Heres a semi artsy shot of my buck after we got him up to the trail.
The next one is a picture of the buck I helped my cousin get in the morning I got mine.
I was able to finally break my long dry spell today and what a great day of hunting it was. It had been five years since I'd killed a deer, now thats done. I'd had tons of chances over the years, but I got really picky and just never filled a tag. My cousin and I decided to do a trip up to some family ground along the Clearwater River and hunt the last day of general season there and hope for the best. We started out walking around a rim and made it about two draws and spotted a buck and doe on the far side at about 300 yards. Since he was in charge of the trip I let him have first shot. He got a good hit but the buck started down the hill so I decided to try and slow him down. Results were his shot right in the sholder and I managed to shoot him in the butt hump His deer turned out the be a nice 4x5 about 19 inches wide, reasonably heavy. A good mature buck all the way around. We hunted for a while not seeing a whole bunch except two monster bucks from the main road probably in the 150 to 160 class, unfortunately both were on land we couldn't hunt. We headed out to another spot for the afternoon and were again walking a canyon rim. We got out to the end of the ridge and hadn't seen anything and were considering going up into the fields on top of the rim to watch till dark when my cousin spotted some deer working out of the field behind us. A check of the binoculars showed 3 does, but we figured there had to be a buck close since all evidence suggested the rut was on and the bucks were chasing. We started around the hillside and got to where we could see where the deer were but no deer. I looked down the hill and there was a buck staring at me at about 40 yards. My first look I thought it was a mulie (mule deer closed in this unit on the 9th). I had the deer in my scope trying to decide what he was and I asked my cousin what he thought. About the time he started to say its a whitetail I made up my mind and hammered him. He went down at the first shot but starting pulling himself down the hill, so I whacked him a couple more times for good measure. At this point I wasn't sure how big he really was. When I got to him he turned out the be a pretty good 4x4, 18 inches wide, good beam length and nice tines. He may be my best whitetail, he'll go pretty close to the last one I got in '99. I was pumped to say the least. What a great last day hunt, two nice bucks, hunting with my cousin, and getting both deer on family land. Hopefully I'll have some pics up tommorrow.
