Opening Day Part 2

photo by Stephan

Colon, Clint, and Stephan left bright and early to bag a doe. And- they did! Stephan took photos with his phone, and when they got back, Colon grabbed the camera so we wouldn't have only artistic shots of the prize. I'm learning quickly how boring 'hunting stories' really are. A little edited:

"We got up at 5am and were at Clint's by 5:30am. Anna was nice enough to get up and make us a little snack which we needed because we ended up at the verge of death. We drove out about 20 minutes Southeast of town to just about the North Dakota border, signed in at the Block Management Box, and went to a place where Clint said he had seen deer. As usual, when the sun came up, before I could see anything, Clint said he saw some deer in the distance, and Colon and I took his word for it. The deer broke across the plain and headed toward antoher road. Clint drove the truck down the road to intercept them. Colon jumped out of the car to set up for a shot, but didn't get it. Luckily, he didn't get one of those, because we later realized they were the wrong type of deer. We didn't have tags for those...

"We drove to a different part of the ranch, spotted a small herd in the distance, jumped into a riverbed to follow them. We came out of the riverbed to find that the small herd had magically disappeared. When we looked up we saw three trees full of sharp-tail grouse. But we didn't have shotguns to shoot them (since we were too lazy to carry them while hunting deer- lesson learned). We spent about 2-1/2 hours hunting birds. I managed to get two sharpies and a Hungarian partridge. Clint got some too. It was getting toward the end of the hunting day, about 1pm, and we knew we probably only had one long stalk left, so we drove to Clint's father's land. We came up on the downwind side of a small butte, stalked across to another, larger butte where we could survey the land, but saw nothing. Luckily Clint had hunted this land before, and knew there were some contours about 1/2 mile South. So we walked down, and as we popped our heads over a small hill we saw two groups of small deer. Colon and Clint came up with a plan, but I just stayed where I was. The next plan included a 100 yard belly crawl across a small draw- Clint had a good view of Colon's jeans dropping down to reveal his butt-crack. What a view!

"Finally, Clint sticks his head up to get a read on the does and they were basically running right toward him. He did two backward summersalts, grabbed the rifle, put it on his shoulder, plugged his left ear, and instructed Colon to take a shot. Which he did. As the two deers bounded over the next hillside, Colon and I weren't sure she was hit. Clint said she was limping. As we came over the hill we saw her smaller companion running solo, so we figured ours was hit. In the tall grass it took us a good 20 minutes to find her. The bullet had entered just behind the front left shoulder and unfortunately, had gone diagnally through the belly cavity through the back. It was a little messy. We field-dressed her, dragged her 1/2 mile to the nearest access point, walked the rest of the 1/2 mile to get thr truck, and now she's hanging in the garage."

Still reading?

I didn't think so.