Slowly, we make our way to the edge where the mountain drops off sharply to the river bottom below. We’re 350 yards from border of private land and 400 yards from the buck we’ve watched feed on it for the last two weeks.

The plan: wait for the buck to finish feeding and hope it beds in the broken cliffs on public land. If anything bumps him, his escape runs right past us.

We found the owner using OnX, but he didn’t give us permission to hunt, nor did he tell us he’d already given access to another hunter. And that other hunter is now making his way across the field toward the buck right below us. There’s nothing we can do but watch and hope he spooks the deer before getting a shot.

As he gets within a few hundred yards, turkeys run away straight past the feeding buck, who merely raises his head to see what caused the commotion before putting it down to feed again.

Now the hunter is 150 yards out and setting up to shoot. I film the deer.

The buck steps and turns broadside to the hunter. And then the deer jumps and runs 20 yards. A few moments later, we hear the crack of the shot. Then two more misses as the deer limps its way to the nearest trees to hide.

The first shot broke the lower front leg, missing the chest cavity. A bad shot, but a fatal one. A deer carries 60% or more of its weight on its front legs. Take one away and he can limp, but he can’t run. Hit a back leg instead, and that buck motors off private land, through the cliffs, straight to us.

But a front leg… it’s just a matter of tracking it down.

A few inches. That’s what determined the buck being his, not ours. The time we spent watching it meant nothing. He’d probably been watching it too. If the shot had been one inch left or right, it misses cleanly and the buck runs to us. The margins between living and dying are always so much smaller than we give them credit for.

Eventually, the hunter finds it in the trees and makes a point-blank kill shot, and we move on to less green pastures.