I got last season’s whitetail put up today. My hunting partner, Jack, did the taxidermy for me. I’ll share a little of the story with you. He calls me at work and says,” Get your stuff packed up we drew a foothills-B late season whitetail tag and we need to go scouting”. We scheduled a trip to Pomeroy to find out that most of the lower parts of the unit were private. We then decided to make a list of all of the names of landowners that we could find and start calling when we got back home. After a ton of phone calls and some persistence, (some farmers took several calls to reach but if they said no we respected that), we felt that we had enough area to hunt. Our schedules allowed us to hunt starting the 6th of November thru the 16th. If you remember, the weather was unusually warm, in the 50’s and 60’s. The first three days of the hunt were very poor to say the least, so we decided to leave camp where it was and head to Idaho. We already had tags and had gotten some information on a good place to go near Orofino. Apparently, neither Jack nor I are worth a damn at following directions. We decided to get a motel room and looked over our Idaho map. We found a big chunk of public land near Kooskia and headed for it the first thing the next day. We pulled up to a gate that was marked as public land and made a deal that we would take the first two deer we saw. A few hours later we were on our way back to our camp near Pomeroy. I wish I could tell you the first deer we saw were big bucks but that would be a lie. Two doe were our prize. Oh well, at least we got a little meat. Now it’s the sixth day of our hunt and we left camp to check a spot that we called the lookout. Jack was glassing down the valley and I was glassing up and across. I told him, “There is a pretty good buck following a doe!” We decided to drive up the road, then got out and started hiking his direction. Just as we topped a little rise he snorted at us. That was his last mistake. An 18” wide three point with 2 ½” eye guards, no huge buck but I was happy to have him as my first whitetail. We got him back to camp and taken care of then headed back out to look around some more. We stopped by the farmer’s place that had given us permission to hunt and told him we had gotten one off his land. He told us we should make sure camp was in good shape to withstand a wind storm. We headed for camp and tightened up the tie down ropes on the tent and prepared for the storm. Holy cow! He wasn’t kidding about the wind. We got up the following morning to the wind still howling and figured that hunting was going to suck. We were there so we might as well get to it. We spent the first half of the day getting blown out of every spot we checked, so we went into Pomeroy for some supplies. On the way back we ran into the farmer who had warned us about the wind. He told us that the wind was 45 mph to 50 mph with gusts up to near 60 mph but that it should die down after dark. We were feeling a little down and not expecting to see anything as we checked one last spot before heading for camp. We had not quite gotten to the spot when Jack shouted, “There is a buck!” I called B.S. but he was already out and lying on the ground. I grabbed the video camera but the wind was blowing so hard that the whole truck was shaking too much for the camera to focus. He lay there for what seemed like ten minutes. Every time the wind would die a little I expected him to shoot, but nothing. Then just before a big gust hit, Kaboom! I jumped out and the wind tore the door out of my hand. I yelled to Jack, “You got him!” We headed down over the hill just a bit and there was almost no wind in the small draw that the buck had been in. We ranged the shot, 290 yards, not bad shooting for the conditions. Jacks’ first whitetail was also a three point with about 2 ½ “eye guards. We got him back to camp, hung and skinned, then celebrated with a cocktail or two before bed. The next morning we broke camp, stopped by the farmer’s place where we had taken both of our bucks, thanked him generously, and headed for home.
