Hunter says a father-son pair on shared property took the big buck he’d been tracking — and then kept piling up deer

A hunter in r/Hunting said he was already irritated before he even finished hearing the full story. In his post, he explained that his uncle lets him and a father-son pair hunt the same property, and when he asked how they were doing, the answer hit him wrong fast. He said they had taken the “big buck” he’d been tracking, which he admitted was fair enough, but that was not where it stopped. According to him, his uncle also said that one of them had gotten three deer in one day and would have had a fourth if he’d had more arrows.

From the way he wrote it, the buck part stung, but the bigger issue was everything else that came with it. He said he was in Ontario and did not see how a guy could legally take three solo archery deer in one day in his area. He even added that once he heard what had been going on, other things about the property started making sense too, like why the bedding areas seemed to disappear after mid-December even though it should have been ideal wintering ground. The whole post had that feeling of somebody suddenly realizing the place had been getting hammered harder than he thought.

He did not make it sound like he had blown up at his uncle or confronted the other hunters right there. He said he just smiled and nodded, but that his blood was boiling. That probably told the story better than anything else in the thread. He was standing there hearing that the buck he had been watching was gone, and on top of that, the property might be getting overhunted or worse, and all he could really do in that moment was eat it.

The comments came back with a mix of sympathy and hard truth. Some people told him flat-out that it was not his ground and that if the landowner was allowing it, there was only so much he could do. One hunter said the unpopular answer was probably to find somewhere else to hunt, and the original poster answered that he agreed and was not interested in hunting there again. That reply alone gave you a pretty good sense of where his head was by that point.

Other comments got into the tag side of it and whether there was any legal way the father-son pair could have been doing what the uncle described. The hunter explained that in Ontario you get one tag with your license and can sometimes buy extra tags depending on the wildlife management unit, but not in a way that made the whole thing sound normal to him. A few people told him to report it if he thought laws were being broken. Others basically told him that if his uncle knew and did not care, then the place was never going to be managed the way he wanted anyway.

What makes the story stick is how fast it turns from disappointment into that sinking feeling that the whole property might be getting run into the ground. First the big buck is gone. Then the deer numbers start sounding off. Then the way the bedding areas empty out starts clicking into place. By the time he finished the post, it did not sound like a guy mad over losing one deer. It sounded like a hunter realizing the property he cared about was being hunted in a way he wanted no part of.