Hunter: Jordan Arnold
Species: Mule Deer and Whitetail Deer
Location: Wyoming
Method: Rifle
Wyoming draw results came out in mid-June. I was excited to see that I had drawn a late-season whitetail tag that I had applied for for ten years! Not only would I be able to hunt whitetails during the rut, but I could still hunt my annual general deer tag and chase mulies in the mountains. October finally rolled around. The season had been extended a few days this year, making for good conditions to hunt mule deer in the pre-rut, and I had planned to take two long weekends off during the last week of October and the first week of November to chase mule deer in the mountains. I was joined by various family members and friends during those weeks and was able to be there for many others filling their general deer tags. I wanted to be picky; I was looking for a mature buck and was okay with leaving my tag unfilled if I didn’t find a deer to fit the bill.
The second week of our trip, my brother-in-law and I were staying at a friend’s cabin and hunting from it each day. The weather was cold and windy, and glassing conditions were not ideal. The first day, we hunted a large drainage and found a young three-by-four buck that we both elected to pass on. We decided to get back to the truck and go glass an area for the next day. Immediately after setting up the spotting scope, I glassed a mule deer buck about two-and-a-half miles away. He had a really good frame, and I could tell he was mature, but I wanted to get a better look at him. We decided to try and get as close as we could for a better look before it got dark; we only had about an hour of light left in the day.
We made our way up to him and slowly crested the last ridge to look into the basin the buck had been in. Immediately, I spotted a deer across from us, although it didn’t appear to be the same buck we had glassed earlier. Our wind was bad. I looked down just sixty yards below us, and the buck I had seen from earlier started bounding away from us. I pulled my gun off my pack and started to follow him, hoping he would stop. Light was fading fast, and the buck was making his exit out of the basin. He was facing straight away from me and moving as I followed him in my scope. As he neared the end of the basin, he slowed slightly and opened up, quartering hard away from me. I squeezed off a shot and missed. We gathered our things and decided to come back up in the morning to look for blood since it was pitch black out and we were in the heart of grizzly country.
The next morning, we made it back into the area we had last seen the buck the night before. We scoured the area and found no signs of blood. It was a clean miss. Disappointed, we moved on with our day, looking into every little nook and cranny in an attempt to turn up a mature buck. Later that afternoon, my brother-in-law Bridger glassed a good four-point buck hanging out with a group of does just over two miles away. We decided to get a closer look and made our way over to the group of deer. After re-locating the buck, we got into a shooting position 250 yards away in the cliffs above him. One shot from Bridger’s 7mm Remington Magnum and the buck was done. We climbed down to his deer and quickly broke him down.
We started the five-mile hike back to the truck as the light was fading and hiked the majority of the way out in the dark. The trail we walked out on was littered with fresh grizzly bear tracks; luckily, we never saw the bear that made them.
I was the only one left with a deer tag for the next day, so we discussed a game plan for the next morning. We decided to leave a truck at one trailhead, take the second truck up to the next trailhead, and make a long loop between the two drainages to cover as much country as possible. The morning was cold, and the wind was howling. As we made our way up the main ridge, we began seeing elk and a few deer—all does and no bucks. We slowly picked apart the cuts and fingers in the drainage we were in.
We made it to the top of the knob between the two main drainages, and I glassed down into the drainage we planned to exit through later in the day. Up under some rimrock in a little cove, I could see two deer. I threw up my spotting scope and quickly saw that one was a doe and the other was a buck. The buck had large front forks and good mass: he wasn’t very wide, but he was quite tall. I told Bridger, “He gets me excited. I wanna try and kill that buck!”
We decided to drop down the ridge across from the deer in order to hopefully have a shot from the opposite hillside. As we made our descent, I could see the buck was looking at something intently. We started glassing the direction the buck was facing and saw a couple of other hunters coming up the ridge from below, so we continued to the last hillside across from him. I dropped my pack and made my final stalk. I was less than fifty yards from the buck when we popped over the hill, and the buck jumped up. I lay down, and the buck stopped about a hundred yards out. I settled my crosshairs on him and squeezed the trigger. The buck dropped and slid down a rocky face, where he got hung up in some brush. We made our way over to him. He was exactly the kind of deer I was hoping to hang my tag on.
The rest of the weekend, we helped some other friends and family fill their tags to wrap up the general deer season. I was relieved to have filled my tag on a great mule deer and was excited to focus on chasing whitetails.
Four days after filling my general tag, I decided to go start looking around for whitetails. I had talked to many friends who have much more whitetail experience than I do, and they all told me the same thing: the whitetails had been hit hard by epizootic hemorrhagic disease (EHD) this year, and there weren’t many mature bucks around. Trying to stay optimistic, I decided I would try to cover as much area as possible in order to see the age class and quality that was still available. I got up early November 11 and headed out, getting to my parking spot at first light. I made the short hike into the area where I could start hunting and decided to sit down where three small sagebrush drainages met coming off of agricultural fields. I pulled out my binos and started glassing the area. I grabbed my phone and texted my dad to let him know where I was and told him I had no intention of filling my tag that day.
I set my phone down and started glassing again. When I received a text back from my dad, I read it and looked up to see three does and two bucks running directly towards me. I set my phone down and pulled up my binoculars to get a better look at the two bucks. They both looked mature to me: one was a four-by-four, and the other was a five-by-five. I told myself that if the five-by-five gave me an opportunity, I would try and take him.
The deer dropped below me in the drainage, disappearing for a few seconds, and I got my rifle ready and scooted to the edge of the hill. The deer reappeared, headed up the draw I had walked in on, and I gave a few grunts to try and stop the buck. He continued to chase the does, so I got steady on the buck and shot. He quickly disappeared into the draw and popped right back out. I got steady again and fired a second shot. The buck dropped. I had waited ten years to draw that tag and had hunted for about fifteen minutes of the season. He was a great mature deer for the area.
I called my dad to let him know I had shot one, and he offered to come and help me pack him back to the truck. An hour later, we had the deer broken down and back at the truck. What an incredible year for deer: in four days’ time, I brought home over 300" of antler!
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