Sometimes men get too macho for our own good; We think we know more than we actually do. It often takes a gentle word or suggestion or intuition from our better halves to cause us to stop for a minute, rethink things and realize, by golly, they’re right.
Had 35-year-old Mitchell Ritchie not heeded the prodding and urging of his wife Amanda, the huge 12-point he arrowed late on the afternoon of Oct. 7 would have likely been a nice meal for coyotes.
After searching for the deer he shot with his crossbow until midnight, Mitchell wanted to give up; Amanda wouldn’t let him.
But here’s how the story began.
“I got up that morning wanting to go hunting, but I had to attend a safety meeting at work, a meeting that lasted until noon,” Ritchie said. “After the meeting, I drove home, grabbed my gear and headed for my stand around 1 p.m.”
Fortunately Ritchie didn’t have far to go to reach his stand; he lives and hunts on 30 acres near Goodwill in West Carroll Parish, and the walk to his deer stand covered all of 250 yards.
“I had put out some piles of corn and rice bran, and had ranged the distances of the piles from the box stand I hunt because, since I was hunting with my crossbow, I needed to know how far I’d be shooting,” Ritchie said. “At 50 yards, my bow shoots flat, but after that it starts dropping.
A couple of hours into the hunt, deer began showing up to snack on the corn and bran.
“It started getting pretty late, and I knew the hunt would soon be over when I looked up and there stood two big bucks in my lane 50 yards from my stand,” he said. “What surprised me is that I had trail cameras out and I had never seen either one of these bucks.”
His first inclination was to focus on the buck with fewer points, but he soon changed his mind.
“One was a big 9-point buck that, at first, I thought was more impressive of the two,” Ritchie explained. “The 12-point buck was standing broadside at 50 yards, so I put the crosshairs on him and squeezed off a shot.
“He hunkered up and took off.”
Ritchie sat for 30 to 40 minutes to give the deer time to expire, and then he got down, walked over to where the deer was standing and found nothing. Not a drop of blood, no hair, no arrow. Nothing.
“I began having doubts: Did I aim too high, too low, did I completely miss the deer?” he said. “So I decided to walk back to the house, tell my wife about my bad shot and lick my wounds.”
Wife Amanda would not hear of it. She’d seen him shoot and knew he was an excellent marksman; she felt in her heart he’d killed the buck. So grabbing lights, they headed back to the woods.
“The first thing we found was a big spot of blood,” Ritchie said. “There was a good blood trail for 30 yards or so, and then it dwindled away to nothing. At this point, I was really feeling discouraged and just knew I’d messed up big time.”
They took a break, went back home, got some water and, although he wanted to give up, Amanda Ritchie insisted they go back and look some more. So they did.
Fifty yards from where the last drop of blood was found, Mitchell Ritchie found his broken arrow covered with blood.
“That really got me excited because I knew then I’d probably made a good shot,” he said. “We continued to search, covering maybe 10 yards in half an hour. I was finding a tiny speck of blood occasionally when the trail led into a tangle of briars and brush.
“We got down on all fours and looked for blood.”
Ritchie told his wife to stay with the last drop of blood they found while he made just one more round. He said his heart wasn’t in it and he was sure the deer was lost.
“I stepped around a cedar tree, shined my light around and the beam settled on the rump of the deer; he was dead,” Ritchie said. “I could see one side of his rack but not the other, so I didn’t know what I had.
“When I got around and picked up his head, I saw a rack I couldn’t believe.”
The couple pulled and tugged on the deer, getting him to a fairly clear spot, went home and got the four-wheeler. However, there was no way the two could lift the heavy-bodied buck onto the machine.
“I didn’t have a rope, so we used my belt,” Ritchie said. “I bear-hugged the deer enough for Amanda to get it around his neck, and she hooked the belt to the rear rack of the four-wheeler.
“We dragged the deer to the house.”
By now, the clock read well past midnight and, after gutting and skinning the buck, cutting it up and putting it on ice, it was 3 a.m. They had no scales capable of weighing such a large animal, but Ritchie weighed him in parts, including the hide and guts, and the total weight was just slightly over 300 pounds.
The buck, a symmetrical 12-point, carried a 19-inch spread and scored 159 7/8 at Simmons Sporting Goods.
Would Mitchell Ritchie have been able to recover his buck without the help of his wife? Possibly, but with Amanda Ritchie prodding him on, the odds, were tipped decidedly in his favor.
