What do you harvest deer with?

My suggestion is to do this:

Buy a rifle for which you can get the ammunition you're going to use while you hunt at a reasonable price. Then, spend an bunch of time at the range shooting that exact same ammunition until you can do it as a reflex.

As others have said, the shooter matters more than the rifle if you're hunting deer.

I've hunted with a shotgun (all I can use in the county where I currently live), an SKS 7.62 x39 (the first rifle I owned) and a .308.

I enjoy shooting the .308 the most, but since I'm after meat, any one will work just fine.

spitfirebill wrote: When I was young, nobody hunted deed with a rifle. All the hunters around us used shotguns with 00 buckshot. A few used slugs. Today, I'm not sure I want to go into woods with a bunch of dumb asses with rifles. I don't know the exact details, but a follow who used to do contract work for the company I worked for was killed on a deer hunt. He was on a 4 wheeler trying to drive the deer through woods. Someone popped him. I don't know if it was an errant shot or someone thought it was a deer on a 4 wheeler. These guys lived and breathed hunting. I am still at a loss on how this happened.

Up in your neck of the woods, there's people who grow green stuff and make clear stuff both of which alter perceptions of reality. I was once warned by someone on the other side of the hills from you not to wander too far into the woods on a dirt bike for that very reason.

Curmudgeon wrote: Up in your neck of the woods, there's people who grow green stuff and make clear stuff both of which alter perceptions of reality. I was once warned by someone on the other side of the hills from you not to wander too far into the woods on a dirt bike for that very reason.

Here too. Got inspired to go exploring a power line road down in the county my wife is from. She was with me in the truck at the time.

She went ballistic.

Now mind you, this is a gal that's been hunting and trapping all her life. She's got no trouble at all getting along with the local SMIBs. But she wanted no part of going down that power line access road.

We sat there arguing a few minutes. Me insisting she's exagurating and that it's all long gone. Her insisting I'm an idiot and don't know what I'm talking about.

Boom! A beat up black truck explodes out of the wood something like 100+ yards down the power line road. Tears off away from us, in a cloud of dust...and flying canning jars and plastic buckets.

Just like the wife said they used. Splashes from some when they broke hitting the dry ground.

Silence in the cab of my truck as I sit there slack jawed staring out the windshield watching this guy go tearing down that dirt power line road away from us. Felt like I was in a PBS documentary about things from nearly a century ago (scary how long ago prohibition was now) watching him escape a revenuer.

Cold eyed stare from the wife as she muttered something like "I told you so, you idiot".

In reply to foxtrapper:

They still have to escape the revenuers.......those berkeleyers are better armed now. Most of those guys doing that E36 M3 are excellent outdoorsmen.

as a surveying student, I was doing field work with my instructor. we were doing a boundary survey in north-western Madison County (the NC one ). my instructor was from there and knew his way around . we stopped a farm house on the way, and he went inside and hired a kid to run out in front of us across each ridge to warn any and all that we were ok and not from the gument