A hunter on Reddit said one of the closest calls of his life came on his own private property, about a mile from any road, during what had started as a completely normal bowhunt. In the thread, he said he climbed his tree, settled in, and waited until a nice doe finally came down the trail. He was just coming to full draw when everything changed in an instant. According to his comment, a gunshot cracked through the woods — “BANG” — and the doe he was lining up on dropped after taking only about 10 steps. He said some “jackass poacher” had shot the deer without even knowing he was there.
The story is short in the original thread, but it does not need much padding to feel ugly. He was already in position, bow drawn, focused on the deer, when somebody else fired a gun into the same patch of woods. That is the part that makes the whole thing land so hard. It was not a scare from bad weather or a dangerous climb into a stand. It was another hunter or poacher sending a bullet into an area where a person was already set up, apparently without ever realizing it.
What gives the story even more weight is where it happened. He specifically said it was on private property and about a mile from any road. That means this was not just some crowded public-land mix-up where two hunters accidentally worked too close to each other. From the way he told it, this was somebody who had no business being there in the first place, taking a shot at a deer on land that was not theirs, while another hunter was already in the tree with a bow in hand.
The bigger thread was about closest-to-death experiences while hunting, so his comment sat among stories about tree-stand failures, bad falls, and other accidents. But this one stands out because of how little control the hunter had over it. He was doing what he was supposed to be doing. He was on private land. He was bowhunting. He had a deer in range. Then somebody else turned the situation dangerous with a single shot. That kind of moment sticks with people because there is no way to plan around it once it starts.
So the story became one more reminder that trespassing and poaching are not just property-rights issues. In the worst version of it, they turn into safety threats for the people who actually belong there. This hunter was not talking about a camera moved or a stand set up on the wrong side of the line. He was talking about drawing on a deer and watching it get shot by someone else first, close enough to make the whole thing feel like it could have gone much worse than it did.
