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I strapped the buck into the sled with 550 cord and tied a length of rope around the antlers and another one around the back legs. Greg scouted out a route down the mountain while I was tying him up.
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So, there I was. In what was now fast becoming pitch dark. No flashlight (in my pack, back lower on the mountain), no OnX (funny how much I hate technology, but that is one thing I quickly became dependent upon), and no communications that I hadn’t already sent. I was about 2 miles from the road (no way I was bailing off that mountain the way I came in-that would be a death sentence).
I gutted my buck as best I could without light, propped him open to cool, and set off in search of my pack. That was a fun 30 minutes in the pitch dark. I finally found my pack and retrieved my headlamp for the hike out. Two hours later I was back at the road.
In my mind, the only way to get that buck out was going to be to hike back in there with a pack frame and take him out in quarters. If I wanted to keep the cape (which I did), it was likely going to be three trips. Everyone who was helping me had to be at work the next day, and Greg has a bad back, so it looked like it was going to be a solo endeavor.
Sitting down with Greg and Phillip that night, Phillip looked at the buck’s location on OnX. He pointed to the stacked contour lines that I had climbed up to get to him.
“That’s all downhill” He said. “Just take him down that.”
“You’re crazy” I said “I came UP that hill. It’s way too steep. With a pack with 100 lbs of meat, I’d fall to my death.”
“Nah.” Phillip said. “I’ve got something that will work.”
Rummaging around in his garage, he pulled out one of those roll-up toboggans that easterners tie deer into to drag them out.
“Just put him in this. Tie a rope to his antlers, and lower him down the hill. Gravity will do all the work.”
I still doubted that Phillip had a clear picture of what that “hill” entailed, but Greg agreed that it was a better option than making three trips at two miles each way to pack him out.
The next morning, Greg was waiting for me. We had served in the Army together as senior NCOs before he retired in 2010 and me in 2011. Despite bad knees, bad back and a host of other ailments, he insisted on going in there with me and doing what he could to help. I was overwhelmed with gratitude, although to be honest, I was a little worried that he would get injured. I dropped my truck off at the bottom of the mountain, and we drove Greg’s truck around to take the more gradual hike in.
We took it easy on the two mile hike to get to the buck. Around 8am we heard a shot coming from the hillside where Limpy was the day before. Sounded like a hit, but we didn’t see the two orange clad hunters from the day before.
Halfway up the mountain, it was pretty clear exactly where my buck was laying. Crows and magpies were all over my deer.
When we chased them off, we took stock of the damage they had done. They had gotten inside of the propped open body cavity and pecked out about half the exposed ribcage and ruined one tenderloin. One eye was pecked out.
Greg and I took a few more pictures, but between the rigor mortis and the pecked out eye, we couldn’t really get any good photos, so we got to work.
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Having two hours to watch him at pretty close range, there was no ground shrinkage or ground growth when I walked up to him. He was exactly what I thought; about a 160 inch buck. By the time I covered the 350 or so yards to get to him, it was getting dark. Pulling out my phone, I texted a few people to let them know I had a buck down (particularly Greg, who would have to meet me on the road), and realized that using my phone all day had drained my battery to 1%. I had to call my son in Fort Benning so he could talk me through how to set a timer on my phone to take a picture. I set the phone up on a burnt greasewood branch and set the timer. My phone snapped one photo, and promptly died.
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Unfortunately, when I got up, they spotted me. And there we stood for about 3 minutes, locked on each other. There was a large pine tree about 10 yards to my left. I slowly started to inch towards it. The buck (about 500 yards away at this point) stayed locked on me until I disappeared.
Lining up with the tree, I slowly backed out, keeping the tree between up. When I got out of sight, I made a beeline round to the west, and then up the steep hill.
20 minutes later I crested the back side of the hill. I had 10 minutes of shooting light left. Laying prone, I glassed the lone tree. The doe was up feeding, with the buck bedded next to her. They had come off the private ground and were close to the top of the hill. I found him in my rifle scope and got a range. 391 yards. I noticed some brush between me and the buck. His vitals were covered up by the greasewood he was laying in, so I crawled forward until I was clear of the brush, putting me closer to 350 yards from him. I had just gotten prone and found him in my scope again when the doe moved a little too far from him for his liking. I would have liked about a minute longer to get comfortable before taking the shot, but it was going to be now or never. I found his shoulder and squeezed the trigger, just as he was taking a step forward. I heard the shot hit, and he stopped, kind of hunched. The second shot dropped him in his tracks.
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“I can drop you off on the backside of that mountain.” Offered Greg. “You could hike up in there with a good wind and try to get eyes on either buck.”
I looked at “the backside of that mountain” out of the truck window. It went straight up. My OnX showed contour lines stacked on top of each other. Lots of them.
But, it was public land all the way to the top, and it would bring me into the saddle between the two hills. One buck on each hill. Good chance one of those bucks would be in or around that saddle at some point before dark. I stripped my pack down to just the essentials, and started toeing my way up the hill. After the first 100 yards, it became apparent that even OnX had underestimated the steepness. Most of the mountain was a four-points-of-contact deal, using hands and feet to climb it. Straight line distance on OnX showed 528 yards. Stupid OnX. Liar.
Over an hour later I eased over the top of the saddle, breaking into cell service for the first time since leaving the truck. I got a message from Rusty with a video of Limpy following a herd of does back onto public land. There were several deer in the saddle. Young bucks and does, chasing each other around like a playground. There was a small 4 point, a 3 point and a couple of fork horns. No big bucks bothering any of them. I eased around them and climbed a grassy hill to glass. The two orange figures were gone from the draw, but Limpy was nowhere to be seen. I assumed he was back in the timber on the private ground that Rusty had seen him go into. I started glassing the other hillside. It took me about 3 minutes to locate the other, bigger buck with his harem.
He was hard at it. Looked like he had a hot doe that he was sticking with like glue, never letting her get more than about 20 feet from him. She trotted back and forth, trying to feed, but they stayed planted pretty solidly on the patch of private ground. I pulled out my OnX. The strip of land they were on came in like a long finger from a ranch to the east. It was fenced off with BLM fencing that had white tags on it, so the borders were easy to see. Only the face of the hill was private, and the approach from the east. If the deer moved uphill, downhill or to the west just a few hundred yards, they would be on public. I had two hours before dark. I figured sitting on them was my best chance. I crept closer to the BLM fence and set up in some boulders.
At one point, the buck got tired and bedded down, only 192 yards from me and took a nap. When he got up to follow his doe though, she went back uphill, taking him deeper into the property. Then, about 45 minutes from the end of shooting light, she started feeding uphill towards a lone tree. I checked my phone. The lone tree was only 66 yards from the fence. When they reached the tree, I got up. My plan was to back down and make a looping stalk around behind them, up the steep hill that I had come up. At the rate they were going, they would be well over the border by the time I got there.
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The trouble was, he and his does, were currently on private land. A strip of private land tore right across the hillside that he and his does were running back and forth on. Surrounded on three sides by public, he would have to move to be fair game.
Glassing another hillside, Greg spotted another buck. We got the spotting scope on him and determined that he was a shooter as well. Not as tall or deep forked as the other buck, this one also had a harem of does. He was wide and heavy, with a crabby front fork that crowned into three points. We watched him chase his does over the top of the hill into private land. Then we noticed two orange clad figures in the draw below him, glassing uphill. Figuring they must have known about the buck, we decided to back out and drive to another glassing point to reassess. We were seeing smaller bucks now, all chasing does, so we figured that it was only a matter of time before something big poked it’s head out someplace.
We hiked back to the truck and drove to another vantage point, when Rusty, one of the whitetail tag holders, sent me a video of a buck that he said he could see on public land. It was the wide, heavy buck. He was back on public ground with his does, in a different spot. “He’s limping really badly on his front leg”. The video confirmed that. Greg and I had not noticed that when we saw him earlier.
97
The next morning dawned colder and clearer. No fog. Another buddy of mine, Greg took the day off to show me where he had seen a couple of bucks the day before. We drove out to a glassing spot and set up the spotting scopes. Immediately we began seeing deer. Before long, on a hillside about 2 ½ miles away we spotted a herd of does. From out of frame, a big bodied deer came barreling through them, neck stretched out. We decided we needed to get a closer look at him.
We relocated the truck, parked and started to hike in, setting up on a grassy hill about a mile and a half from the hillside. It didn’t take long to determine that the buck was a shooter. Tall, with deep fronts and wider than his ears, I decided that if I had the chance, I would go after this buck.
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The next morning, Phillip, another buddy of mine took the day off work to show me some spots he knows.
The first half of the morning was more of the same; fog banks, small doe groups feeding unbothered by bucks, and rain. Looked like it was shaping up to be another disappointing day. Phillip is an optimist by nature, and kept cheerfully saying “We’ll see something. They can’t avoid breeding forever”. As we drove from one glassing point to another, I looked out the rain-spattered window and spotted a deer, about 100 yards downhill from us. “There’s a little buck.” I said casually, as Phillip stopped the truck and I pulled up my binoculars to look at the surprisingly heavy 2x2. I was staring at him, wishing he was 3 years older when Phillip leaned over me and whispered, “Big buck to his right!” I scanned over 20 yards, and sure enough, there were 3 deer that I hadn’t seen. All three bucks, and one of them was big. His head was turned to the side, but I saw deep forks and a heavy rack. No width needed! I dropped the binos and grabbed my rifle and clip. As I slipped out of the truck, the 2x2 started to take off and I knew the gig was up. By the time I racked a round and flipped out the bipods, they were disappearing into the canyon below. At that exact instant, a thick fog rolled in, covering everything for the next 20 minutes. We could hear the bucks moving up the other side of the canyon, unseen. When it cleared we made a 2 hour effort to locate them, with no luck.
The good news was that when the fog lifted around noon that day, it lifted for good. And the hold on the rut activity seemed to lift with it. First, we started seeing small bucks, noses to the ground, cruising. Then we started seeing larger ones; not shooters, but a young 4 point and a big crab-clawed 3 point, both dogging does pretty hard. I spoke to a couple of whitetail tag holders that were seeing the same thing, sending me photos and video.
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The next morning I am in my truck, in the rain, about a mile from the pin that Hunter had dropped for me, waiting for daylight. Just as gray light began to break, I started to ease up the road through the patchy fog. Movement to my right at the base of a cliff wall. Two does. Then another and another. Through the fog, like a ghost came the buck. One of the biggest 3 points I have ever seen. He was 25 or 26 inches wide, tall, heavy, big backs, but no front forks. Looked pretty cool through my scope at 200 yards, pushing does around in the mist. No way I am punching my tag on a 3 point the first 5 minutes of an 8 day hunt. Boy, he sure looked cool though. Besides, a mile ahead of me was a 170” class buck, locked down with a harem, just waiting for me. Right?
That’s when the fog rolled in. Really rolled in. Pea-soup, can’t see 50 feet, won’t lift, won’t burn off, FOG. For two days.
For the rest of that day, and until about an hour before dark the next, all I could see was fog. The only deer I saw, were right next to me. When it cleared about 4 pm the next day, it felt like someone had turned the rut off like a faucet. For the next 3 days, when we saw deer (between fog banks), we only saw doe groups and small bucks. At one point, right before dark, I drove past an ag field with a load of deer in it (almost 50). There were several small bucks out there, but nothing even approaching mature, and not one of them even acting “rutty”.
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I think at this point, looking back on it, I must have contracted a case of buck fever. Nothing I did for the next 10 minutes made sense.
Instead of getting up and finding a place to get prone or set up my bipods, or set up my tripod shooting saddle, I just squirmed and fidgeted clinging to the side of the mountain and going back and forth between my binoculars and my rifle scope. I would find him in the binos, then not be able to find him in the scope.
Of course I couldn’t find him in my scope. I was perched on the side of a mountain, with only one bipod leg resting on the ground.
For what seemed like 10 minutes (I have no idea how long it actually was) I played this game, evidently in a low-grade panic the whole time, incapable of detaching myself from my binoculars and seeking out a place to get steady and take a shot. Slowly, the buck began moving away from me up the hill towards the dark timber. The further he got from me, the more I think I panicked. My shuffling and shifting must have finally caught his attention, because the last look I got at him, he had me pegged. Staring at me, ears alert. More panic. He started making for the timber, not running, just walking quickly. I took a shot. As soon as I pulled the trigger, I saw the crosshairs bounce off of him. I racked another round and took a hail mary shot just before he disappeared. Dumb. Just dumb.
As my brain slowly returned to the planet earth, all the stupid things I had done over the last 15 minutes began to occur to me. I started seeing places I should have moved to before setting up. It never dawned on me that I could have shot prone (a large, flat rock 20 feet behind me would have been perfect). Or that as soon as I spotted deer filtering through the timber I should have pulled out my tripod and started adjusting the legs for the steep hill angle. Why did I spend all that time looking through my binoculars to relocate him for the 10th time, when I knew that I was not in a steady position to shoot? I cannot explain any of it. It was like 40 years of deer hunting experience disappeared and I was 13 again.
The worst of it was all the work that Hunter had done to get me on him. He thought he was going to get to see (in his words) “The biggest deer I have ever seen in this state during a hunting season” hit the ground. If you have never been in this situation before, I can tell you that no apology sounded sufficient.
I assumed (since I shot at him twice) that he would leave the basin for parts unknown. Hunter told me that was not necessarily the case (I should have listened), but I already felt guilty for leaving the Sergeant Major with 100 cadets for longer than I had promised him, so I decided to pack up and head home to work for a day before my wife and I had to leave for our anniversary trip.
Dumb move.
Hunter called the next day. Buck was back in the same basin chasing does. No way for me to get back there and do anything about it.
To make a long story short, while my wife and I were in Arizona, another tag holder found the buck and killed him. Word on the street is that he scored 187”…
Try sleeping after you screw THAT up…’
5 days later I was back at work, counting the hours until my scheduled time off. 5pm, phone rings again. Hunter. Found another buck. Drop everything and get up here. Two days before my scheduled leave. The Sergeant Major told me to go. My students said “Just go!” Even my wife said “go!” So, I went.
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