The Ultimate Sportsmen Muley
Among my earliest memories are a longing to see far away places and to write about them. God has blessed me by allowing me to travel from my childhood home in New York to hunt as far apart as interior Alaska and southern Africa, and to return safely home again. The second part of the dream was helped to fruition by Jon Hedin of UltimateSportsmen.com when he selected a couple of my adventures for inclusion in his second anthology of hunting and fishing stories, "More Tales of the Ultimate Sportsmen."
One of the other authors in the book was John deWeber. After reading John's stories I sent him an email and told him how much I enjoyed his work. He wrote back thanking me and asking about my hunting season. We quickly became pen pals swapping emails several times each week.
I eventually began to swap emails with another friend of John's named Gale Palmer. John and Gale hunt mule deer together each year and invited me to join them for several years running. I finally decided to take them up on the offer in 2007 and headed west to Washington State to see my first mule deer.
The whole experience was amazing. Everything was different from what I was used to while chasing whitetail in the thick woods of upstate New York. Stepping out of Gale's house the first predawn morning of mule deer season brought the scent of sagebrush in the dew to me.
At home we watch deer trails and hope to see an animal appear somewhere between ten to a hundred yards away. In Washington, we were glassing deer at over a mile away and saw plenty of them. By sunset of the first day I had seen nearly 100 deer, but none that met the three tines on a side requirement to be legal game.
We hunted HARD. We set out before sunrise and returned after dark each day. We ate all we could hold twice a day of John's excellent cooking and had candy and soda to keep us going in the middle of the day, and I still lost 10 lbs in a week from all the walking we did.
On day three, I missed an easy shot at a muley buck. I was so keyed up at the idea of my first muley with John at my side that my hands shook and I couldn't keep the crosshairs on the buck at 40 yards. It was buck fever plain and simple.
I had seven days to hunt with a flight scheduled early on the eighth. By the evening of day seven I was frustrated and disappointed in myself.
With less than an hour of my hunt remaining I realized that it didn't matter how hard I had hunted; that it was God's will alone that determined whether I would even so much as see a deer let alone bring one home.
Just ten minutes later, with the sun literally going down on my hunt, Stan spotted a big deer coming toward us in the tall grass and sagebrush.
At 400 yards the deer was headed right toward us. Stan got glasses on him and said that it was a legal buck.
At 175 yards, I squeezed the trigger of Gale's 1969 Browning FN Safari Grade 375 H&H, worked the bolt and looked for the buck.
"I can't see him!" I said.
"I see him!" said Stan. "He's on the ground!"
I thanked God. I thanked Stan. We shook hands. We hugged. I had my first muley buck.
We estimated him at 250 lbs on the hoof. That's DOUBLE the size of a decent whitetail at home.
While I waited, the sun set, the moon rose and the coyotes began to sing in the sage on the next ridge.
Alone in the dark with my buck and the song dogs, I thanked God again for His grace and generosity.
He may not be a monster buck, but he's my best to date and I feel truly blessed to have him.
