I decided to hunt with a Marlin M336 in .35 Rem. this year. I’d never used a “medium bore” and wanted to bag one with cast bullet with it. (Have shot most of my deer with a .30-06, mostly with cast bullets, and one with a .45-70 and a CB.)
We hunt public land in a river bottom and usually use tree stands. I got up in my stand opening morning before light and shortly heard some noise behind me. I looked around and there was another hunter setting up on the ground 75 yards behind me.
What a jerk, I thought. Well, not exactly in those words, but you get my drift. 
About 10 minutes later I see something moving out of the corner of my eye and he’s moving up beside me on my left, 30 yards away. He noisily breaks a bunch of branches off a tree and sets himself up there! Of all the gall! I’ve never seen another hunter act like such a jerk. I figured saying something would just make matters worse, so I pulled out my camera and took a picture of him, flash and all. 
He then moved about another 75 yards to my left. About 20 minutes later his cell phone rang (in the deer woods!!!) and he met up with his other two buddies and they left the area. I found out later that one of his buddies had done the same thing to another guy from our party that was in a tree stand about 300 yards from mine. Oh yeah, they saw us, all decked out in the required Daylight Fluorescent Orange!
The next morning I got back up in the stand, and we had the woods to ourselves. I once again saw deer down by the river cover, too far away (250 yards or so). After a half hour of seeing noting, I started scanning with binoculars, and spotted a deer near the river cover that I didn’t notice because of intervening branches. It looked like a doe (we all had “antlerless” permits), but was too far away to shoot, and facing the river cover. I figured it would disappear down there, then it turned and headed down a trail that came near my stand. When it got close enough for a shot, I whistled a little to get it to stop, but it ignored me. I guess that doesn’t work as well for whitetails as it does for mule deer. It finally did stop 70 yards away, and I took a shot. It took off at a rather slow, limping run, but appeared to be hit fatally. I chambered another one just in case, but it never came out of a patch of snow berries it disappeared into, so I knew it was down. I took a few photos from the stand, then got down and followed her up.
Left X shows where the deer was at the shot, right X show where it went down. OOps right x cropped off. Right at the edge of the photo, next to the brush pile.
When I walked up behind her, I gave a little kick to the hind quarters to make sure she was dead, the walked around in front. Imagine my surprise when I saw two broken off horns on top of “her” head! The definition for “antlerless” is horns less than 5” long, so it was a legal antlerless deer.
My load was the RCBS 35-200-FN bullet cast of wheel weights and air cooled (12 BHN) over 39 grs. of AA2495. I haven’t chronographed this load, but it should do around 1900 fps. The bullet entered in front of the left shoulder and exited through the right shoulder, catching the front of the lungs. The deer hobbled about 75 yards before going down.
Since I had seen almost all the deer so far from the stand, Bruce and I moved it that afternoon about 150 yards closer to the river cover, and he got up in it. Just before sundown, a number of does came out of the river cover and he got one with his Rem. Model 7 in 7-08.
The other levergunner of the group was Denes, the guy we originally invited. By the end of the second day, he was the only one that didn’t have a deer yet. He hunted out of two different tree stands the first two days. On the afternoon of the third day, he got up in the stand Bruce used to get his deer, but didn’t see anything before dark. He got back up in it the next morning. We told him if he hadn’t seen anything by late morning, we’d do a drive. He texted us about 8:30 and said he was freezing his extremities off, and where were the drivers? We headed out and were going to do a drive from both upstream and downstream, but just as we were getting set up we heard him shoot.
He was using a Marlin M336 in .30-30 with Federal 150 gr. FN ammo. He shot a nice whitetail doe through the throat. Not exactly where he was aiming, but hey, it worked! She spread her front feet out at the shot, and about 10 seconds later fell over.
We usually gut our deer where they fall, but since we didn’t have a tarp to wrap it in for the drag out (keeps ‘em clean!), we drug it out before gutting.
The kids outgrew the sled years ago, and boy have we drug a lot of animals on it in the last dozen years! Slides over any kind of ground – no problem.
After field dressing, Denes loaded it back on the sled, slipped a trash bag on from each end, and stuck it in the back of his SUV. No muss, no fuss!
