Hunter: Kail Larsen
Species: Mule Deer
Location: North Dakota badlands
Method: Archery, spot and stalk
The morning started the same as the previous thirteen days I had spent bowhunting mule deer in the badlands of North Dakota. The rising sun found me picking apart the brush and buttes, hoping to spot a mature buck returning to his bed after his late-night feed. Just before the sun crested the horizon, three grey ghosts caught my attention almost a mile away. Even through my binos, I could tell they were bucks, and one in particular warranted a closer look. I swapped my binos for my spotting scope, and as the largest buck came into focus, I recognized him almost immediately. I had run into this buck a week or so before the season had opened, and although I’d only caught a glimpse of him then, his antlers were unmistakable. He was exceptionally tall and unusually narrow; though he wouldn’t score well, he had plenty of character, which I prefer over score anyway.
I kept an eye on the bucks as they snaked through the buttes and finally stopped to crawl into a small buffaloberry patch to escape the heat of the oncoming day. For the next hour, I observed the spot to make sure they stayed put and pored over my map trying to plan an approach. There was a lone clay butte that rose about sixty feet above its surroundings, only 200 yards from the bucks’ hideout. If I could get on top, it would offer a commanding view into the bedroom.
I got to the butte just before 9:00 a.m. and, as I had hoped, I was able to climb to the top unseen. Sure enough, there were all three bucks, lying at the edge of the thicket. With my new vantage point, I surveyed the area intensely, trying to figure out how I was going to get close enough to the buck for a shot. There was one lone bush directly across the small draw from the bucks that, if I could get to it, should put me just inside my comfortable range; that said, while there was another smaller butte down wind of the thicket that would keep me out of sight for the majority of the stalk, there were fifty yards between the butte and the bush where I would be in plain sight of the deer.
With my plan of approach made, there was nothing I could do until the bucks moved into the deeper shadows of the thicket, so the waiting began. Between catching a few winks and eating my canned lunch, the bucks moved deeper into the thicket to escape the rising heat. By noon, all the bucks were out of sight in the thickest part of the buffaloberry patch, so I began my wide, half-circle stalk to get downwind and behind the butte that would conceal my approach.
The first 800 yards of the stalk only took about thirty minutes, and when I reached the back side of the butte, I dropped my pack and crawled up to the crest to try and pinpoint the location of the bedded buck. When I finally picked his chocolate antlers out of the tangled mess of branches, he was lying smack in the middle of the thicket. As for the other bucks, I couldn’t locate them, so I figured they were in denser brush and wouldn’t pose a threat. I eased back down to my pack, put on my sneakers, stuck a bottle of water in my pocket, and began the slow, painful crawl across the hot bare clay to the lone bush.
Moving forward an inch at a time, it took a full hour, but I finally made it to the cover without spooking the bucks. The small bush provided a fantastic position, and I could see the antlers of the buck through a small gap in the branches. I ranged the antlers at forty-five yards, and if he stood up, I could slip an arrow between the branches instead of waiting for him to step out of the thicket. As I lay in the grass, trying to calm my nerves and prepare for the shot that I hoped would come, I noticed that my release had somehow gotten damaged in the crawling and would not stay armed! I quickly began to mess with it and discovered that the arming spring had been lodged in a way that kept the sear from engaging. Using a piece of grass, I was able to dislodge the spring pieces, and if I kept forward pressure on the trigger until tension from the bowstring was applied, I could make it work. Crisis averted.
After waiting in position for nearly three hours, on one of my routine glances at the bucks’ hiding spot, a patch of grey that had not been there before made my heart jump. A quick look through my binoculars revealed that the buck was standing with his vitals perfectly centered in the small opening in the brush. My heart was thundering as I drew my bow and bracketed the grey patch between my forty- and fifty-yard pins. A deep breath in, a slow breath out… My pins steadied and the shot broke.
I watched in what seemed like slow motion as the arrow sailed across open airspace and disappeared into the center of the opening. I heard a loud crack with the impact of the arrow, and the buck tore out of the brush like his tail was on fire. He cleared the brush at a dead run, and, to my dismay, I couldn’t see the arrow or any blood coming out of this side as he ran up and over the small hill, out of sight. It was then that the sound the arrow had made on impact started to concern me, and I started to think that maybe the crack was the arrow hitting a branch and not the buck.
I walked over to where the buck had been standing when I shot. There was no sign of my arrow, but then, only a few steps in the direction of his hasty flight, I saw the glint of blood across grass and leaves! With some relief, I returned to my pack and gathered myself back together. I made a quick phone call to my dad to let him know what I’d done and to recruit some help packing this buck three miles back to the pickup.
After about twenty minutes, I picked up the blood trail. Forty yards past the brush, I found my arrow soaked in bright blood. A little farther along, I stopped at the top of the ridge and glassed the little valley, hoping to spot the downed buck. With no sign of the buck, I started down the slope, and a patch of grey caught my eye. A closer look through the binos confirmed it was the dead buck lying twenty yards below me! He hadn’t made it a hundred yards from where I shot him.
I texted a quick picture and a pinpoint of my location to my dad and then began caping and quartering the buck. I finished the processing of the buck and began ferrying the meat to the top of the ridge. By the time the last load was packed up, my reinforcements had arrived. My mom had come to help too, and she’d brought some much-appreciated snacks and water, which I had run out of hours before. With our packs loaded heavy with meat, we began the hike back to the pickup as the sun set on the rugged badlands of western North Dakota.
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