2010 Deer Hunt — By Blake Tubbs
After hunting for seven days I finally saw the one . It snowed a skiff the night before , which resulted in Jeff and me not getting out of our sleeping bags as early as we should have . We were hiking to our destination and it was already getting light and we still had half a mile to go . As we were heading to our destination , we were moving pretty swiftly and I was pretty irritated at myself for not getting out of bed a half hour earlier . That was until we spooked some deer over a ridge and I saw a buck that I knew was the “ one .” If we would have left camp when we intended it would have still been dark and would have never seen that buck .
We immediately ran to the top of the ridge expecting to see it from the top , since it was open sage brush country on the other side . We saw several deer , but not the buck . I knew he had to be there somewhere and continued to look for about 15 minutes . I finally decided to go back down the hill to retrieve my pack from where I had left it and see if I could find the buck ’ s tracks . His tracks were pretty obvious compared to other deer and I followed them to where we had previously been on top of the ridge . The snow had melted on the other side and we sat there wondering how far away he was by now . We were looking into a really big , open drainage and we kept saying to each other that we should be able to spot him .
After standing there for another 10 minutes we heard rustling about 150 yards below us in a patch of 3 to 4 foot tall brush . I was then shocked to see “ my buck ” run out of that small patch of brush at full speed . I immediately put my gun up to start blasting , butJeff pulled the barrel of my gun down saying , “ where ’ s he going to go ?” It was wide open country and he was right in the fact that it would have been a tough shot with the buck at full speed and me having a serious case of buck fever . The deer ran until he was about 800 yards out and then just stopped and started to browse all by himself . It was an amazing experience to watch that buck in our binoculars and spotting scope for 30 minutes . As soon as he crested a small ridge and was out of sight about a quarter mile away , I hurried as swiftly and quietly as possible to hopefully catch him just on the other side and within range .
Once near the crest of the ridge , I paused to catch my breath , got on my belly and crawled to the top . He was not where I expected him to be , but was 200 yards to my left with several does . I was able to shift to the left without being noticed and bring the buck down in his tracks with one shot from my Remington model 700 30-06 . Jeff watched the whole ordeal unfold through the spotting scope
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