Tagging Wilson
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, a pronghorn that had almost arbitrary measurements designed to look good on the wall, but simply a buck that was more mature than Jackson, a smaller four year old.* John knew my goal for this hunt and he had a specific buck he’d been scouting all year but hadn’t had the right hunter to kill him.
After a long drive to a large cattle ranch about forty miles west southwest of Newcastle, WY we drove through the gate and John told me to get my rifle, that it was time to get serious. He knew of a buck that had been in the area that would not only be bigger than Jackson, but would likely be the biggest goat he would tag all season. Two days prior to my arrival he had one hunter set up three hundreds yards off, but he wouldn’t squeeze the trigger on his .300 Winchester Magnum, a round that isn’t even starting to stretch its legs at three hundred yards, and so settled for a smaller buck on his final day. We knew this large buck was in the area, John had been scouting this ranch for weeks, and our job was to put our eyes to our binos and find him so that we could make a stalk. I was dedicated to spending my entire hunt on this one ranch in order to kill this buck. Only it didn’t work out that way.
When we got to the back side of this unfathomably large ranch John put the truck in park in the area where our buck had been for over a week. We were in the heart of his home range, and he had a harem of does feeding about a half mile away. He couldn’t be too far in a land where nothing ever seems too far, but is. Then as I prepared to get out of the truck to put some hard earned miles on my new boots, I saw a buck trotting from our left to right about three hundred yards directly ahead of us. I took a very quick look at him through the binoculars and said “that’s the one, John.” I noticed first his tall horns, taller than any I’d yet seen on any goat. From John’s descriptions of the buck we were looking for I knew he was our buck, and he had just crossed the road in front of us before we were even able to get out of the truck. As we quickly made our way towards our buck John whispered that we needed to get to a ridge overlooking the draw the buck had entered, and then he’d be two hundred and fifty or three hundred yards away. As soon as we reached that ridge, there he was, three hundred and one yards out and standing broadside with his muzzle in the grass.
I’ll be the first to admit that I wasn’t prepared to take this shot. I was expecting miles of walking before we’d see a shooter and I was just a couple of minutes from getting out of the truck, I was winded from having just sprinted three hundred or so yards, my adrenaline went from zero to flooding my brain in one moment to the next, and I was staring through my scope at not only a pronghorn that was bigger than Jackson, but the largest pronghorn I had ever seen. John ranged him one more time: “three hundred and one yards, just like last time.” I settled the stock of my rifle in to my shoulder and pulled the trigger. Only I missed. I’m not exactly sure why I missed, but I do know that the bullet either went just above or just below him. In any case it was a clean miss. “Shit”, I mumbled, knowing that I should have waited until I was ready to shoot, upset at the idea that in my hastiness missing wasn’t the worst outcome that could have happened by taking a shot I wasn’t ready for, followed closely by that sinking feeling you get when you’re sure that after such a close call with my 120 grain Barnes Tipped Triple Shock, that buck was going to run and not stop until he was in the next county. Only I did miss, and he didn’t run. At least not away. He turned and quickly began to trot right at us. “Two ninety, two seventy-six, two sixty-eight, two sixty-one, two-fifty, two forty-three, two twenty, two ‘o’ one, one ninety-four, one seventy-eight, one fifty-seven”, John said, giving me updated range information as he was moving at us. As he moved, I had him in my scope, but being head on, he never presented me with a shot I would take. I had already taken one bad shot, I wasn’t going to compound my mistake by taking another. And then he stopped. He looked right at us, and after a couple of moments veered to our right and continued his trot, running right past us and disappeared down a draw. Just as John and I made the decision to slowly follow him in the hope that we could keep an eye on him but avoid spooking him off, he presented himself again right where he had disappeared a minute or two before. And then he stopped and started to graze again as if nothing of any kind of import had happened. “Two sixty-five”, John whispered as I settled my eye in my scope and my left hand settling my sticks. I placed the triangle reticle just behind his shoulder, let out my breath, and squeezed the trigger.
Perhaps it was because I had never seen a bullet pass all the way through a big game animal before,** or else because two minutes before I had just barely missed this pronghorn, initially I was sure I had missed. All I saw after I squeezed the trigger was the dirt splash of the bullet behind the buck. The only time I had ever seen splash like that was directly after a miss. “Shit!”, I whispered just a bit louder than the last miss I had, “I missed him again.” “Nah . . . nah . . .” John immediately replied as he watched that buck through his binoculars, “no, you got him.” “Really?”, I asked, sure that John was seeing things. But as I watched that buck, he started to falter a bit. He trotted up a small rise about fifteen yards from where he was shot, and fell down dead.
He died much quicker than I thought he might. Though I had once shot a coyote in the neck at forty yards and watched him as he “cut to black”, I hadn’t yet had good enough shot placement to put down a large animal quickly, and I imagined him bedding down to slowly bleed to death or else make us track him across the open plains in order to retrieve him. From shot to fall was less than fifteen seconds.
When we got to about five yards from his body, I asked John to give me a minute. He gladly stopped and waited for me. I sat next to my buck and admired him. He’s a strong buck, big and athletic. He has fresh scarring on the back of his neck from having fought off competitors during the rut (scars his mount still bears). His horns are big, and well used. This was the buck we came for, and he was quite the prize indeed.
I remember being very glad once it came time to field dress Wilson. It was early, about ten in the morning, and the weather was beautiful. We didn’t need to hurry in order to save the meat, it was only forty five degrees, and the truck was only about three hundred yards away which meant a short walk to the truck. I also remember exactly what I said to John after having watched him field dress Jackson as light faded last season: “next year.” I had never field dressed a big game animal before, but I knew that I wanted to despite the prospect of cutting open an animal’s body for the specific purpose of removing his innards was always pretty disgusting. When I first I started hunting it was what I looked forward to least. But now I knew that preparing my quarry for transport was just another part of the hunt. It was just as important a skill to learn as learning to shoot or learning to use the wind on your stalk. It’s part of hunting.
As I was cutting open Wilson’s body cavity I remember being in wonder that there isn’t more blood than there is. My bare hands were definitely bloody, but I was expecting that I’d be washing my hands in blood. I remember, after I had finished cutting him open and reached in to him in order to grab his intestinal tract and pull it out, how warm it was, how slippery and unwieldy his guts were, and how simply all of it is attached to the body. As soon as I got them out, I inspected his lungs and his heart to see just where the bullet hit. I knew that it was a good hit either in the lungs or heart based on how quickly he passed, but I wasn’t sure which. After allowing those organs to slide through my hands for a brief moment it was obvious: I had hit him smack in the middle of both lungs, exactly where I wanted to hit him, instantly collapsing them and sending him in to immediate shock. He suffered very little pain, and died quickly. It was a clean kill, and for that I was very thankful. When I’m hunting I want to kill my quarry, not hurt it, and the faster an animal dies after having been shot means the better I’ve done my part.
Not all hunts develop the way that you plan. Some hunts happen fast, while others might take days. Some end up with game on the ground, others don’t. But when interacting with nature as a predator you have to learn to take what the rest of nature gives you. As with so many other things in life, even the best conceived plans will change the minute you embark towards your goal. Sometimes those changes end up with a much easier hunt than you could have imagined, other times what should have been a reasonably easy hunt turns in to days of slogging and nothing to show for it in the end except for a hardened sense of resolve to plan more carefully, or else execute your plan more faithfully or have more flexibility when conditions change. But what’s most important is that you don’t allow watching your plan fall apart ruin your hunt. Nature happens, and it will affect how will hunt will go more often than not. You can only go along with it, be it for better or worse.
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* Jackson’s teeth were examined by the Game Warden in Weston County, WY where it was determined he was a four year old buck.
** During my first season I had shot two large game animals, a mule deer and a pronghorn, but neither time did the one hundred and twenty grain Nosler BT bullet fully penetrate and exit the opposite side of the body. Those experiences prompted me to seek a different bullet, and ultimately settled on the Barnes one hundred and twenty grain Tipped Triple Shock.