Odds were very good for him to draw, so when results were posted it wasn’t entirely unexpected when he text me. Even though it was expected it was still exciting and we began making plans for a scouting strategy. We purchased a couple more trail cameras and I was able to place and check them a couple times. Here are some of the bucks that had us especially excited:
The plan was for us to hunt the last half of the week so Cody booked a flight that would arrive late Sunday evening on November 4th. We arrived at the cabin about 10:30pm and prepared for the first morning of hunting. Sleep didn’t come easy for either of us and Monday morning came quickly. We hopped in the truck and headed for a vantage point to begin working the ridges. As soon as we got set up I spotted a nice buck cruising up the next ridge with his nose to the ground. He was trucking right along and there was no way for us to make a play on him and Cody decided that he wasn’t quite a “first morning” type buck anyway. Our plan was to work our way south but the wind was wrong so we turned and worked our way into the wind heading north. We ended up seeing a ton of deer but no bucks worth further pursuit. So we headed back to the cabin for a sandwich.
After lunch the wind had shifted so we decided to revisit our morning plan and work our way south into a large bowl that always seems to have game. As soon as we began dropping into the bowl I spotted a small group of deer down in the bottom. We sat and glassed a cluster of trees in the bottom for several minutes and spotted a couple deer working in and out of the trees. Cody decided that it was time to take matters into his own hands and be the aggressor. The wind was actually quite perfect for a stalk so he got the wind in his face and slowly made his way towards the trees while I sat and watched from about 600 yards away.
I lost his location as he neared the clump of trees and thought that the deer must have made their way out of there earlier unnoticed. Movement caught my eye as a doe burst from the trees… followed by another… then another. There were deer coming out of the trees everywhere, more than I anticipated. I scanned the deer searching for anything with antlers and didn’t see anything. Then in the bottom left of the field of view of my binos I saw something different. I noticed a large set of antlers protruding from the head of the last deer to emerge from the trees and almost as soon as I spotted him I was startled by the report of a muzzleloader. The buck ran a short distance and then slowly started working his way up a small fold in the bowl. A second muzzleloader blast caught me off guard and I just happened to be watching the buck at the time of the shot. The buck appeared to jump and quickly made his way to the top of a small clearing in the shade and stood motionless for several minutes. I thought that he was hit but by the way that he was acting it likely wasn’t a very good hit.
Cody slowly emerged from the trees and was glassing the area in front of him. I couldn’t tell if he could see the buck or not, so after several minutes I left my perch and hustled down to meet with Cody to let him know where the buck was. As I was nearing Cody’s location he started waiving frantically at me and I was waiving frantically back at him. Cody had seen the buck bed down and didn’t want me to spook it by coming in noisily while I was wanting to let him know to slow down because we really didn’t want to be pushing what I had thought was a poorly hit buck.
Once we realized we were on the same page, he let me know that both shots were actually misses and the buck was currently unharmed. While Cody and I were planning our next move we watched as 14 does that had scattered from the trees made their way back to where the buck was now bedded and just milled around him. I had never seen that before, this buck was the boss of that little group… the does actually came back to him!
We worked our way to within shooting range again but the buck was bedded with a number of does very near him so there really wasn’t much of a shot opportunity with the only part of his body visible being his face and antlers. So we waited… but Cody lost patience and took what was likely an ill-advised shot on a bedded buck with very little margin for error. After the smoke cleared the deer were gone so we began scanning the area where he was bedded and caught glimpses of deer scurrying through the trees in various directions. We scanned deer to the left and all were does, then some more movement caught our attention up and to the left of where they were bedded. The lead deer in this group was the buck so Cody readied his rifle. As the buck stepped into a small clearing in the trees he stopped, turned and looked back at the handful of does trailing him as if to tell them to hurry it up, and gave Cody just the half second he needed. The rifle barked, I watched the buck react to the impact, and then begin rolling down the hill.
The buck died half buried in some brush, so we untangled him and were pleasantly surprised and very pleased with the caliber of buck that was laying on the ground in front of us.
It was between 3 and 3:30pm so we worked quickly at getting the buck quartered, bagged, and hung hoping that we could be back to the truck by dark. Several years ago I shot a bull elk just a couple hundred yards away and I knew that the pack out would be grueling. I loaded my pack with a front and hind quarter, the neck meat, backstraps and tenderloins. Cody loaded himself up with the other front and hind quarters and the head. By 4:30pm we were starting the 2 mile hike that would have us gain back more than 1000 feet elevation. Needless to say we didn’t make it back before dark, it ended up taking us about 2 hours to reach the truck.
Returning to the cabin we hung the quarters outside, ate some dinner, and decided that Tuesday would be a “recovery” day.
The focus from here on out would be elk. So Tuesday morning we woke up and drove to a glassing point where we could glass from the truck. We didn’t spot anything in the morning so we returned to the cabin for lunch and drove around checking out a number of other locations where we could glass. We didn’t see any elk on Tuesday.
Well recovered, we decided to go big or go home on Wednesday and planned to make a big loop retrieving all my trail cameras hunting along the way. We covered a lot of ground that day and didn’t see any elk. We did turn up plenty of moose and another good buck… but no elk. We came across a couple other guys and they corroborated what we were seeing, they had hunted the area hard since the hunt opened and hadn’t seen an elk either. That night as we ate dinner we licked our wounds and discussed the plan for the next day. Not overly optimistic at the possibility of seeing an elk, we decided to take it easy Thursday morning, do some glassing, and if we didn’t see anything we would come back and head for home.
Thursday morning passed about as uneventful as ever so by lunchtime we found ourselves on the road back to civilization. As discouraging as it has been elk hunting this area over the last two years, the buck that Cody was able to shoot made this hunt an unquestionable success.
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