ID_deerslayer
Active member
Finally have some time to report how my season turned out. I spent opening weekend focusing on helping my brother find a nice representative Montana muley since he traveled up from Idaho after drawing a non-res deer tag. He ended up tagging out opening day in the first 20 minutes of shooting light with a nice buck. After packing it back to the truck we tinkered around camp and prepped for an evening hunt. We didn’t end seeing anything that peaked my interest that night. The next morning we went back to the drainage where he had shoot his deer and saw a good number of whitetail deer and some decent bucks that we set up on, but I wasn’t ready to pull the trigger and passed on them and didn’t bother filling my doe tag either. The opener was a wrap.
After being sent out of town for work for the next two weeks I didn’t hunt so I could catch up on spending time with the family and doing some chores. I also had a planned week off to hunt so the stress level to fill my tags was low. A good friend of mine wanted to hunt together and the chores were caught up so I went out towards the highwood mountains with him and looked for some whitetail deer with him. He ended up shooting a really nice framed buck in a snow storm and I continued to pass on small deer that didn’t have the body size I was looking for. After packing his buck out to the truck we called it a day as we both had additional obligations to our wives that evening. Finally I headed back out to hunt the sweet grass hills hoping to find a deer I would want to shoot.
Day one of my week long hunt I had minimal activity and oddly saw several groups of doe’s with no bucks chasing them around. I found a lone whitetail doe that afternoon that needed to be harvested and made a good shot on her and she never left her bed. Got her butchered up and in the coolers quickly and called it a day.
Day two I was sitting and glassing over a deep coulee and again watched two different groups of doe’s wander through with no bucks trailing behind them. Way off in the distance I found a few bucks that had ladies to chase but were on land I couldn’t hunt. After about an hour and a half I decided to make a big loop around the north end of the coulee to where two other small coulees connected to the main one. I ended up bumping a few small bucks and watched them chase the girls around. I decided that I would sneak over a small rise that had a hidden cut in the coulee to see if I could glass up a deer after spending an hour watching the merger of two coulees into one. I just had a feeling there would be some animals in there. As I crept up to the rise to look in the direction of the small cut I throw up my binoculars and see the tips of some antlers. Then off to the right I see a doe looking towards the deep end of the coulee unaware of my position. I gain a few feet of ground set up the bipod and get a better look at the buck I had just seen. I’m glassing him and confirm he has a good sized body and a decent set of antlers. He’s a nice 3x3 framed deer, I think about how many big bodied three points I’ve shot for a split second, realizing that the number is zero and I decide I want to make a shot. As I’m getting into position the buck follows the doe into some scrub brush to feed. No shot and now he’s in the cut of the hill and I can’t see him. A quick relocation of position and the doe he’s following see’s me and spooks up towards the buck and above the brush. He follows her up and clears the brush before stopping to look for what has caught her attention. A quick range and I settled the crosshairs on him, a gentle squeeze of the trigger and the Kimber sends a 165 grain accubond right into his chest cavity. He trots up onto the top of the bench and stops again to have another look and then throws his head up in the air almost as if he is trying to smell me out, then lifts his front hooves up and falls backwards onto the ground and does a few kicks before lowering his head. I couldn’t believe I had just shot my first 3x3 framed deer and was thankful to have a good amount of meat to take home to my family. I got the buck butchered up and packed out of the coulee and spent the next day relaxing at camp and enjoying my time in the sweet grass hills area.
Friday evening I pulled up to the house and started unpacking my Subaru to have my daughter run out and meet me asking if I caught any deers. I told her yes and she immediately asked, “when can we eat them?!” I told we could start eating the meat after I processed it and she insisted that she help supervise the processing. After getting unpacked I quickly cleaned up my gear and got the wife ready for a day hunt that was happening Saturday with some friends. She tried telling me she was going to shoot the first deer she saw and I told that it would have to be a perfect situation for that to happen.
Saturday morning our friends pick us up at about 9:30 and we head out to try and get the wives tags filled. We finally make it to our hunting location and are climbing the coulee by 11 am. We find a small spike in the bottom of the coulee and I convince my wife to hold out since we had only been hunting for 30 minutes. She agrees and we keep hunting, playing a game I call “one more coulee.” We end up bumping a small 2x3 mule deer and decide to make a plan to relocate and shoot that deer. About 45 minutes later we have relocated the buck and sneak in from above him and set up to shoot him in a steep ravine. We wait for him to clear some doe’s he is with and my wife settles the cross hairs on his lungs. She squeezes the trigger and misses the buck high. Another round gets put in the chamber while the buck and his doe’s try to figure out who is shooting and from where. The range is 200 yards from us to the deer and my wife shoots again. Another miss. She is starting to get stressed out about missing and I tell it’s ok. I take a quick look at the rifle and we realize the bipod is missing a screw and causing a massive shift when the recoil occurs and is lifting the gun. The deer walks out of the ravine towards a flat out of sight and I try to calm my wife down. We back out from on top of the ravine and circle around a finger ridge to see if we can relocate the buck in the flat. Nope. We go and glass up some doe’s another finger ridge over and then decide to see if the buck from earlier circled back into the ravine. Sure enough he has and we setup one last time, this time using the wife’s pack as a rest instead of the malfunctioning bipod. Her nerves are still pretty high after missing the first opportunity and she misses. He starts climbing the other side of the ravine and stops to look back, perfectly broadside and she shoots again. This time she hits him and he side hills up and out of the ravine and I can see he’s bleeding out of the exit side of his ribs. We sit and wait for a few minutes before we head to where he was and I tell my wife that we will track him-via his blood trail. We first found his tracks and the game trail he used when he left the coulee and we find our first spot of blood. We then tracked from blood spot to blood spot and we found him 60 yards on the other side of the ravine in the sage brush hidden out of sight from above until you were almost on top of him. My wife let out a cheer of relief and I congratulated her on persevering in the face of discouragement when we were having rifle malfunctions. We got to work and packed out her deer to the truck to find out our friends wife had also gotten a deer, her first one and a nice little 4x4 mule deer.
All in all it was a season full of success and patience that lead us to a freezer full of meat that will feed our family for the next year. I’m very blessed to have the opportunities to hunt where I do and with the people that I hunt with.
After being sent out of town for work for the next two weeks I didn’t hunt so I could catch up on spending time with the family and doing some chores. I also had a planned week off to hunt so the stress level to fill my tags was low. A good friend of mine wanted to hunt together and the chores were caught up so I went out towards the highwood mountains with him and looked for some whitetail deer with him. He ended up shooting a really nice framed buck in a snow storm and I continued to pass on small deer that didn’t have the body size I was looking for. After packing his buck out to the truck we called it a day as we both had additional obligations to our wives that evening. Finally I headed back out to hunt the sweet grass hills hoping to find a deer I would want to shoot.
Day one of my week long hunt I had minimal activity and oddly saw several groups of doe’s with no bucks chasing them around. I found a lone whitetail doe that afternoon that needed to be harvested and made a good shot on her and she never left her bed. Got her butchered up and in the coolers quickly and called it a day.
Day two I was sitting and glassing over a deep coulee and again watched two different groups of doe’s wander through with no bucks trailing behind them. Way off in the distance I found a few bucks that had ladies to chase but were on land I couldn’t hunt. After about an hour and a half I decided to make a big loop around the north end of the coulee to where two other small coulees connected to the main one. I ended up bumping a few small bucks and watched them chase the girls around. I decided that I would sneak over a small rise that had a hidden cut in the coulee to see if I could glass up a deer after spending an hour watching the merger of two coulees into one. I just had a feeling there would be some animals in there. As I crept up to the rise to look in the direction of the small cut I throw up my binoculars and see the tips of some antlers. Then off to the right I see a doe looking towards the deep end of the coulee unaware of my position. I gain a few feet of ground set up the bipod and get a better look at the buck I had just seen. I’m glassing him and confirm he has a good sized body and a decent set of antlers. He’s a nice 3x3 framed deer, I think about how many big bodied three points I’ve shot for a split second, realizing that the number is zero and I decide I want to make a shot. As I’m getting into position the buck follows the doe into some scrub brush to feed. No shot and now he’s in the cut of the hill and I can’t see him. A quick relocation of position and the doe he’s following see’s me and spooks up towards the buck and above the brush. He follows her up and clears the brush before stopping to look for what has caught her attention. A quick range and I settled the crosshairs on him, a gentle squeeze of the trigger and the Kimber sends a 165 grain accubond right into his chest cavity. He trots up onto the top of the bench and stops again to have another look and then throws his head up in the air almost as if he is trying to smell me out, then lifts his front hooves up and falls backwards onto the ground and does a few kicks before lowering his head. I couldn’t believe I had just shot my first 3x3 framed deer and was thankful to have a good amount of meat to take home to my family. I got the buck butchered up and packed out of the coulee and spent the next day relaxing at camp and enjoying my time in the sweet grass hills area.
Friday evening I pulled up to the house and started unpacking my Subaru to have my daughter run out and meet me asking if I caught any deers. I told her yes and she immediately asked, “when can we eat them?!” I told we could start eating the meat after I processed it and she insisted that she help supervise the processing. After getting unpacked I quickly cleaned up my gear and got the wife ready for a day hunt that was happening Saturday with some friends. She tried telling me she was going to shoot the first deer she saw and I told that it would have to be a perfect situation for that to happen.
Saturday morning our friends pick us up at about 9:30 and we head out to try and get the wives tags filled. We finally make it to our hunting location and are climbing the coulee by 11 am. We find a small spike in the bottom of the coulee and I convince my wife to hold out since we had only been hunting for 30 minutes. She agrees and we keep hunting, playing a game I call “one more coulee.” We end up bumping a small 2x3 mule deer and decide to make a plan to relocate and shoot that deer. About 45 minutes later we have relocated the buck and sneak in from above him and set up to shoot him in a steep ravine. We wait for him to clear some doe’s he is with and my wife settles the cross hairs on his lungs. She squeezes the trigger and misses the buck high. Another round gets put in the chamber while the buck and his doe’s try to figure out who is shooting and from where. The range is 200 yards from us to the deer and my wife shoots again. Another miss. She is starting to get stressed out about missing and I tell it’s ok. I take a quick look at the rifle and we realize the bipod is missing a screw and causing a massive shift when the recoil occurs and is lifting the gun. The deer walks out of the ravine towards a flat out of sight and I try to calm my wife down. We back out from on top of the ravine and circle around a finger ridge to see if we can relocate the buck in the flat. Nope. We go and glass up some doe’s another finger ridge over and then decide to see if the buck from earlier circled back into the ravine. Sure enough he has and we setup one last time, this time using the wife’s pack as a rest instead of the malfunctioning bipod. Her nerves are still pretty high after missing the first opportunity and she misses. He starts climbing the other side of the ravine and stops to look back, perfectly broadside and she shoots again. This time she hits him and he side hills up and out of the ravine and I can see he’s bleeding out of the exit side of his ribs. We sit and wait for a few minutes before we head to where he was and I tell my wife that we will track him-via his blood trail. We first found his tracks and the game trail he used when he left the coulee and we find our first spot of blood. We then tracked from blood spot to blood spot and we found him 60 yards on the other side of the ravine in the sage brush hidden out of sight from above until you were almost on top of him. My wife let out a cheer of relief and I congratulated her on persevering in the face of discouragement when we were having rifle malfunctions. We got to work and packed out her deer to the truck to find out our friends wife had also gotten a deer, her first one and a nice little 4x4 mule deer.
All in all it was a season full of success and patience that lead us to a freezer full of meat that will feed our family for the next year. I’m very blessed to have the opportunities to hunt where I do and with the people that I hunt with.
