WY_pronghorn 2012

Tagging Wilson

January 17, 2014

When I got in the truck with John for my second pronghorn hunt with him in two years, I was expecting a similar hunt to my first: glassing for hours, seemingly without end, and walking the open prairie mile after mile in search of an antelope to shoot. I wasn’t looking for a conventional trophy, […]

trophy_country

Trophy Country

December 18, 2013

When you see terrain from a distance it always seems like it’s no problem; like it’s easily navicable. The angles aren’t too steep. This hill’s not that tall. The deception was so thorough as I looked at the mountain from the closed window of the truck that even out of shape and overweight as I […]

muley_does

A Fortunate Mistake

December 1, 2013

On the first day that we decided to hunt a piece of public land about ten miles north of Upton, WY* we went straight to a spot where John had seen a group of does regularly. Just after sunrise they would feed out of the pine and cedar woods and on to the sagebrush flats, […]

BLM-Osage

Ten or Ten

November 28, 2013

When we woke up it was cold. Damn cold. A frigid six degrees in the Black Hills of Wyoming. It was what I had been waiting for in three seasons of hunting mule deer there. Cold and snow. Fresh snow. Four to six inches of it covering up everything. A perfect day for tracking. After […]

antelope1

Busting My Cherry: Tagging Jackson

November 28, 2013

Our third day of hunting was a miserable day. The rain was pouring down, the wind was blowing from the north at nearly thirty miles per hour, and it was hovering just below forty degrees. It was a terrible day for hunting. The pronghorn, seemingly smarter than John and I, were bedded down and weathering […]

mule_deer_sagebrush

Busting My Cherry: The Search Begins

November 11, 2013

After my badly hurt yet very determined to get away muley buck leaped out of his bed he took two bounds before he was out of sight just over a small ridge about thirty feet in front of us. Rather than make another mistake by following him and pushing him any harder than we already […]

muledeer

Busting My Cherry: The Moment Comes

November 9, 2013

You never know how you’re going to handle killing of a large game animal until the moment comes. Even though you’re no stranger to killing things, the deliberate killing of a deer is an altogether different proposition than busting up a bunch of rats or birds. You think you’ve practiced and prepared for this moment. […]

1stbuck

A Hunter

November 9, 2013

I wasn’t always a hunter. My father never taught me the skills needed to hunt because he wasn’t a hunter either. Nor his father before him. Sure, dad might have shot a squirrel or two on the odd occasion from the back porch of his grandmother’s cabin in rural North Florida, or killed a woodpecker […]