Cruising along 63 yards away, the 8-point buck made his way past John Blaich's stand on the second day of Missouri's firearms deer season.
"I'd already decided I was going to shoot anything that came by because all I saw on Saturday was does," said Blaich, who was hunting on his family farm in Butler County.
With rifle in hand, the Poplar Bluff dentist grunted to the deer, readied for the shot, took careful aim and squeezed the trigger, sending a thick cloud of smoke into the cold morning air.
As the smoke cleared, Blaich's buck laid motionless, dropped in its tracks.
"He went down like a ton of bricks," Blaich exclaimed. "I had held on his shoulder as he was walking, and hit him in the neck. It was a lucky shot."
While the scenario played out across the state that same day, Blaich's was different. He wasn't shooting a modern centerfire rifle with minute-of-angle accuracy or a shotgun with slugs. No, this was no normal rifle -- it was an Isaac Haines Pennsylvania-style flintlock muzzleloading rifle, and the best part about it was Blaich built it himself from a rough kit, taking just more than a year to complete the project.
"Our forefathers depended on these rifles," he said. "To be able to recreate one of their rifles gave me an understanding of how truly remarkable these pioneers were."
The building procedure, he said, is painstaking but rewarding.
"It's really a cool process," Blaich said.
Blaich described the Jim Chambers Flintlocks rifle kit components as "completely rough."
From shaping, sanding and finishing the curly maple wood stock and brass accoutrements to precisely fitting the sights, lock, drilling the flash hole and even cutting a custom metal file to fit the 38-inch octagonal barrel, the process is time consuming.
"It's therapy for me," Blaich said, "... a kind of a mind release. I put on a baseball game and work on the rifle for an hour or two at a time.
"I invest about 100 hours on them to build. I could do it in less, but where's the fun in that?"
The fact he killed the buck with the flintlock rifle also happened to be a bit of a happy accident because, originally, it was destined to be an heirloom passed down to a son-in-law, just like his previous hand-built rifle.
"The gun had a couple of flaws in the wood, so I decided to rest it," Blaich said. "But it shot so well, I decided to hunt with it."
Indeed, the rifle was accurate. With 70 grains of loose Pyrodex powder launching a patched round ball, Blaich was getting 1-inch groups at 50 yards.
That has fed his desire, and with a successful hunt behind him, Blaich now has aspirations to build more flintlock rifles in the future, including two in the coming year.
"I still have a long way to go in my building skills," he said, "so the sense of accomplishment was more of a goal toward a longer game plan."