Garrett Joles

Harvest Story: “Sleepy” Watched this deer the past 3 years and decided that this would be the year to kill him. We named him sleepy after getting around 100 photos throughout his life of him sleeping on top of a big community scrape, dozing off in front of our camera. Sleepy seemed to be a great name for him after he started doing this pretty consistently this year night after night. Hunting this deer was tough. Had multiple encounters and couldn’t seem to catch a break. My brother and I both were stumped on how to kill him in the hill country where we were dealing with swirling and inconsistent winds. “Sleepy” knew the property better than any deer I’ve ever hunted and never went anywhere unless he had the wind in his nose. Eventually I became hopeless after this deer caught our scent on three different occasions through the season. He just knew the property better than we did and I just came to the conclusion that I would have to be the luckiest man alive to kill this deer with a bow. By the 13th of November he was traveling 4-5 miles a day on a 2 mile radius loop searching for does. Knowing that more and more people were aware of this deer and the fact that he was traveling that distance really made me decide to swallow my pride of only trying to chase deer with a bow and to go after this thing with a gun. Opening day I hunted an observation stand that overlooked a recently logged section of our property that had the tops of the trees left, and it also has been great bedding in years past. I saw deer after deer that day as they moved from one bedding area to another. By late afternoon I had 20 deer in front of me feeding on the tops and multiple bucks sparing and working their way through the timber. At 4:26 the Sleepy appeared from the valley across from me and worked his way to the logged section where I had some openings I could shoot to. After that everything happened pretty fast. I readied my gun, took my shot which was about 200 yards through the woods, and watched him pile up in about 10 steps. Definitely exciting but also a bittersweet moment to put this deer to rest. He humbled me in ways no other deer has but has also forced me to become more knowledgeable in how to hunt some difficult terrain. Such a cool animal to hunt.