Here are a few pics of the buck I shot “instead”.
Oh, look, I can make him look
huge:
Haha.
The reason for the last pic (it just turned out that “yuge” way) is that the guy appeared to be a warrior. Take a closer look at his left antler:
There used be a drop tine that was broken off a while back. His G3 on that antler was “shaved” off fairly recently. Definitely a cool deer. Without a doubt I would rather take the one I thought I was shooting, but what are you gonna do. No complaints on my part.
What happened, I think, was that while the big boy was wrecking the bush, this guy wasn’t too far away and came to check it out. Unfortunately for him (and
maybe for me as I am still
kind of “salty”), he happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.