of the woods and some rice bran, I thought I was going to get a shot a a big doe, but she eventually pulled the fawn off realizing something wasn’t quite right.

Several minutes later, one of these cull bucks came through the clover patch like he owned the joint. I waited for him to quarter away from me and made a perfect heart shot. The bolt from my borrowed Parker Cyclone crossbow passed through the deer and stuck 3/4 of the way in the ground on the other side.

The deer bolted into some nearby timber, and I heard him crash into the palmettos. Although palmettos make it hard to cover ground, any blood on them shines like a bicycle reflector when the light hits it. After thinking that we might be going in circles, we heard a deer get up and crash through the timber.

Worried that it was my deer, Clement told me not to worry because no deer was going to survive that much blood loss. Apparently, it was the doe that I had seen follow my buck into the woods; she must have been lying with the dead deer.

We found the buck close to where the other deer jumped. And to pay me back for some of those bonus points I gave them during school, my former students came in to help drag the deer through the palmettos.

A close inspection of the jawbone determined that this was indeed a deer that needed removing from the heard, as Clement estimated it to be over 2 years old.

Clement also passed along lots of other great information that I will be sharing in a feature story in the December issue of Louisiana Sportsman. I’ll also share some of his extra information here in the coming days, so make sure to check back in to learn everything you can from this experienced deer hunter.

The FIELD X-TREMERS crew gets ready to film their Tensas Parish deer hunt