A-hunting we will go, part the second...

So I went coyote hunting last night, never thinking about the fact that it is still deer season here. I saw some deer, including a couple of small bucks, across the canyon but I decided that if I did shoot a deer, it had to be bigger than anything I'd shot before. This wouldn't take much, but it would have to be bigger than those...

I set the Foxpro out in front of me and dialed in "The Screamin' Demon Blues" and let that play for a while. Nada. So I switched the caller to another homegrown fave, "The Dying Cottontail Swing". Nada again. The wind was coming up the canyon toward me, and it would gust up some once in a while, so I decided to bring out the big guns: Super Jack...

After about 10 minutes of that, and no coyotes, I was about to decide to pull up stakes and head for home, when something large and gray appeared out of the creekbed a hundred or so yards below me. Something large and gray with bones between its ears, bones I could see with the naked eye. I put the scope on the buck and my little heart started to pitter pat. Rapidly. It was just then that it dawned on me that I'd left my wallet home. Not just in the pickup. Home...

I watched the buck watch the hillside below me for a while, then decided to see if I could sneak out and get my wallet, hunting license, tag, knife, stone, shooting sticks, etc., all the things I normally pack with me and for some odd reason had left home. I left the Foxpro running so I could find it again and rolled up on one knee and started walking bent over around the hill. One last glance before I went out of sight told me the buck was still there...

I beat feet back to the pickup and zoomed home, got all my stuff, and tippy toed back to my seat on the hill. Of course the buck wasn't there, so I smiled at my good fortune at seeing him and settled down to wait for a coyote to show up. But five minutes later the buck strolled out of the brush and stopped broadside at about 150 yards...

Now lets keep in mind here that I was hunting coyotes, so I had my coyote rifle, a Savage .243, in my lap. One less than stupid thing I had done recently was to substitute some Federal 80 grain GameKing loads for my usual Hornady hollowpoints, just in case I did see a shootable deer. The buck was in the bushes with just his back showing so I took a shot and shot over him. Instead of running clear out of the country he trotted around the ridge another 25 yards of so and gave me another chance. I didn't miss that one...


My lovely long-suffering wife and I spent the next several hours getting him out of the canyon he was in, in pieces. This picture was taken at 11PM, which sort of explains why I look like a zombie...This by far the biggest buck I've ever killed. The rack unofficially gross scored 197 4/8's, and netted 193 3/8's...