“Down,” I whispered as my client and I quietly took a knee in the snow. I had been a tough week, full of missed opportunities. We had a tough morning, it was the last full day and we had not seen a dang thing, no animals, no fresh tracks, blistering wind and another miserable climb up the mountain. We, were on the way back to the vehicle to make a plan for the afternoon. I stopped, not sure of what I had seen. I had caught a glimmer of light shining through the trees. Something that I knew deep down was not a rock or a tree branch. I raised my Vortex Razors to my eyes to investigate it further. Then I saw it, an antler moving in the trees. My heart started racing, as if it was going to break its way out of my chest. This was it, the moment that my client and I had been working towards all week long. I turned to my client and pointed the buck out, and asked if that was a shot that he could make. I decided that there was too much debris in the way to be comfortable and grabbed my client and quickly stalked our way closer to a spot that offered a few more shooting lanes. We sat, patiently, waiting for the buck to offer us a shot. He was chasing does so I knew we had some time and that eventually a shot would come. Inside I was hoping that this would be the moment that overshadowed all the opportunities that had been squandered throughout the week. The buck started to move towards and opening that I knew would allow us to get off a good shot. A doe came through first, followed by a smaller buck, then came the one we were after. As I watched through my binoculars, I heard a shot ring out. The echo, swept down the draw, the buck hunched up and turned downhill away from the does and into the trees. Everything that I had seen indicated that the buck was hit.
With smiles on our face and deep desire to put our hands on the buck we had just shot we went down to check for blood and find our animal. As we got to the spot that the buck was standing we shot my heart began to almost stop beating and started to sink in my chest. There was no blood that I could find and the tracking was made more difficult because of the amount of pine debris left from past logging activities. The word devastated did not even begin to describe how my client and I were feeling. I knew in my mind that the buck was hit, but began to talk myself out of because of past experiences with other clients. We zigged and zagged down towards the area we had thought the buck went, add “Nothing.” I decided to pull out and head to the vehicle. We met up with the other guides and discussed the entire event. We all deduced that the buck was hit and we decided to go back in and look for the deer together.
We all headed out, with a convoy of jeeps going down the mountain road to the area that we had been hunting. We stepped out, armed and looking like a company of soldiers going through the mountains. When we got the area we all began looking for hair, blood, bone or anything else that we could find to confirm a hit. We turned into a pack of hounds, then I found it, a large patch of hair. We continued to follow the tracks and found little, dime sized spots of blood. We tracked this to an area where the track had broken off and was now all alone making it a little easier to follow. We decided that the buck was hit in the front leg and was dragging it pretty bad in the snow, but was still able to cover some country and it would be best to just have my client and I track it from that point on.
We took a little break to catch our breath and get some water as the rest of the group turned back to the vehicles. We only had a couple hours before shooting light was gone and it had started to snow, covering the track and added to our despair. My client and I pushed forward following the track by the drag mark in the snow , left by a broken front leg. As went up the mountain we were filled with a new feeling happiness and hope that the track would lead us to the downed animal. However, this feeling quickly faded away. We followed the track to a fence. This fence was a crossing point were elk, deer and moose had all been crossing trampling down the track that we had been following. We were stuck between a rock and a hard place. There was nothing tangible that we could pick out that would allow us to continue to track our deer. After a few minutes of debating with myself about what we should do to give ourselves the best chance to find the deer, I decided to circle out. We began to make a big circle around the last blood. We went up the mountain and then cut across through the trees and down a deep ravine back to where the blood was. We stopped for a second, I turned to my client and said, “That buck has to bedded somewhere in here,” pointing to the little patch of trees in front of us. We started off again our heads still low and the despair growing deeper and deeper. We hadn’t even walked fifty yards, then trees seemed to explode in front of us as we jumped a deer. One look at the rack and I knew it was our deer. He leaped up, seeming to take 15 foot bounces as he bounded away down the mountain. I found the spot he was bedded and it was full of blood, confirming that this was in fact our deer. We began to follow the tracks down the mountain.
We followed the deer to the spot where we had started to circle through the trees. The shooting light was running out, but the good part was it was snowing harder by the minute. This let me know without a shadow of a doubt what tracks I was on and not confusing them with the other tracks on the mountain. We had about an hour left before dark, I turned to my client and told him, “ This is going to suck, but we have to get this done.” I was motivated, desperate to not let the animal get away and continue to suffer. I told him, “I was not going to stop and that we had an hour to get it done, so he needed to keep up and we had to go till we found him.” Off we went, like a wolf my nose in the track and my eyes scouring the country in front of us. The chase was on, minutes were ticking away. We followed him down the mountain, through thick timber and sage brush. As we pressed on, the thought of amazement went through my head. Seeing the country this buck was going through and how well he was getting around showing that he was tough as they come. He weaved his way down, not showing himself to hunters on the road till he knew it was safe, at which he crossed within 75 yards of the jeep. I stopped briefly to make sure my client was still with me. He was still recovering from a recent back surgery so I knew this was tough on him. I kept telling him that I did not mean to look like a jerk and like I was not taking the way he was feeling into account, but we absolutely had no choice but to press onward.
We were down to the last 20 minutes of shooting light as we began to follow the buck up the mountain behind the jeep. I was hoping that he would not get to the rock outcrop at the top of a meadow as that would have cooked our goose and we would lose the fight. We got to a spot where it looked like the tracks stopped! The buck couldn’t just disappear. Then I notice that he had turned back on his own prints, he was either tired or extremely smart, maybe both, but he stepped track for track down the hill, making the tracks all look like one set. We only had about ten minutes at this point and doubt started to creep back into the minding, knowing that if he didn’t stop soon then our chance of harvest was slim to none. I dragged me client with me as we followed track once again, five minutes later, I turned around a tree and there he was, bedded down under a big pine no more than ten yards from me. I turned and said “There he is” to my client. His rifle raised and the crack of his rifle firing once again echoed through the forest. This time the echo of the shot was followed by a loud scream. A scream of joy as the buck finally laid before us on the ground. We had done it, achieved what we set out to do and not given up, living the old adage of “persistence pays off.” We were overcome by happiness and joy as my client finally put his hands around the antlers of the large buck.
As we began to take pictures I began to think about all the emotions us as hunters go through. The despair, the joy, and knowing that things do not go your way at first, but we owe it to the animal to push through that and continue to press forward. This hunt had been both physically and mentally tough on both my client and I, and we, like all hunter’s will in their time, had walked the line between happiness and heartache, and with the motivation, persistence and drive to harvest that animal and follow up on our shot had lead us to a joy filled experience that both my client and I will never forget.
Montana Tines 