Took this 2x3 (brow tine by my thumb that's almost 2" long) Muley on the last day of early archery. My wife, her sister, her sister’s husband (Jason) and myself decided to head to Winthrop for Ice cream and to meet up with a friend of Jason's for dinner. We brought the bows with as we both had not tagged a deer yet this year. Since it was just supposed to be a day trip we drove the cars. We went out in the evening for a little bit before dinner, just cruising a gravel road to kill some time. Saw 1 grouse, as it flew out of the road. We ran up the hill and I put an arrow in it at about 20 yds. All this fun had us itching to do some real hunting. We decided to stay overnight and hunt in the morning for deer. Jason and I headed out in his Prius, wearing T-shirts and jeans. Parked the car at the start of a brushy road, hiked to the end, and then split up to hike adjacent ridge lines. When we met up Jason had just jumped this buck and a spike. We split up again to try to head them off. He went low, I went high. He saw them again and pushed them right to me. After glassing this guy for what seemed to be an eternity, I realized the eye guard was over an inch. I ranged him at 51 yds. Took two steps to the left for a clear shot and put my arrow about 2" behind the front leg. He ran down a steep hill (almost straight down) and out of sight. We waited for 45 min and started to track him. There was not much blood for the first 40 yds or so, so it took a while to get on blood, but once we did it was very apparent he was shot well. Lots of pink blood and bubbles. At one point he crossed a log and there was blood spray at least 10' wide. About 50 yds later the blood trail took us to the edge of about a 30' cliff, and of course, he was at the bottom. He was double lunged and the only thing I could figure why he was able to get so far is because it was so steep. We gutted him and headed back to the car to drop off the bows and grab some rope. At this time our wives joined us. We drove the Prius as far down the road as we could (about 1 mile from the deer). We didn’t have packs or else we would have boned him out. We drug the deer to the Prius, tied him to the back, drug the beginning of the road (yes we did get video of the Prius dragging the deer), skinned him, put on game bags, and put him in the back of our car. We then drove to Mazama, got ice on him and took him to the butcher. Quite a memorable hunt indeed.
