A Tale of Two Six Points.. edited w/ part 2 on page 2

So these are a couple of stories that i listened to around the camp fire as a child. I must have heard some of them 10 times, each version a more grandios and a bit more embellished upon than the one before. I would love to captivate the witty humor and substandard dialect i heard these tales in, and could only wish that you could have met the characters, so that you could understand the type of men they were.

I will call them James and Willard, because thats their names. Brothers, both farmers and two of the most genuine men you could meet. Willard spent a period of his life in a log cabin between two mountains in Montana, guiding hunts. And not your mommas D-shaped logged, lavish log cabin. Im talking, made from the trunks of trees cut within a mile of the house, feel the wind in the living room rustic cabin. His hunts were equipped with the whole 9; from pack mules to horses, to a personal chef and mexicans doing all the hard labor. He eventually moved back to the other God's country to carry on a family tradition to cultivate cropland.

James took on a more conventional role, sticking to his inherited career. James is a smart man, but a simple man; can hold a stimulating, intelligent conversation, but has never and will never own a computer. Hell, you're lucky to catch him on his flip phone, and don't bother leaving a message. . He is very stoic, almost intimidating. In fact, I have seen him be downright intimidating to poachers. Lets just say, after their talk, the ol boys weighed the risk and reward, and decided not to take a chance on showing back up. Well, lets talk about six points.

Its dusk, middle of the rut, and the deer are moving around the field. Booooom, the echoed blast from the 7mm mag that James carried to everywhere but church. So Willard gets down to help load the most surely, already expired beast, because James didn't exactly miss deer. After conversating, about what I can only assume was how big this deer probably was, they decided they would just "go get him". They found blood at the spot where the deer was first hit.. good sign. They trailed into the woods for almost 40 yards, when the trail came to a thicket. So James decides he will get on his hands and knees and crawl over the somewhat dim blood trail until he reached the other side of the thicket or found his deer, whichever came first.

What came first was the deer, only instead of a glazed eye and no pulse, it was more of a bewildered look on all fours. So one quadruped staring at the other, slightly more unnatural quadruped, they both had decisions to make. James' was to scream like hell for Willard. So Willard, who had James' gun and only 2 bullets left, fired into the air, as per James' impulsive instruction.. the deer broke and left the thicket in a fury. 1 bullet.

So James crawls out of the thicket, dusts himself off and they regroup. They hadn't walked 50 more yards when they jumped the injured buck again, James fires his last shot, hitting the deer on the run. Not a fatal shot though, as he hit him in the hind quarter this time. So they trail and they lose trail, and they finally come to a huge Palmeto thicket.

As they bail into the thicket, the exasperated animal bails out and about faces them, as if he was a general making his last stand. James looks at Willard, and hands him the obsolete steel pole that was his gun with no ammo, and pulls out his knife. Willard advises against this hasty decision, but James assures him that the deer almost dead and "hell, it's only a six point". Well, he went at it all wrong... he went at it like a Mexican in a backyard knife fight. Started stabbing at the confused deer, bouncing towards him. The deer just backed up and charged him, like a bull on a matador, and at that point James knew he had messed up. He somehow ended up on the deer's back, stabbing him in the arse, while it kicked him like a bronco.

After what James described as 30 minutes of wrestling this bastard (Willard later confirmed about 3 minutes), Willard walked up and slit the throat and put both fighters put of their misery. At that point, they were so deep in the woods and disoriented, they had to sleep against trees until they could see how to get out. James could barely walk the next day, and said that was the worst damn deer meat he had ever eaten, but he made sure he was in on every last meal that sucker was cooked for.

To be continued...