If you remember back to the 2008 season, Thad DeMoss had sort of a chance at a buck in early November that Mike Sawyer then missed about 8 days later.   Kurt Schroeder found one shed from the buck in February 2009.  He went on the hit list, nicknamed "Sawyer Buck" in honor of Mike's less than stellar moment.  We have all had those moments.  I have certainly had my share, but it is fun to poke some fun at each other (and ourselves) from time to time. 

We got some photos of the Sawyer Buck in early to mid-December and we hoped to shoot him during the late season this year.  We never saw him - which is no big deal.  There are a lot of deer we never see other than in photos. 

Well, Kurt won't be finding any sheds off the Sawyer Buck this year.  Yesterday, Scott Prucha took a short walk around one of my food plots in the area where we had gotten those photos.   He found the buck lying dead in a small finger of trees leading up to the food plot.  It looked like he had been dead for quite a while.  Could have been all the way back to mid-December from the looks of the carcass. 

Dallas Davis, the local game warden, came out and issued Scott a salvage tag for the buck and ran his metal detector over the deer to see if he could find a bullet or slug that might indicate cause of death.  The buck was quite a ways back in away from any roads so I wasn't really expecting poaching.  Dallas didn't find a bullet so there was really no way to know for sure what caused the buck's death.  He could have been wounded on a neighboring farm, or he could have just died.

The deer looked a little run down in the trail camera photos we got of him, so it is possible he was suffering from some kind of disease or maybe he just succumbed to the stress of the hard winter in combination with being run down from a hard rut.  It is hard to say, but he's gone now.  Another one off the hit list.  We keep scratching them off the list, but we aren't the only ones killing them.  Mother Nature has taken a couple and the neighbors have taken one - that I know of. 

In this week's show, coming up on Monday sometime, I'll take a quick look back at my hit list from August and then update you on which ones we've seen, which ones are dead, which ones we've killed, which ones have disappeared - and what I have learned as a result of all this that might help me connect with at least one or two of these bucks next year.  We'll also put together a musical tribute to the season.  I always like those.

The game never ends.  Even as we wrap up this year's show season, I'm already planning next year's strategy.  Take a look at Episode 30 on Monday - this is the last regularly scheduled show of the 2009/2010 season.

It has been a great ride.  It is sad to see it end again. so very soon.  Seems like just yesterday we were overflowing with anticipation.  You have all been great to us. Thanks for your support.