We are all back home now, rested and ready to deal with reality. Rob and Tom’s reality is cutting and wrapping venison, mine is dealing with a mixture of memories of a great time with two fantastic friends and depression. There was never a dull moment around these two guys. If I wasn’t splitting a gut laughing at there antics, it was tossing and turning in our shared hotel room listening to father and son duel, snoring Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony in different octaves. Rob won, hands down, the night we had pizza for dinner. Tom argued the next morning that if it were his night on the roll-a-way cot he would have slept in the hallway. The trip overall was a success with a 66.66% success ratio. We spent most of our time roaming the roads checking out new areas and looking for a higher concentrations of deer. I did have my opportunities for a buck and in my case I proved that big bucks not only get big by being smart but being lucky and taking advantage of mistakes made by the pursuer. At the end of the last day the score was little buck-1, midsize buck-1, big buck-1 and steve-0. The little buck story was a story in itself and believe me I don’t have time to describe in detail the events leading to the decision to let him grow up a little. I named him pencil horn and your can take it from there. The medium buck story was more dramatic but still doesn’t compare with the Big Story.
The Big Story: Thursday morning started like many of the days before, except Rob decided to sleep in, leisurely eat breakfast and tour the town of Meeker on foot while Tom and I chased Mr. Big. The plan was to drop off Tom in the low lands so he could harvest a doe for freezer meat, which he purchased a left over doe tag, I would drive up to a spot that showed a lot of potential and was very close to the area that Rob had killed his buck.
I hiked to the top of the ridge where I could glass not only the canyon where I had parked, but also a plateau and bowl in the next canyon. When the sun was rising I realized that soon it would be difficult to watch the plateau since I was looking almost directly east. I noticed a doe grazing up the canyon headed for the bowl at about 600 yards and realizing that every deer I had seen in the morning was grazing up hill made me make the decision to sneak up the ridge and work into the bowl and glass the ridges for Mr. Big. I found a small ridge that lead to the base of the bowl that had lots of juniper for cover and quietly made my way to a point I could glass the upper bowl. The bowl had a hump in the middle that made a perfect vantage point using the hump to mask my advancement to deer in the lower sections of the bowl. I would take a couple of steps and glass the juniper and pinyon pines for a bedded buck.
I was nearing the head of the hump when all of a sudden I was staring eye to eye with Mr. Big. He was bedded under a pinyon tree on a grassy shelf about 130 yards up the hill. I was sure he could only see my head peaking over the hump so I slowly moved down to one knee, dropped my binoculars, shouldered my rifle, spread my new shooting sticks and placed my crosshairs right on his shoulder. His chocolate horns had ivory tips and were wider than his ears by several inches. My mind was racing, concentrating on his shoulder and just before I squeezed the trigger I noticed my horizontal crosshair was resting about an inch above the hump that was concealing my location. Knowing that my rifle was sighted in about an inch low at twenty five yards interrupted the thought process and created the break that Mr. Big needed. Slowly I adjusted my shooting sticks to elevate the bullets trajectory enough to miss the hump, but somewhere along the way I either clanked the sticks together or hit a rock with the tips of the stick. This slight sound was like a click before the bomb exploded and before I could say “Oh Shit” he was on his feet headed south. My first shot was a little to the right I think, because he turned east and headed for the rim of the bowl. With shooting stick flying one direction and the buck bounding across the slope the opposite direction the second shot didn’t find the mark either. I settled in for the next shot and found Mr. Big headed directly up a very steep wall, and after the recoil all was silent. No noise, no movement, just the beating of my heart and my first thought was that I had hit pay dirt. Knowing I had only one shot left, I began to worry that now the buck, if still alive, would appear near the top of the bowl and now in my state of mind I began to doubt my ability of a one shot kill. I waited about two minutes, which felt like hours, and then slowly pulled three shells from my shell holder, laid them on the ground and then quickly reloaded. After about an hour (five minutes maybe) I slowly made my way to the location I last saw the buck. The bench where he was bedded was on the northern exposure of the mountain and rarely saw the sun, so finding tracks was very difficult. I stomped my foot in the ground and could hardly see a print. I did about three circles of the area looking for tracks or blood and then hiked back down to where it all started the get better bearings. I started this time under the tree where it all started and finally found a set of tracks, followed them straight up the hill and over the top right behind one of the only trees that blocked my vision. That buck knew exactly how to get out without being seen and once over the top, turned directly into the wind for a clean escape. Smart or lucky, he won this round and the memory of this chase will be imprinted in my mind forever.
I have learned many lessons this year. The first is to get in better physical shape for hunting above the 6000 foot level and then I need to practice using shooting sticks. Hunting a new area for the first time has it challenges but next year with area knowledge, better physical shape and better shooting techniques maybe I can even the score.
Below is a short video recapping the Mr. Big event. Enjoy
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