| Hunting Stories |
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| The Camera Never Lies Submitted by: Matt Blaine On a December morning in 1998, cousins Matt Blaine and Brad Blaine went hunting on Sandy Lewis land, which is ideal for wide open, long range, ridge to ridge hunting. Matt was armed with a .243 Remington 700 ADL and Brad was armed with a video camera, hoping to capture good hunting footage for a movie he was putting together. As we quietly creeped the ridges, we spotted a gathering of 4 does across the ridge. The deer were in no hurry, so Matt slowly sat down, steadied himself against a small tree and picked the deer he wanted. Brad filmed as matt fired across the ridge. The deer scattered, so we both reluctantly agreed that I had missed. However, one doe was still hanging around, so a second shot was fired. Brad watched through the viewfinder of his camer as he saw the deer drop - a direct hit. We ran across the other side of the ridge, found the victim of the second shot, field dressed her and hauled her back to the Old House on the 4-wheeler. It was mid-morning by this time, so we went up to Randy's house and made ourselves the infamous meat breakfast, dubbed "meatfast," which consisted of bacon, sausage, breakfast steaks, shit-on-a-shingle, eggs and a biscuit. We watched Ricky Lake on TV while satisfying the carnivorous needs. Then, we decided to watch the video that Brad had shot earlier that morning of the kill. We watched as I fired two shots across the ridge. Everything played as expected until something caught our eye. Something wasn't right about that first shot. We replayed the tape over and over. Upon review, we concluded that the first shot didn't miss at all. In the field, we got confused after the shot when the deer started scattering, but on tape, it was claer that a deer dropped after the first shot. Still skeptical, we jumped on the 4-wheeler and rode out to the ridge in question. Sure enough, the second (or should I say first) deer was lying there, dead as hell. If it hadn't been for the camera, we would have never known and a perfectly good provider of a key ingredient in the "meatfast" would have gone to waste. Let that be a lesson to you hunters, take your camerman with you. After all, the camera never lies. |
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