Thanks fellas. I'd be a little more concerned about the velvet shed had I not seen so much of him last year. I'm pretty sure he was bedding in roughly the same area last year as the three times I saw him, he came off this ridge. I feel this area is his home and as long as he's not pressured, he'll hang tight. He is a special deer for sure, but I'm not counting any chickens before they hatch. Honestly, I'm not overly excited about anything at this point. The entire ordeal with Deuce taught me volumes and the biggest lesson was not to hang all your hopes on the back of one specific buck. Sure I feel like Moe is the most killable buck I have ever hunted, but at the same time I'm all TOO familiar with the taste of failure, so I'm expecting that for the time being. Lord willing, a decade of hard work and dedication will pay off this fall and if it doesn't, then I know that I am simply not meant to harvest a deer of this caliber. I'm taking this one day at a time and letting the pieces fall where they may. My track record is pretty shitty when it comes to killing big bucks, so there is no sense in thinking I have this one in the bag until I see his white belly laying on the ground...
In the early years of my bowhunting career, I had the naive thought that I could routinely harvest mature bucks with a bow. I wanted to kill OBB's on a nearly annual basis and that's just not going to happen for me for a number of reasons. At this point with two 6.5 year old deer on the wall and no OBB's to show for in 10 seasons behind a stick and string, I feel I have reached a new understanding of what I want and what I am capable of in my bowhunting career. I'll give up that wall full of deer and annual/semi-annual success for the oppurtunity to kill one or two bucks of a lifetime like Moe/Deuce that I have developed stories with. Moe represents so much more than a great rack on a brute of a deer. He's embodies what I so dearly want to accomplish and that's the visual aid to a great story. Time will tell how great the story will become, for now it's just a waiting game...