Do you have any opportunities on animals that you passed on and now looking back that decision haunts you. I have two.
The first was back in the 1980's and I was in my early 20s. I had been hunting late muzzleloader blacktail seasons, and my goal that year was a "four point" or nothing, western count (I've since learned not to make goals like that). I ended up passing on a monster, old, reverted, heavy fork horn at....10 YARDS. We bumped into a guy who asked if we saw the big fork horn in the area and that it was the biggest buck he had ever seen. That one still hurts.
The next one was in 2010. My wife had drawn a limited entry Wyoming deer unit in a long shot random draw and it was going to be her first deer hunt. We decided to hunt the last few days of the season. On the first morning it was snowing, perfect conditions. We hadn't had time to scout and I really did not know for certain what the quality we would find on that unit. We ran into a buck chasing some does, one of the first bucks we had seen. He was strangely narrow, I mean strangely narrow, like 14-15" narrow, but he was VERY tall and had deep forks, each tine around 11". I kept asking her if she thought it was a good one, and she kept telling me she didn't know what to look for. We sat on that buck under 100 yards for a solid 5 minutes, what seemed like forever, and he was happy checking out the does. There were many easy shot opportunities at him. Finally I told her to shoot him. As if on cue, he grouped up with some does and for another minute or two he milled around right in the middle of them. They finally got tired of us and trotted off. I recalled that one again this morning after I looked at a set of 190+ sheds and remembered that Wyoming buck with tines in similar class and I still can't believe I was so indecisive, especially on her first buck.
Both of those opportunities would have been chip shots and it just came down to choosing not to shoot.
The first was back in the 1980's and I was in my early 20s. I had been hunting late muzzleloader blacktail seasons, and my goal that year was a "four point" or nothing, western count (I've since learned not to make goals like that). I ended up passing on a monster, old, reverted, heavy fork horn at....10 YARDS. We bumped into a guy who asked if we saw the big fork horn in the area and that it was the biggest buck he had ever seen. That one still hurts.
The next one was in 2010. My wife had drawn a limited entry Wyoming deer unit in a long shot random draw and it was going to be her first deer hunt. We decided to hunt the last few days of the season. On the first morning it was snowing, perfect conditions. We hadn't had time to scout and I really did not know for certain what the quality we would find on that unit. We ran into a buck chasing some does, one of the first bucks we had seen. He was strangely narrow, I mean strangely narrow, like 14-15" narrow, but he was VERY tall and had deep forks, each tine around 11". I kept asking her if she thought it was a good one, and she kept telling me she didn't know what to look for. We sat on that buck under 100 yards for a solid 5 minutes, what seemed like forever, and he was happy checking out the does. There were many easy shot opportunities at him. Finally I told her to shoot him. As if on cue, he grouped up with some does and for another minute or two he milled around right in the middle of them. They finally got tired of us and trotted off. I recalled that one again this morning after I looked at a set of 190+ sheds and remembered that Wyoming buck with tines in similar class and I still can't believe I was so indecisive, especially on her first buck.
Both of those opportunities would have been chip shots and it just came down to choosing not to shoot.
