The critter corner in rainier.
Ok here's the story. My buddy and I decided about a month ahead of the season that we were going to try to see what pomeroy had to offer this year. He grew up in pomeroy and his family owns a school section out there. I had always hunted the okanogan country and felt like a change. We only had 4 days so we decided to use Friday to scout.(modern firearm). We showed up late Thursday night and since we weren't going to be there long we hauled the trailer. We got up early Friday and headed out. By noon we had counted almost 75 deer. 26 bucks, 13 of which were legal!
! Needless to say I was getting a little anxious! For the evening jaunt we decided to check out a stretch of area about 15 miles away. When we got there we were surprised to see about 20 whitetail and 11 mule deer, all feeding within 200 yards of each other. So we decided if the morning hunt of the opener was a bust we would head there for the evening. Well that's exactly what happened! On the way in to the area we busted 4 turkeys up and thought we were ruined. Much to our surprise we had beat the deer in there. We sat for about 15 minutes and we started seeing deer filtering out of this draw. But they were coming in about 500 yards farther than the night before!
! Pretty soon I saw a big bodied deer coming through some crp. When he got out of the deep stuff I very quickly noticed he was a nice buck!(legal) . We watched him for 2 hours trying to let him get closer, there was no such thing as a stalk in this area. While I contemplated taking a 600 plus shot, my buddy whispered there's another legal buck, I looked and there was a very decent mule deer at about 300. So I told my buddy to go ahead and take him, he was a lot closer to us. My buddy raised up and BOOM, deer scattered everywhere! I looked up at the buck I had been watching and he was still standing there looking our direction like WTF was that?
I couldn't take it! Shootin sticks came out! I shoot a Ruger mkII 7mm rem mag, 168 gr. Berger vld's. I said here we go, he said your gonna take that shot? I said I'm very confident in this rifle and my ability! (I was shaking like a leaf!) I buried the crosshairs a little above the shoulder, and squeezed it off! The 7 mag barked and the following THWOP confirmed a solid hit! The buck went about 20 yards and did his death wobble and was done! Longest shot I've ever taken on a big game animal! I couldn't have been a happier man at that moment! My buddy missed!
