Well, we had another great year of hunting. We spent less time than usual in the field, but that's the way it goes sometimes. The start of the upland bird season found my son and I doing some hunts together in his home area. The new pup we picked up for him last year is doing phenomenally well and he works well with my dog. Bird numbers were great and we got them on a ton of sharptail and huns.
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/AEvuAGh.jpg)
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The boy didn't draw an antelope tag this year, so I was on my own. I hadn't gotten a chance to do a lot of scouting, but the little that I had done, didn't indicate that there were any real good ones on the places that I hunt. No archery antelope had occurred so opener of rifle was day one of hunting. I headed out at daylight to my little honey hole and had no sooner driven onto the place than I saw a good buck standing by a reservoir about 400 yards ahead. I looked him over through the spotter and he looked as good as any I had seen, so I hopped out of the pickup and worked my way over to a hilltop overlooking the waterhole. I slowly crawled over the rise to see him standing there with a doe. Roughly 150 yards away, he was a chip shot and there is a two track trail going right to the side of the reservoir. I let the new 7 SAUM bark and sent a 162 gr A Max into his ribs. He stood there for maybe 15 seconds and tipped over backward. Upon gutting him, I started to get a bad feeling about the A Max bullets. It broke 3 ribs going in and didn't exit. His vitals were soup, but a piece of the bullet had also lacerated his bowel. Not sure how that happened, considering he was broadside and the shot was tight against his front shoulder. Anyway, I was home within 15 minutes of leaving and had my antelope hung up before breakfast.
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/q5Uyemx.jpg)
My boy and his wife are expecting a baby any day now, and his little wife was nesting pretty hard all fall. He had a LOT of little projects that she wanted done around the house (like gutting the master bath and completely re-doing it) before the baby gets here, so free time was harder to come by than usual. Despite the reduced time, we did manage to get out quite a bit. Archery elk was a bust this year. The only weekend that he could get away, he came down to my house to put a new roof on with me. He didn't get out at all for archery deer or elk. I got out a couple of weekends and had one close encounter with a good bull, but no arrows were released.
When rifle deer rolled around, the boy was chomping at the bit to get after them. I was tied up and couldn't go for opening weekend, which has never happened in my entire life. He kept me in the loop on opening morning, sending me pictures of buck after buck that had come out as he was sitting behind his spotter. About 20 minutes into daylight, he texted and said that he had seen a real good one and was going after it. 30 minutes later he sent me the picture below. He had spotted him coming down a ridge behind him and watched as he disappeared into a small brushy draw and didn't come out. He worked his way within 200 yards and peeked over the ridge. There he was, bedded and broadside. He leaned into his old Ruger in .280 Rem. and squeezed off a shot on that beautiful mule deer buck. The buck jumped to his feet and made a short 20 yard dash before tipping over.
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/kxhTvVb.jpg)
We got together with a good friend on the third weekend of season and hunted hard. A couple of exceptional bucks were spotted, but the weather was terrible and there was little hope of getting within 200 yards on them in the sideways blowing snow and 40 mph winds. Regardless, a lot of fun was had and maybe even a little scotch put away.
By the last weekend, I was pretty intent on scratching the itch on my trigger finger. We were starting to see some good rutting activity, but we again had to deal with blizzard conditions. This time we also got to have some sub zero wind chills and plugged roads and trails. We eventually spotted a great whitetail chasing around a hot doe in an old farm grove and tried to make a move. The flat ground and roughly 20 other deer in the grove that we hadn't seen bit us in the azz and they spooked out on a dead run before a shot could be lined up. Try as we might, we just couldn't figure out where he ended up after they left the grove. I walked a couple of miles of creek bottom trying to find them and came up with nothing. We decided to check another chunk of land just to the NE of there and got up on a hill to glass. Almost immediately, we saw him down in a creek bottom with two of the does from the grove. We watched him for a few minutes and he decided to bed next to a clump of brush. The boy dropped me off at a field crossing about a mile downwind of the buck and I started my walk in to the creek where he was bedded. The boy returned to the hill to watch things unfold. I stumbled along through the blizzard using a distant fence row as a landmark. The vicious wind and cold made the walk seem twice as long as it really was, but eventually I belly crawled to the edge of the creek and settled into my rifle. There he was, maybe 100 yards away, bedded in a clump of brush. I could only see his antlers at this point, so I gave a whistle and he launched from his bed at a dead run. A little shooting later and I was sitting next to a pretty outstanding whitetail. The 7 SAUM had claimed its second victim, and the 162 A Max bullets had been equally grenade-like in this instance. Lesson learned with them.
![[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]](https://i.imgur.com/d1H8PkZ.jpg)
We still have some upland and waterfowl hunting to do, along with the usual coyote calling and trapping. Lots of fun left to be had, but big game is over for the year for us. Any day now a grandson will be coming into the world and the process will start all over again. Life is good!!
