My first buck (sure it was them) was opening morning many years ago in the mountains. Frozen leaves, well away from man made noise/disruption and as I sat under a lone tree on a reclaimed strip mine I heard something off to my right. Looked that way and say glimpses of deer running up a ridge several hundred yards from me. Figured someone had jumped them up coming into the woods. The were running perpendicular, front to back from me and I figured at that direction/distance they would not figure into my day.
I'd seen some does feeding along in front of me just out of the tree line and was playing games with one of them. She kept trying to catch me moving my head around and was trying to fake me into moving when I thought she wasn't looking at me by acting like she was going to feed and then jerking her head up to look at me. Finally got tired of that and said "BOO!" loudly when she was looking at me and she and the two smaller does went over the bank away from me.
A few minutes after that I hear some fast travelers in the frozen leaves coming down the ridge behind me. I slowly turned to watch and the noises got louder/closer and five deer came out of the woods an onto the reclaimed strip mine. They came to a quick halt with the buck in the middle and the four does spread around him a few yards away. The buck was looking back up on the ridge they'd come off of and I figured it was the same bunch I'd seen several minutes before going up the other ridge away from me.
I finally, slowly got rolled over, prone position and got a shot on the buck's neck at about 95 yds. The M1A went off, the recoil bounced the scope up a bit and only two deer were visible. Two does stayed in place and the other two had run back up into the woods. I laid there watching through the scope for a bit and one doe kept looking around, then looking at the ground between her and the other doe. She kept doing that and I figured the buck was on the ground between them but I couldn't see him due to the tall grass.
I got up and both does ran off. I walked up the hill and the buck was dead (bullet hit just below the head and took out the spine).
I think, sometimes, the other deer are so surprised by the shot they don't understand why the deer that was shot fell down and doesn't get up. The does get used to running interference for the bucks, too.
Mine was a good sized deer but only a ragged looking 4 point. You got a nice buck there.
