Escape from Planet 4 MOA– Part 4

This installment will address what I did out in the field to escape from Planet 4 MOA. This is going to be a short one. Most of the serious work was done back home at the shooting bench. However, there were several things I did to improve my lot during deer season.

I pretty much stopped shooting my deer rifles off hand. When I first started deer hunting, I was a bow hunter– first and foremost. I shot standing on a raised stand without anything in front of me. When I started using a slug gun– that’s what we used in Ohio– I stood up, shot a pieplate with some Remmie Sluggers at 50 yards and when they all hit the plate, I was good to go. That habit of standing up and taking the shot lasted until I was well into my time at the farm. I stopped bow hunting in 2007, mostly because my eyes and my right shoulder were going. I was having a hard time seeing the pins and my shoulder pained me enough that I could no longer pull the bow back.

That all caused a serious change in my shooting habits. Within a very few years:

I was no longer using treestands that did not have a shooting rail all the way around
All my ground blinds had either a sandbag or some sort of padding on which to rest my rifle’s forearm
I was giving up on my yearly stalk-and-shoot trips, kicking it up old-style with my Rem 1100 and the 12 GA Sluggers.

I was dedicating the last 2 weeks of November, the KY Rifle Season, to filling the freezer with venison. I normally take a buck and a doe, and I concentrated on shooting the largest buck I could find the first week and then filling out the freezer with an appropriate-sized doe. I cut all the finesse to the bare essentials. Our farm is in the middle of a heavily-hunted area in SW Bracken County, Kentucky. Opening Day sounds like WWIII. I spend a good part of the rifle season in the middle of the property where a stray round never penetrates. With all the activity going on around us, the deer tend to gravitate to the quiet patch that has no obvious activity. That is where I am sitting.

In my treestands, I take better than half my shots from a metal shooting rail with pipe insulation wrapped around the tube steel. The other half are standing shots out the back of the stand, and I try my best to anchor the rifle against the tree. In my ground blinds, I shoot off a sandbag whenever I can. On the rare times I just set up in an Adirondack chair overlooking a field, I bring along shooting sticks. I’m getting to old for goat rodeos. I try to drop the deer where a truck can roll out to retrieve the carcass. In the past 20 seasons, I have had to put a finisher into only one buck. The animal goes down where it stood, or I can stand in its tracks and see the carcass.

About half of the shots I have taken on deer in the past 15 years have been taken from a single ground blind that overlooks the infamous Garden of Stone. I crawl into my luxury blind at Midway and wait for a herd of doe to come out and munch clover out in the middle of the pasture and I pick the animal that will best fit the freezer. The shots are between 120 and 175 yards. The Garden of Stone is about the size of a tennis court. As such, I have a place where I can have repeatable conditions and I can test rifles and loads. Any deer rifle that is going to be added to the rotation can be proved on the deer at the Garden of Stone.

Like Dirty Harry said, a man needs to know his limitations. Since I have no venues where the range is greater than 200 yards, that’s what I shoot for. My eyes are too old to regularly hunt deer with open sights. Honestly, I would be hard pressed to tell you where I could even see a deer beyond 200 yards except out in front of one of our ground blinds that is 450 yards from the house. My offhand shooting is limited to about 50 yards. I would not chance an unsupported shot unless I had to. Once I am settled on a buck, I stop looking at the rack and concentrate on the point where the bullet will enter. Normally, it does. Most of my kills take out both lungs and the top of the heart.

None of this actually got me off Planet 4 MOA, but it did give me a lot of confidence. If I lay a round down at a deer during season, I know I have done my utmost. Planet 4 MOA is a planet filled with poor buggers that live in self-delusion. When I shoot know where the shot is going. After 20-some seasons of doing over and over I should.

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