Hunters: Amanda and Robert Bewley
Story by: Robert Bewley
Species: Mule Deer
Location: Alberta, Canada
Method: Rifle, guided horseback wilderness hunt
While feeding cattle back home on our ranch in the Oregon Coast Range and falling back into my daily routines, I couldn’t help but occasionally think to myself, “Did that really happen, or was it just a fantastical dream?” The day before, we were in a wall tent in the Northern Rockies at the end of probably the greatest adventure of our lives.
My wife Amanda and I had decided to try a guided hunt for our tenth wedding anniversary, as it would be a treat compared to our regular routine of hunting the hard way, solo with backpacks and boot leather. We are lifelong horsemen and thought a horseback wilderness hunt would be right up our alley. After months of research, Amanda had filtered species, hunts, and prices and made a few calls to Huntin’ Fool. She paired us up with Paul Pierunek at Timberline Guiding of Sundre, Alberta, Canada. I am a mule deer junkie, so we decided that this would be the hunt for us, though I had mixed feelings about a guided hunt, as I am a self-taught hunter and have been honing my skills over the last three decades hunting deer, elk, pronghorn, bear, and mountain lion.
We were greeted with a warm welcome at the home of our outfitter and enjoyed a great conversation as we went over details and expectations for the hunt before heading to camp. I have taken a few respectable mule deer and other big game animals, and I no longer need to kill on every hunt at this point in my life. It was more important to me to see my wife take a giant buck.
I wanted to soak in every moment of this hunt, so, as we broke through the tree line on the first morning of our planned six-day adventure and spotted our first deer (a bruiser of a non-typical buck), I was not interested in taking it. I encouraged Amanda to go after it, as it was as nice a buck as most mule deer fanatics would love to take. She and Paul closed the gap from over 800 yards to 150, but the buck’s instincts were razor sharp; he had not grown to that size by being foolish, even in rut. She needed only one or two more seconds to seal the deal, but he busted down the mountain before she could get a shot.
Within an hour, we had a close encounter with the buck that she would eventually take later in the day. I must admit that I discounted the size of this deer due to the sheer mass of the one that Amanda had just stalked, but Paul enthusiastically remarked that this buck was a “huge typical” and a “definite shooter”, so the stalk began. As we went up the mountain to head off the buck, we encountered a band of bighorn sheep and had to slip above and around in order to not startle them and, in turn, spook the buck. You read that right: a band of bighorn sheep! These mule deer didn’t fit into the mold of any others that I knew of. They are alpine deer that live above the tree line at high elevation and do not migrate down the mountain with the snowfall. As Paul remarked accurately, this was a “poor man’s sheep hunt,” as we were hunting deer in sheep country—not your typical mule deer habitat or behavior.
It took us most of the day to relocate the buck and make a play on it, but by late afternoon, she had connected with two consecutive shots from her Weatherby Camilla rifle. We had to leave it until the following day, as it was nearly dark and we still had a two-and-a-half-hour ride down the mountain back to camp.
Spending four to five hours on horseback every day while hunting was an entirely new experience for us. This was extreme trail riding on a whole new level, taking big, strong draught-cross horses through dog-hair timber with scattered windfall and steep rocky conditions. By the final day’s ride, I had become inherently aware of what’s possible to ride a horse through. This is something I would never have thought I could’ve learned before this trip, already having forty years of experience in nearly every facet of the horse industry as a farrier and horse enthusiast. “Wow” was an expression that I used frequently due to the difficulty of the terrain and the ability of those well-trained, well-broke mountain horses.
The following morning, Amanda and Paul recovered the buck, and they headed back to camp early to take care of the meat while my guide “Sherpa Dave” and I finished out the day’s hunt. When I opened the tent door that evening and saw that hanging, freshly caped head, I sheepishly admitted that it was much bigger than I had originally thought. I instantly felt foolish for discounting its trophy quality, but, with that said, it was a testament to the size of the first buck she had stalked, as he had made this one appear much smaller.
In the following days, I had an opportunity to take a buck that would have satisfied my criteria and hunger for a true giant, but I could not make the shot due to the buck moving through the timberline at a fast trot. He only stopped twice, once with two younger bucks directly behind him and again when the doe he was pursuing was in my line of fire. It happened all too fast, as it often does, and I could not get a rest of any kind, leaving me offhand at 240 yards—a tough shot for even the most seasoned shooter!
Without regret or disappointment, we trudged on. The following day, we headed back up the mountain in blowing snow with temperatures falling well below zero. It was so cold that my water bottle, which was double wrapped in a thick wool sock and buried deep in my pack, froze solid. Our gear was probably the most vital component of our hunt. I was wearing two base layers of Merino wool, a layer of puffy down feathers, another thick layer of wool, and another thick layer of feathers covered by a heavy wool blended overcoat containing a wind cutting membrane. We became very comfortable with being uncomfortable.
The biggest battle was trying to keep fingers and toes from freezing, and it would be many weeks after the hunt before feeling returned to a few toes on both of us. The creek we crossed daily was frozen solid by day six, and the river where we watered the horses became a slow-moving slush, narrowing by several feet each day—something that we had never seen before.
At one point on the coldest day, as we were postholing through deep snow, fighting howling wind as we headed straight up to our glassing spot in a small cliff band, Sherpa Dave turned to Amanda to remark that not many women would voluntarily put themselves in such a precarious position and that she was “one tough cookie.” Her sheer toughness and determination were remarkable. However, this was no surprise to me, as I have tested her many times over the last fifteen years, both willingly and unwillingly. She has never disappointed and has always exceeded my expectations, especially in circumstances where I have taken men that simply could not hack it. She then asked Sherpa Dave, “Oh, about that, how many women have you guided up here?” He promptly and enthusiastically replied, “Oh, zero!”
The conversations we had around a warming fire during the day and at supper in the evenings gave incalculable value to the hunt. Sharing thoughts and experiences about many facets of life forged friendships that will last a lifetime. We started the week as strangers and finished as true friends. Paul’s sense of humor was second to none, and we never had a dull moment because of it. The knowledge that was shared and the education gained will make our future hunts much less laborious, as we will be pivoting our horse passion to pack horses and mules. This will extend the longevity of my hunting career, as my body has been beaten up from a lifestyle of ranching, rodeoing, and shoeing horses. It will also get us farther and more comfortably into the backcountry. Our expectations for this hunt were exceeded tenfold, and the price that we paid became trivial as we gained a million dollars’ worth of memories. A big thank you to the Triple A crew, a.k.a. the “Albertan Alpine Assassins”: Paul, Dave, and Sydney.
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