+1, that is awesome. I'd leave it to remind him.
I used to keep a scraggly 15" spread 4 point rack hanging on a plaque as a reminder to my best friend, it was one of the first things you seen when you walk in my front door. He would always get mad when he walked in and say "You need to take that ******* thing down! It disappear one day several years back. It's kind of a miss story so I'll tell it, maybe somebody will get a chuckle from it.
His family has a little land in southern Arkansas that they use for a small deer camp. This whole area is crawling with deer, not uncommon to see 30 deer a day. There are very few bucks and they rarely make it past 1.5 years old. Their place is only 100 acres of really thick pine but has lots of land surrounding it that is mostly paper company leased deer camps. Earlier that spring a good section of the place had been clear cut and the weeds had grown to about chest high, it was thick. There is a smallish ridge that runs East-West not quite through the middle of the place. He set a 15' tripod up on the ridge and could see down into the grass and along a firebreak that runs E-W as well, a pretty good vantage point. Now keep in mind my buddy is not what anyone would call a good shooter, he needs to be close. However, he hunts with a 7mag that I load and sight in.
Opening morning not long after daybreak, I hear a single shot from his location a few hundred yards behind me. If my buddy fires one shot it's usually a good indicator that he connected, if not he will empty that bolt action and make it sound like a semi-auto. He will lay down enough suppressive fire for the deer to escape and evade!
Today, one shot...good he got one. A few minutes later a decent racked head pops out about 200 yards down the firebreak I was watching and so I dropped him immediately with my .300 WinMag. This deer had come from a direction like it had just passed my buddy's stand. I jump down, walk over to my deer, make sure it's dead and walk around to where my buddy is to see what he got. He and his dad was looking up and down the old firebreak for blood. He was really excited and when I asked what he got he said "It's the biggest **** deer I've ever seen, it must have been a big 10 point or something!" The shot was about 200 yards, a long stretch for him, and the deer at the shot supposedly just stiffened up and fell over. But there was no deer to be found, and after about 15 minutes of looking his dad spotted two tiny drops of blood that headed right towards his stand in the tall weeds. He had made the comment "You sure you didn't shoot my deer?" and my response was "No, I shot some scraggly 4 point. Not a big 10 point." After about an hour of the three of us not finding any more signs of a hit his dad told us to go get my deer to camp and he would keep looking. So we walk over to mine and he picks the head up, looks up at me and says "You did shoot my deer!". It had a small round hole through the ear and a chunk taken off the lower part of one antler. He had shot it through the ear (that's where the tiny drops of blood came from) and must have knocked it out! Then he probably jumped down and hurried over to his kill. In the meantime the buck must have got back up and the two unknowingly passed right by each other in the grass. Only for the deer to meet his demise a few hundred yards later and my buddy getting the ragging of his life!
So my response to his "You need to take that ******* thing down" was "But that's the biggest **** deer you've ever seen!".
What are friends for?!
