re: Shooting a deer swimming across the bayou

Back in 07 I was duck hunting in my friend's family's cypress swamp. Hadn't killed a thing all weekend. I was leaning against a tree, full camo (face mask, gloves, the works), stomach deep in water. I heard splashing behind me, stepped out from the tree to confront what I was sure was the person whom my friend had said had been trespassing and shooting ducks on his land. I was staring straight into the eyes of an 8 point, big swollen neck, shoulder deep in the water 15 yards or so away. I froze and started to assess the situation:

It was deer season.
Nobody had killed a damn thing for days, ducks or deer.
Can I get my gun down in time to pop him before he gets out of shotgun range.

My breathing got heavier and I began exhaling big plumes of condensation. The buck looked at me, tilting his head this way and that (like a dog hearing a high pitched sound), wondering I'm sure what all that smoke was doing coming out of a moss covered stump. After my initial assessment of the situation some secondary thoughts popped into my head:

I don't have any orange on.
Not sure of the rules for deer hunting with a shotgun but I think I need buckshot or slugs.
When I draw on him he's going to bolt but there's no way in hell he can get away. This is when I decided not to shoot. I've never killed a deer, although I've hunted them out of tree stands on the same property with a rifle. I just knew this particular situation was not right.

I gave him the Jedi hand-wave-thingy. His eyes bugged and I could see the whites all around the irises as he turned to run. It was no use. He galloped and galloped but just sort of bogged down in the water and mud. I could have emptied my gun, reloaded, and emptied again but I just watched that big fat rump and huge white flag of a tail beat it back to shore.

For me it came down to realizing I could not look myself in the mirror if I would have taken that buck.