Perseverance Pays Off!
2012 Idaho Controlled Early Rifle Hunt By Travis Long
I had great anticipation for this hunt as I knew there was potential to harvest a good buck in the velvet if I put my time in to scout and find the bucks. The first weekend my friend and I went in to scout the area I planned to hunt a fire started the very same morning. We watched the fire slowly progress throughout the day, but thought the fire crews would quickly get in contained as it was moving slow. Unfortunately, that was not the case! Two months later and over 140,000 + acres burned that fire shut down over half of the unit I planned to hunt. The area I planned to hunt was shut down to any access. My plans were foiled and I had to make a decision. Two of my buddies that drew the tag with me decided to exchange their tags for an over the counter tag, as Fish and Game offered that option due to the fire closures in the unit. I decided that I would hold out and start looking in other areas of the unit. I hunted in several different areas the first three weeks of the hunt, but never once saw a buck. In fact, I hadn ' t even located a group of does! It was looking bleak.
The hunt opened on August 15th and closed on September 30th. So I had some time to try different areas that hadn ' t been closed by the fire. Though the areas I hunted did not produce the results I had anticipated I did not want to give up. If I had to eat " tag soup " then so be it. That was just the luck of the draw, as I kept telling myself. Around the first week of September a friend of mine that I had recently met out on the archery range called me to ask how the hunt was going. He had drawn the same tag the year before and did not have any luck filling his tag. I recounted the situations that I had been experiencing with the hunt thus far and told him that I wasn ' t sure I was going to fill my tag. He then began to tell me about a few bucks he had been watching for a few weeks on some private land. A friend of his had permission to hunt it and he thought we could get a chance at one of the bucks if I was interested. I graciously accepted his offer to go out and see what we could find.
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