fishing and hunting: Mule Deer Adventures 2014

I had a great, though brief, solo 2014 mule deer hunt to start the season.

I had booked off the entire two week season but ended up shooting my buck on the first morning of hunting. It was nice to have the time to leisurely skin and butcher my deer, spend some time at my cabin, and also get in a great end-of-season duck and goose shoot with some buddies.

My boys were also drawn and they had a full week break from university during the second week of the season. Excellent! Whoever made that schedule change must be a mule deer hunter, I sure wish I would have had the same break when I went to school.

With my tag cut I was really hoping to be able to find a couple of good bucks for the boys.

It didn't take long to see a nice wide buck on our first morning out. Parker had first dibs and was ready to pass him up because of a missing tine on his right antler. Then, he saw the buck had a couple of non-typical points and he decided he wanted him.

Parker lined up on him and hit him hard twice from about 170 yards. I couldn't see exactly where the hits were but they were both solid whumps.

We walked up to the area where we last saw him and he jumped up and ran hard. He was in a lot better shape than what we had thought! Park took one quick shot at the departing buck and put it over his back. We both looked at each other and thought, "This might end up being a lot tougher than we thought."

Thankfully, the buck didn't go far and seemed to run out of steam. He bedded and we could see his antlers sticking up above some brush so we sat down to keep an eye on him. Ever so slowly his antlers started to tip to the side as it looked like he was fading away. Seeing his head laying sideways on the ground like that, I was thinking that it had been a liver shot that had resulted in the buck's slow but sure death.

So now it was time to find Mack a buck. We moved to a different area and were hoping we hadn't used up all of our luck. Just as we got to the new area we spotted some does on a hillside. They started to move off and were being followed by a big-bodied, beautiful red mule deer buck. His coat looked just like a whitetail's and he had a double throat patch, I'd never seen one so pretty and he really stood out from the other gray deer.

He cleared a fence in front of us and disappeared into some brush. We got a quick picture of him through the windshield of the truck as he jumped.

Mack and Park loaded up and started to move off in hopes of cutting off the buck while I stayed back a bit and watched a clearing between two giant cottonwoods to see if the buck would cross.

Before long I spotted him sneaking through the brush and then accross the clearing. His coat was unmistakeable. I caught up to the boys and we moved ahead to the next clearing and set up.

It didn't lake long until he came through the bush and stopped at the edge of the clearing.

I ranged him at 98 yards as Mackenzie fiddled with the legs of the bipod. I was getting exasperated and told him, "Never mind what height it's at, just SHOOT! This is your shot.

You can see in the video that the buck took a step just as Mack shot and the bullet hit a little far back but his followup was right through the heart.

.......a little blood was spilled but Mackenzie took it all in stride.

The rest of the day was spent having lunch and taking pictures of the various critters in the area. It was a beautiful day and the animals were out in full view.

At dusk we decided to set up in my favourite whitetail area and do some rattling. We got distracted by all of the wildlife around us and never quite made it into my area.

Most of these pics were taken after sunset and at 200x zoom (yes, 200x!) so the quality is not great.

Six bull elk made their way out into a flat to the northwest of us to feed. Here's two of them.