Last Updated on December 24, 2025 by Jason Tome
This was my girlfriend Michelle’s second year deer hunting, and coming into the season we felt like we were due.
Last year, we hunted hard—every morning and evening on weekends, plus a handful of weekdays whenever we could squeeze them in. We saw deer almost every sit. We had close calls. We had moments where our hearts were in our throats. Especially, with one 120″+ big buck we had at 10 yards. But we never got a clean, ethical shot, and the season ended without punching a tag.
This year started very differently.
We hunted just as hard, but the woods felt empty. We weren’t seeing deer during legal shooting hours, only catching glimpses right at first or last light—always just too late. If you hunted southern Maine this year, you probably noticed the same thing. There were no acorns. No apples. The woods simply didn’t have food. I’d never seen anything like it. Deer weren’t moving like they normally do, and when food disappears from the forest, deer adapt fast.
They were living on grass—whatever green they could find.
Before making that discovery, Michelle and I spent most of our time tucked back in thick stuff, in hard-to-access areas.
But every night on the drive home, we’d see deer along the highway, in front lawns, crossing roads, and out in open fields. Not just some deer, we saw a LOT of deer. That started to bother me. The sign was obvious once we stopped ignoring it: the deer weren’t deep in the timber—they were close to people, feeding where grass still existed.
That realization forced me to rethink everything.
I’ve never liked hunting field edges. It goes against every instinct I have about mature bucks and daylight movement. But this wasn’t a normal year, and the deer were proving that. We needed to hunt where the deer were, not where we wanted them to be.
So we adjusted.
On November 21, we decided to hunt a field we hadn’t tried yet. Getting set up took longer than I wanted. We made noise. We left more scent than I was comfortable with. Normally, that alone would’ve been enough to ruin a sit. But the wind was strong, and I figured if deer showed up, it would be right at the end of shooting light anyway.
While scouting a spot for the stands, we noticed something that immediately changed our mood: deer droppings everywhere. The kind of sign that tells you deer are feeding there every night.
We finally settled into a spot just a foot or two off the ground on the field edge. I had barely sat down after hanging both stands when Michelle quietly said,
“There’s a deer… I think it’s a buck.”
She wasn’t guessing.
A solid 8-pointer was already in the field with an hour and a half of legal shooting left.
The buck was nearly 200 yards away, and the odds were stacked against us. First, the buck had to come toward us. Next, somehow if the buck did decided to come our way, he couldn’t veer to the right of us, the shot wouldn’t be safe because of a farmhouse off to our right. Also, the buck would have to get close to us before we could shoot because from the direction he was coming, he was skylined—no backdrop. Everything about the setup made the likelihood of success low.
But then the buck started feeding.
He worked slowly toward us, head down, tearing through clover like it was the only food left on earth. He drifted right… then back left… then right again. Every few steps felt like a test. He just kept coming, basically on a string strait at us, but meandering slightly back and forth on his way.
Michelle needed to twist in her stand to line up a shot, so she rested her feet on my knees—I was set lower right beside her. Her arms started to shake from holding the .30-06 up for so long, so I supported her elbows to take some of the strain. Somehow, through all that movement, the buck never noticed us and kept coming.
Fifty yards.
Forty.
Thirty.
The buck stayed almost perfectly head-on the entire time—still skylined, still no shot. Then, finally, he did exactly what we needed at 30 yards. He turned broadside and started feeding left and would cross right in front of us.
Michelle struggled to find him in the scope. We’d left it cranked to 9x when he was far out, and now at 30 yards everything felt rushed. She dialed it back to 3x, the buck stopped again to feed, and I whispered, “Take the shot when you’re ready.”
The rifle fired. The buck ran—but not like a hit deer.
“Reload,” I whispered. “Reload, reload.”
She chambered another round. The buck stopped broadside at about 40 yards. Michelle fired again, hitting him in the spine and dropping him instantly. We saftied the rifle, jumped out of the ground level stands, and moved in. The buck needed a finishing shot, and Michelle placed it cleanly behind the front shoulder.
Then everything went quiet.
We stood there for a few minutes, letting the adrenaline and emotions settle, replaying the last hour in our heads before walking up to him in disbelief that her first deer ever was a big Maine buck.
The buck weighed 127 pounds on certified scales, a solid southern Maine 8-pointer for the time of year, and a memory neither of us will ever forget.
Then the work began…
