Nearly 20 years ago now, my wife and I (fiancé back then) moved to south Alabama to attend school at Auburn. We originally leased a little lot from some folks my FIL knew…. where we lived in a single wide trailer that sat at the base of a hill just below a little house. The daughter of the fella my FIL knew was attending Auburn as well and lived in the house. Eventually as time went on the guy’s daughter left school and we bought the house and 5 acres from them and had the trailer moved out. We ended up living there for nearly 7 years.
The place was out in the sticks a little and there was some pretty decent looking hunting land that surrounded us. One day I caught an old man out by the road looking at the land next to me. I struck up a conversation with him and it turned out he owned the couple hundred acres that surrounded me. I asked him about the possibility of me being able to hunt and I’ll be damn if he didn’t say I could. All of sudden I had me a little honey hole right out of my back door.
I hunted that little honey hole for years while we lived there. It’s where I killed my first buck with a bow…..it was where I killed my first “older” buck period…..and it’s where my old beagle Sam is still buried under a little pile of rocks in the creek bottom off the back corner of the house.
We eventually sold the house and moved on to the little farm where we now live……and eventually the folks who bought it from us sold it again. As fate would have it, some guy named jlbuc10 bought it…..and last night he called me out to track a deer in my old honey hole. Not only was it my old honey hole.... but the tree he shot the buck out of was the same one that used to be my favorite spot….the same spot where I shot my first buck with a bow and had so many memorable hunts.
I’ll save you any more suspense and tell you that we didn’t recover his deer. We tracked it for 800 yards before calling it off…..chalking it up to most likely being a shoulder shot. But man let me tell you it was nostalgic to be back in my old stomping grounds. I dang near shed a tear on the way out the driveway looking at the trees I had planted there nearly two decades ago and thinking about all the good times that were had there. It was definitely one of the coolest tracks I’ve been on. It was good to see you again Sam………
