By STEVE GILLILAND
Exploring Kansas Outdoors
Over the years, I’ve had lots of help getting my harvested deer out of the field and/or into the pickup. I hunt mostly on land owned by a family member, and my sister usually helps hoist my deer into the truck.
Last year, however, I harvested a really old deer that was also the heaviest deer I’d ever taken. After it was tagged and field dressed, we tried multiple times to get the beast loaded with no luck. With her in the pickup pulling and me on the ground lifting, it just wasn’t going to happen.
Luckily, a heavy equipment operator working in the field next door agreed to come to the rescue, and with the extra muscle on the ground to lift, it was soon loaded.
I’ve also had some mechanical help loading deer over the years. A few years back, my deer went down on the neighbor’s land. He was quite alright with me going there to retrieve it, but he was slowly clearing much of it for pasture, so the place had become forty acres of brush piles consisting mostly of thorn trees with long massive thorns, and thorny limbs from those trees lay everywhere. A deep creek bed also meandered through the property in several directions.
If I had dragged the deer, it would have meant getting it down one side of the creek bed and up the other, or somehow heaving it over a fence, neither of which appealed to me. It's possible I could have weaseled my pickup in there, but rubber tires would just have been fodder for the thorn limbs.
I walked out and drove to the neighbor's, not really sure what good that was going to do, but viola, he had a skid loader on tracks, and in a short while, the deer was rolled onto a pallet on the forks, and away to the truck we went.
When Joyce and I were first married, we hunted on her uncle’s land where she grew up in southwestern Kansas. The first buck she shot was there on an evening hunt. She made what looked like a great shot and the whitetail buck went down immediately. But before we could celebrate, the buck stood up again and ran off down into a maze of briar patches and coulees.
Both of our hearts sank, as we knew what lay ahead. We began searching, and soon it was dark; not just any normal “dark” as I remember, but pitch black. Somehow God helped us eventually find that deer, which had ended up down a steep embankment into a ravine.
This was well over 20 years ago, but luckily, we did have a cell phone. I was able to clamor down to it, and while I field dressed the buck, she called her uncle, but what would she tell him?
We had no idea at all where we were, but after explaining where our blind was and which direction the buck had gone, he seemed to know right where to find us. Soon we heard the motor and saw the lights of the tractor, and after dragging the buck up out of the ravine with a chain, and plopping it into the bucket of the loader, off to the shed we went.
Perhaps the most memorable story comes from harvesting my first deer in Kansas back in the late 1990s. I hunted on Joyce’s uncle’s property in southwestern Kansas, and stayed in his basement.
This particular morning was the last day I could hunt before I had to come back home, and that morning the fog was so thick you could literally see nothing. I debated on just throwing in the towel and heading home, but visibility slowly got better as the morning progressed.
I walked up their lane to look down into a grassy pasture below, and as I stood there, two whitetail bucks cantered across the pasture and into his corral below, of all places.
I found a spot between some trees, and watched until the bigger of the two gave me a shot.
The buck ran out of the corral and went down in an open spot in the pasture. I drove an older Ford Explorer with a rack on the roof, and easily maneuvered to where the deer lay. I tagged and field dressed the buck, but I guess I hadn’t very well thought about how I was gonna get this beast on the roof of my Explorer.
I walked to his round top shed, opened the door and there sat the answer with the words Massey Ferguson written on its side. I drove to the deer, got it rolled into the bucket, but then it became a juggling act, getting the bucket just the right height and angle so as to slide the deer out of the bucket and onto the roof rack without crunching the roof of the vehicle or dumping the deer over the side and having to start all over again.
After many trips on-and-off-the tractor, the deer finally lay on the roof. I returned the Ole’ Massey to its stable, strapped down the deer and headed home, mission accomplished!
I suppose one day when all I can remember are things from 40 years ago, I’ll constantly bore the nurses at the care home with stories like these. Oh well, I guess I could do worse.
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Steve can be contacted by email at [email protected].