You Went to Montana? On Purpose?!

I awoke at 3:55 to the heavenly sound of my cellphone alarm. Of course, I use the word “heavenly” facetiously as that noise is quite possibly the worst thing on this planet… well, next to the horrid sounds that emanate from pigs, but that’s another story. Anyways, I’d gone to bed at about midnight-thirty and had received a torrid of text messages in my sleep, so needless to say I wasn’t too well-rested when I was roused from my slumber at this absurd hour.

But today was different. On this day the noise of my alarm WAS actually quite welcomed since it marked Day One of Larry’s and my hunting trip in Montana. I turned off the alarm, said my standard morning prayer, and rolled out of bed to start making things happen. I was entirely too awake for the morning as I actually made some conversation with Larry after I headed downstairs. Now usually in the early hours before I engage in a communication with anyone that has any depth, I like to do three things: shi… err… I mean, poop, shave, and shower. Now you’ll notice that these items all start with “sh.” As in “shhhhh, be quiet.” But today was different. I was ready to go. Apparently I was so ready that upon trying to open an egg for to fry and subsequently consume, I managed to crush it and cause it to explode all over my pants. Smooth. But nonetheless, come 5:00 mi padre y yo were listos. So we both hugged my mom/Larry’s wife (who’d woken up to send us off) and bounced off to head to the moderately standard state of Montana which happened to contain within it the amazing deer hunting Milk River (where there are absurd amounts of the creatures).

A bit of Mapquest work had told me that the trip was probably going to take around 11 hours or so, but of course, this didn’t include gas, bathroom, and dance party stops, so no doubt that a fair bit of time would be added onto that. Not going to lie, the concept of 11+ hours in a truck didn’t sound overly amazing to me, but whatevs, it was a necessary dealio for the awesomeness that was to come. Plus, given my three hour nap the previous night which had doubled as my actual “go to bed sleep time,” I figured I could just close my eyes and konk out for a few of those horas.

And sleep I did… Well, for about a half hour (from like 9:00 to 9:30). Unfortunately for me during this time I missed the ONLY live animal that was spotted on our pilgrimage that was actually worth looking at: a coyote. Seriously, we didn’t see a deer of any sort, an antelope, or ANYTHING interesting on our way to Montana. I mean, we saw probably like 7 or 8 dead deer on the side of the road, but let’s be honest here, that doesn’t count.

But anyways, the majority of the trip was fairly uneventful. Larry found that people got friendlier and friendlier in gas stations as we approached our final destination, so that was encouraging. We also discovered that the road names in that state are quite possibly the most generic ones EVER. Seriously, throughout our travels around the great MT (ha, empty) we came across 3 separate roads with “Paisley” as part of the title (East, West, and just regular Paisley), 4 that were called something like Porcupine Fork, and then just an absurd amount of things like “hawk, bear, and [other animal].” My two favorites were probably “Good Road” and “Happy Flats Road.” I mean really, “Happy Flats”?! Ain’t no way I’m driving in the vicinity of that place! :p Anyways, so we arrived in the Glasgow (that being the little town of 3425 where we’d be staying)area after 738 miles at around 3:40 Mountain Standard Time (so like 4:40 CST). Not too bad. Sunset was at about 4:20, so this give us just enough time to drive around the immediate region to check out what would appear to be solid places to start hunting the next day. Of course, we obviously had our guns and such in the truck with us in case we stumbled upon some sort of epic deer that just needed to be shot (*relevant aside* season in Montana started several weeks before this and was to end on the coming Sunday, November 30).

But before I get into that, this seems like the time where it’d make sense to talk about how the whole hunting thing works over there. The majority of the land around Glasgow is under what’s known as “Block Management (or BLM).” BLM areas occur where the government has some sort of agreement with whomever the actual landowner is (be it privately owned or whatever) where I assume they give the aforementioned owner money in exchange for allowing other people to come hunt on their land. I mean, there’s probably a lot more to it than that, but that’s the gist of it as it affects me. Basically, Larry and I get the ability to hunt in a lot of places. Sweet. All you have to do is sign in at the little box that’s at the entrance to the area (which are sometimes hard to find), possibly open a gate, and then head in. Each landowner has their own little rules that you have to abide by (such as the place being walk-in only, restrictions on what types of weapons one can use, and the like), but they’re never an issue to deal with unless you get to some spot that’s specifically archery only; then obviously, Larry and I with our guns can’t rock that. In general, though, it’s a ridiculously amazing system, and I’m all for it. Plus, they’re pretty much all marked with green signs, so they’re not exactly difficult to find (assuming they’re on marked roads).

But yeah, so we drove through Glasgow as I examined the maps I’d printed off Google. Larry’d been pretty big on this “Tampico Road” that was supposed to have this great ranch that he’d hunted on before, so naturally we started our search in hopes of finding that one first. Well, we weren’t able to find the place in question at this time, but what we did find were deer. Lots of friggin’ deer. Seriously, I saw more probably in the first 30 minutes of being in this area than I’d seen in my entire life before that. Baller. T’was going to be a good week. Specifically, I remember driving past one field just off the main road and spotting like 30 deer just chilling like villains out there. At the time I wondered why no one was over there having a great time...Seeing as how it was just about sunset, though, there were a few hunters out and about pushing other BLM areas; that was interesting to us that people were out walking about at this time. Typically, one sits during this period and waits for the deer to emerge from the woods/wherever they happen to be bedding (i.e. sleeping) and wander toward their food source. The hunter usually positions himself near this source and then bushwhacks said ciervo whenever the opportunity arises. But these cats were walking around themselves. How very odd. We ended up learning that for whatever reason this was typical of Montana hunters. *another aside* I’m not necessarily going to change road names here, but I am going to modify the names of the BLM areas, our motel, and certain people just for the sake of the privacy of the owners. As I well know, bad things can happen if the wrong person stumbles upon this blog :p

We ended up putting on a fair amount of miles before we decided that it was too dark to actually really see anything pertinent anymore. So it came to pass that around 5:00 or so we headed off to our motel back in Glasgow. I’d marked the place off on our convenient little Google maps, so it wasn’t too difficult to find. The town itself, though, is pretty not awesomely put together. City planning fail, no doubt. It’s tough to describe adequately, but seeing as how Larry had a rough go of remembering how to get places in that crazy town (and you know, he’s been with the post office for like 27 years or some ridiculously high number like that), then you know something’s wrong. But seeing as how I had the maps and everything laid out in front of me, I was able to get a fairly firm grasp on the goings-on of that place. But anyways, we arrived at the Franklin Hotel at some point, parked right out front, and headed inside to check in all while I sang “Hotel Motel” by Pitbull in a low voice because I’m so hood like that apparently.We stood in line behind some cat who seemed less than pleased while I looked around at all the food items that had been placed on a table that lead up to the main check-in desk. I’m going to be honest here, broheims, the food looked less than reputable. One of the boxes, I kid you not, contained donuts and was closed BUT THERE WERE STILL FLIES IN THERE DOING FLY THINGS SUCH AS FLYING! Consequently, I left these little packages of what I assumed were the continental breakfast alone. But it wasn’t long before the receptionist/lady who I assumed was one of the co-owners of the place started talking to us. We’ll call her Ellie because Jurassic Park is an awesome movie. She informed us that instead of what she’d originally told us we’d have for room assignments (which was to be two separate rooms because the hotel didn’t have any open ones or something with two beds), that we were going to be in a what basically amounted to a two-in-one room. We weren’t quite sure what that meant when her husband, who we’ll call Roger, handed us room key 203.We kind of shrugged it all off and wandered off to the place in question. Upon entry into this place of 203-ness we figured out what Ellie meant: there was one door that led to a main room with a bed, TV, and such and that was connected to another kind of side room that had its own bed, mini-fridge, and a microwave in it. Fantastic! That was going to make things a TON easier! Things were already starting off on a good foot at this place. We rejoiced briefly in this before heading back out to the truck to grab all of our gear. Just so you know, it was a bit weird walking back into the place carrying FIVE (5) guns (two rifles for the deer, two shotguns for bird hunting, and one slug gun in case the restrictions mentioned earlier wouldn’t allow us use rifles on deer)!

It wasn’t long into our unpacking that we ran into Dave. Now who’s this “Dave,” you ask? Well, we later came to the conclusion that he was probably the maintenance guy for this hotel and just a really friendly guy. He asked us about our plans for hunting and willingly offered us some advice. He told us that most of the areas that we had originally had been planning on hunting had been pushed really hard by people for the past several weeks, so all the big deer had moved off into more private areas some jaunt away. We were intrigued by this, so he said he’d hook us up with a map while Larry and I went to go get supper/dinner (*another aside* I typically call the evening meal “dinner” unless I’m at home. Like at school I never eat “supper;” it’s dinner. To me “supper” always has the kind of home-esque connotation, and since I’ve never had a legit home outside of the Olivia greatness, that’s the only place that I really consider to be worthy of the title “supper.” However, like the evening-ish Christmas Eve meal at my grandma’s house, that’s supper because I’m with family in a house. I guess in this sense since I was with my dad, I can refer to all of our later meals as supper even though the fact that we were eating out in Montana of all places seems to constitute its being called dinner. Meh, since I was with my dad, I’m going to call it supper as a bit of an exception.) .Anyways, Larry mentioned to Dave that we were kind of wanting some pizza, so Dave recommended that we should rock some of Eugene’s Pizza (name not changed). Intrigued somewhat by this we headed out. We spent about 90 seconds looking for this place before we just said Smurf it. We could see Pizza Hut on the main highway going through town (Highway 2), so we just decided to hit that place up instead. Now, Amy, you’ll remember all the times we used to eat at Pizza Hut in St. Cloud and like Redwood Falls and such, but since then, up to this point, I don’t think I’d eaten at said restaurant more than an absolute max of three times. Turns out it’s still really good. All we did was split a large pepperoni pizza, but t’was a darn fine call, I must say. I missed that place.

We rolled back to the hotel, motel, Holiday Inn that looked suspiciously like something out of The Shining shortly thereafter to find Dave chilling in the lobby area drawing a map. We walked over to him as he started talking to us and explaining it. We were supposed to travel between x and x+2 miles to the west on Tampico Road, turn north at Vaughn Road and stay there for about y miles, at this point we’d turn left Stone Crick (“Crick” is exactly what he wrote, btw – pretty sure he meant “Creek” :p). This land was supposed to be state-owned, meaning that we could hunt it. From the sounds of what Dave was saying, it was a fairly small area that was surrounded by completely private land (i.e. NOT BLM stuff, so there was no hunting there). Thus, the deer thought of the whole area as some sort of sanctuary. Except unbeknownst to them, they were vulnerable in this little area. He said that one of us should drive (as in walk through) the winding, wooded portion of the land and the other one should stand outside and basically dominate the deer that would jump out. He explicitly stated that some dude he knew recently shot what he more or less described as an amazing 10-point whitetail buck. Grateful for his information, we took the map and headed back to the room.We quickly formulated a plan for the next day and came to the conclusion that we’d get up at 5:00, so we could roll by 6:00. Legal shooting time was around 6:45, so that should’ve given us ample time to find Dave’s spot and get ready. After figuring this out... well, we went to bed. It was just a tad after 8:00, so we both bagged over 9.5 hours of sleep, which given the long drive (which must’ve sucked for Larry far more than me) and the fact that I was on only 3 hours of extended nap was much appreciated.

Larry’s cell phone alarm went off at 5:00, and just like the previous day, I found myself quite awake and alert. I mean, I was on a lot more sleep than before, but the point remains the same: I was jacked to go hunting, son! We both showered, ate some breakfast (which for me for most of this week was cereal, a Nutri-Grain bar, an apple, and a bit of orange juice), packed our lunch (sandwiches and the like), and rolled out at a bit before 6:00 for to continue our awesomeness.
We hopped into the truck with Dave’s directions in tow and started off. It wasn’t an absurd amount of time before we realized that his estimate of between x and x+2 miles on Tampico was like 5 or so miles low, but we eventually stumbled upon Vaughn Road and headed north. For a while. We eventually did cross a creek, but there was nothing even remotely denoting Stone “Crick.” Y miles quickly turned into y+6 miles (which is A LOT on a gravel road, you know. Not like in the way that it’s a long distance, but in the way it’s somewhat understandable to underestimate highway distance by 5 or so miles, but NOT gravel road miles by that much). All we saw was fencing, which no doubt denoted private land. We eventually grew tired of trying to find this mystery place as we wanted to (a) actually hunt and (b) not end up on some angry rancher’s land and cause a bunch of trouble. So we turned around and decided to head back to what we knew.

As opposed to hopping back on paved Highway 2 and going back the way we came, we went jumped over it to get to the Tampico Road where we knew BLM was more prevalent. This entailed us driving past some more private land that was absolutely LACED with deer. They were seriously everywhere. At this point it was getting a bit lighter, and they were easily spotted all along the road and in the fields. I took a look at the basic BLM map that Larry’d gotten in the mail from Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, and suggested that as long as we were over here, we should check one of these areas out as they were far enough away from Glasgow that maybe the deer hadn’t been pushed much over there.We talked over this as we drove down the Tampico Road a bit. Quickly, we stumbled upon the exact ranch that Larry had been really excited about from one of his old hunts. Not going to lie, it looked like a great place full of some sort of wheat, next to some wooded area. Heck, there were three deer already standing in it. We drove up to the place only to be shot down like some sort of sharp-tailed/sharptail grouse (what? wait for it... :p). It had been changed to an archery only area, so we couldn’t rock it. Larry was a bit annoyed by this, but we soldiered on and ran across the other ranch he’d been excited about. There didn’t appear to be any area where one could sign in, though; there was just a sign with some phone numbers on it. Roaming charges aside, Larry decided to make some calls. After some brief phone-tag, we ended up talking to someone about the whole thing. Apparently, there had been some issues the previous year, so you had to get permission from the owner to drive in. Like he had to come and open the gate for you. All this for only 80 acres of land (keeping in mind that in one of the other books Montana had sent Larry, all the BLM areas were briefly described – complete with acreage on them; some were only a couple hundred acres but others were thousands). With this knowledge, we didn’t feel like jumping through a bunch of hoops for this place. Thus, we decided that we should go back to the place I’d suggested earlier in this run-on paragraph.

We pulled up and into what we’ll call Bison Draw only to see grand things. After signing-in (which involves taking a slip out of the sign-in box, filling out some information, and dropping half of it in a little slot within the box itself) and finally getting to the parking area, we were immediately greeted by three mule deer just watching us. They were easily within shooting range, but they were all does, so we made the extremely simple decision to pass on them (perhaps at this point I should say that we both had a tag that was good for either a buck or a doe). They bounded off shortly before we saw a covey of sharptails jump in the distance. Good to know, good to know. Included with our deer licenses was the ability to hunt upland game birds as well (this includes pheasant, Hungarian partridge, and sharptails). I mean, we only had our rifles on us, so we couldn’t legally shoot them; plus we didn’t want to scare any deer, so they’d have to wait for a later time, so we just loaded our rifles and started walking.This area was very similar to what we’d seen in Wyoming whilst antelope hunting. So that meant that we’d have to hunt in the same way: walking. Most of what we’d seen so far had been prime area for just sitting and waiting for deer (with all the wooded areas, food sources, and the river), but this was definitely a bit different. We were likely just going to walk over a hill and then spot some deer randomly in a draw or something down below us. Hopefully they wouldn’t notice us so we’d have time to perhaps sneak a bit closer and set up for a good shot; although, the possibility of them seeing as just as we spot them seemed just as likely if not even more so.

We wandered around this area for a while looking for any deer sign until we stumbled upon what was certainly an interesting site: a cow graveyard. Not like an area with recently dead and decaying bovine (When I grow up, I’m going to Bovine University!”), but rather a spot that was just littered with the bones of the creatures. In retrospect, Larry and I were quite pleased about seeing such a thing. Why is that? Well, my reader, you’ll just have to continue on in this entry to find out :p

Anyways, we kept on keeping on and eventually happened upon a bunch of antelope that were way off in the distance. They didn’t seem to show much consternation at our presence until we started to get a bit closer to them (it should be noted, though, that they were probably like 500+ yards) at which point they sprang off behind some hill and out of our sight. At this point we’d met a fence, so we decided it was best to check our map (at the sign-in box of each BLM area, there’s maps of the place). We figured out that the land on the other side still belonged to the owner of the Bison Draw, so we traversed our way into the adjacent field because there was a solid looking creek (not to be confused with “crick” of course :p) that was surrounded by some tree-age just beyond the fencing. At this time of day (like 10:00), most deer find their way into these sort of covered areas to rest/bed and the like. So this seemed like a solid idea as perhaps we’d jump one.

But alas, t’was not to be right here. No deer made itself known in our little walk, so we figured that it was best just to bounce from this place and check out a different area. So we started what amounted to be a LONG walk back to the truck (this area was over 3000 acres; I mean, we certainly didn’t cover that much land, but we might’ve hit 700 or so). Of course, we jumped a few more sharptails on our walk that we couldn’t do anything about. We mentally noted the seemingly high prevalence of the birds here as we left Bison Draw.

We hopped back on the Tampico Road as we tried to figure out where to go next. After a bit of driving and thought, we decided on what we’re going to label “Paleolith.” I opened up the gate near the sign-in box to start making things happen. We filled out the slips, dropped them back in the box, and headed out as we decided that we wanted to park the truck in one of the other entrances to Paleolith (for most of these BLM areas, there be a few different places to park your car, but there’s usually only one or perhaps two sign-in boxes).

The entrance we wanted was probably only like a quarter mile down the road; once we got there, I jumped out, handled the gate, and we were set. The first thing we really noticed after parking was the cows. A fair amount of the stupid beasts made themselves present in this place. We just ignored them and kept on moving. A quick gander at the map revealed that the Milk River itself served as a winding northern boundary to area, and with the road marking the southern border, there wasn’t going to be any issue in accidentally wandering into someone else’s property.

On our immediate left was a no-shooting zone (as in a place where you can’t shoot). It was clearly owned by the proprietors of the land, but they had their house there, so for very logical reasons, they had the area fenced off. The area was full of some sort of wheat-looking stuff, though, so there was little doubt that the deer would head over to this area come nightfall to feed. We noted that as we wandered about.

As soon as we reached the river, we saw three does standing on the opposite bank just chilling and doing deer things. Money. Again, though, they were does, so we weren’t going to take them downtown to funkytown. And they were on the other side of the rio as well, so they were technically off Paleolith property (and even had they not been, how the frigg were we going to get a dead deer across a river? I mean, the winding water thingy’s pretty shallow and narrow, but still, it would’ve been darn near an impossibility given the ice that was present on parts of it – and who even knows what kind of sediment buildup’s on the bottom or what the current’s like?).

Anyways, we watched them for a couple minutes before they headed off into the woods on the opposite side of the river. So after that occurred, we got back to scouting. It was immediately evident that there were deer trails EVERYWHERE where they’d crossed the river. I’m talking DEEP, HEAVY trails, mind you. Larry looked over at me at one point and just stuck his fist out because it was that awesome. I pounded it as we kept moving. We ended up walking the whole thing until we got to the Eastern boundary of the place (some wooded area). From there, we came up with our game plan for the evening. There was an area that basically cut the whole place in half from north to south (from the river to the road) that was trees. It was only about 10 feet wide, though, and it had a 15 or so foot gap near the river for walking. It’d be perfect to sit there just against the foliage. We’d easily be able to see the main trails where the deer would cross the river, and we could also see the area behind us (the no-shooting zone) where the deer would feed. Couple this with the fact that the trees would funnel deer right toward the gap that we’d be sitting in, and everything was perfect.

Problem, though. The wind was coming at a decent clip and blowing in the complete wrong direction. Our scent would’ve been blown right into the deer crossing the river if we were to sit there. Fail. So we ended up moving away from the trees and up the area a little bit. We could still see everything as it would cross by, but it wasn’t ideal.

Turns out that it wouldn’t have mattered where we sat on that side of Paleolith, though, as we didn’t see a single deer once we sat down. What? I know, right? All we saw were the cows milling about all over the place. At one point they got a bit too close to us, and Larry actually got up and scared them off. Stupid creatures. I mean, it’s not like they’d really pose any threat (although there were a couple of well-horned steers amidst the bunch), but obviously we couldn’t have cows blocking our shot at any deer.

So come about 4:50 or so (the end of legal shooting time) we started our march back to the truck. This is the part that for pride’s sake I shouldn’t mention here, but honesty is the best policy. After we got a bit closer to our destination, we could see a BUNCH of deer (probably like 15 or so) just chilling in the aforementioned, no-shooting zone field. What the frig, mate? We quickly surmised that they’d come from the far end of the property, crossed the plowing over there, and gone into the field undisturbed. They would’ve been completely out of our sight on their trek and fully safe. Turns out we’d picked the wrong spot to sit, I guess.

We hung our heads at this absurd level of fail and got into the truck. As we rolled toward the McDonald’s drive-through, we put together our plan for the coming day. We were going to roll back to Paleolith and sit at the other side this time and dominate the deer as they left the field and went back to the woods. This time.We got back to the hotel, motel, Holiday Inn only to be greeted by Dave asking us our journey went to his magical land of giant and prevalent deer. Rather than just saying that we didn’t find the place and didn’t want to get shot by some angry landowner, we told him that we saw one buck but decided to pass him up (which wasn’t total lie as we did see one… although, he was on private land). At this point some giant van pulled up in front of Franklin and Dave mysteriously jumped in after saying that the people in the vehicle weren’t there for him. How very odd. Anyways, Larry and I enjoyed our double cheeseburgers, watched a bit of TV, and then hit the proverbial hay in order to rock it all again the next day. To be perfectly honest, I’m glad that we didn’t get our deer the first day we hunted. I’d been really looking forward to a legit, prolonged hunting trip, so this was definitely all fine with me. Preferred even.

The next morning we decided to roll instantly to Paleolith and do up the plan we’d come up with the previous night. We did our best to sneak into the area without jumping anything, but since the no-shooting zone was literally right next to the road, it was impossible. We spooked a doe and what we’re both pretty sure was a buck as we headed toward our spot. We lost track of the female quickly, but the buck kind of slowly bounded out in front of us maybe 160 yards away as he went to the wooded area. Either of us probably could’ve shot him, but it was still way too dark to really see how good he was, so we let him go off to go do deer things.

We walked along the edge of the field until we found what we believed to be a good area. Once we sat down we noticed a flashlight off to our left in the neighboring property. That explained why we’d only seen two deer in the field. Some worker had been out and about doing stuff and had likely jumped them all already. Unfortunate.

But there were still deer to be seen, however; Larry and I watched a prolonged line of eleven of them emerge from the trees far in front of us (probably like 250 yards) at about 6:48, which was RIGHT after legal shooting time began. There was one really small buck in the mix that, again, we decided to pass up. The creatures shortly found their way back into the woods never to be seen again (well, that’s not necessarily true, but you feel me).

At about 8:00 we both came to the conclusion that it didn’t pay to just sit in this area and wait all day because they weren’t going to come back until sundown. So we got up and scouted this little portion of Paleolith. We checked out where the deer had come from, where they’d gone, what the trails looked like leading into the field, and everything in-between. Again, there were some solid trails on this side of the field, so we figured that if we hadn’t shot our deer by around 2:00, we’d come back here and make it happen. I was fully confident at this point that we had everything on lockdown and that we were going to get our deer tonight.

In the meantime, though, we decided to head to the area that we’d seen the hunters pushing on Sunday to see what that was like. We’ll call this BLM place “Shepherd.” I don’t remember exactly how big it was, but it was large. We walked around it for a long time and jumped a multitude of deer (we assume, I mean, we heard distinct crashing noises in the woods but never saw anything). We plunged deep into the wooded areas, meandered through dry creeks, and pushed over and down many a hill, but it was all to no avail. But it certainly wasn’t a waste of time.

As we were just about to start the truck and leave the place, we saw a truck pull into Shepherd. A little glance at the painting on its door revealed that the driver worked for Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP). Baller. We were going to get to talk to some dude who knew what the frigg was up with this place. Penn, as I’m calling him, was chalk-full of solid information and gave us a lot of good ideas as to where to go to find deer. He mentioned that the northern portion of “Charlie” would be a great place to go as few people had been up there, and he’d seen a fair amount of deer there recently. Clutch. He also told us that there were two deer literally just down the road not more than a quarter of a mile in the “Sword” zone: a buck and doe. He’d watched them for at least five minutes from his truck, and they didn’t seem to have a care in the world.

After speaking with this Penn cat for a few minutes, we figured that checking out these deer would be a darn fine idea. We found the sign-in box, made that happen, and then drove over to the entrance to check it out. And just as Penn had said, there they were. Maybe like 150 yards deep into the field. Definitely a makeable shot. The buck was definitely a shooter too. Noice. Larry told me what to do, and then I loaded my gun and headed in to make it happen as he drove the truck away so as to not spook the animals. I looked to my left on the other side of the road and saw two horses staring back at me, apparently curious as to what awesomeness was about to go down. Turns out all they saw was a giant picture of fail. As soon as I entered the place, the deer jumped and went tearing off. I jacked the shooting sticks/bipod/little sticks that serve as a nice rest for the gun into the ground, and tried to take aim. It may or may not have been the best idea since the deer were near 300 yards away and running when I was ready, but since I’m pretty darn confident and… well… good with a rifle, I still took a couple of pokes at them. Obviously, I missed as they ran off into Never Never Land.

Pissed as all get-out, I watched as Larry drove back up in the truck. I explained the horrid situation, and then he told me that he’d wanted me to step over the fence and shoot from the couple of trees in the area as opposed to walking in at the entrance. My misunderstanding. They probably wouldn’t have jumped had I’d done that. I looked back to the horses to see what their reaction was, but they were just staring, stoic as ever. I’m sure they were laughing, though. We drove back up the road a bit when we looked over into the field where we’d seen all the deer the previous day. There they were again. And the one I’d just missed was standing in the midst of them. Now I understood, this was private land, and the deer knew it. Clever girl.

Larry looked over to me as we moved on and asked if that was at least fun. I turned my head toward him and responded, “No. Not at all.” I was a bit pissed. I don’t like missing. Ridiculously difficult shot or not, it didn’t matter.

But that wasn’t the end of my missing of ridiculously difficult shots that day. We figured that we should then head up to Charlie to check out what Penn had been talking about. The road to the place wasn’t marked, so it took us a bit to find it, but when we did we found ourselves to be alone in the place. Sweet. We looked at the map of the area that’d we picked up at the sign-in box, devised our plan of attack, and rolled in. The little area that Penn had specifically mentioned for being solid for deer looked amazing. There were two open fields that had nice tree cover along the eastern, western, and northern portions. It looked like this place would be ripe with deer.

So Larry suggested that he do what he does and do a drive for me in the woods. I was cool with that, so he ended into the trees as I walked just outside of them and a bit ahead of him. It wasn’t too long we I heard some noise and saw the tails of three deer as they moved out of the woods. They stopped briefly, and then BOLTED out at high speed. I thrust the shooting sticks into the ground, but these cats (or deer, if you will) were FAR away again and running even faster than the one I’d missed at Sword. This was another impossible shot, but there was a solid buck in the mix again, so I took another poke at him before coming to the conclusion that shooting anymore would be a waste of ammo. They ran off into the trees on the far west side and disappeared.

I picked up the sticks, probably swore, and started walking to the trees as I saw Larry emerge from them. Before he could say anything, I opened my mouth, “I’m SICK of missing LOOONG shots at running deer.” I told him the story, and then said that it was my turn to do a drive for him. I walked into the woods a bit angry and started moving. My feelings subsided fairly quickly as I began jumping deer all over the place. One ran off behind me, and then three (two bucks and a doe) jumped up simultaneously and worked their way to the edge of the trees, right where Larry would/should be able to shoot. I lost track of two of them, but the one buck just STOOD at the edge of the woods and looked at me for a solid five seconds. It would’ve been CAKE to ruin his day and wreck his world, but obviously I didn’t want to shoot out of the woods because… you know, my DAD is out there. That’s dangerous *nods head* So I took a couple of steps forward and soon enough the crazy animal bounded out of the trees and into the waiting gun of Larry.

T’was only a second or so later when I heard the giant thunder shot of his .375 H&H Magnum AKA Thumper. The thing’s literally a friggin’ elephant gun, so just like Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV (“… = Rocky VII, Adrian’s Revenge!), anything [it] hits, [it] destroys. I waited for a few seconds before I walked out to survey the results. I slowly approached the man standing in the field. “I got him,” he yelled. “You can come out.” Money!

I exited the woods and walked out to take a look at the deer. But before I got there, my dad motioned me down. I immediately dropped to the ground and looked to my left. The other buck was standing right there, not more than 70 yards away. Just staring. I adjusted myself and got in position for the shot. For Montana, he was a below average deer at best. Had I been in Minnesota, I would’ve smoked it before I could’ve thought about it, but given what we’d seen out here, I hesitated. I looked over to Larry and shrugged. He simply shrugged back.

I turned back to the deer and raised up my gun. I had the thing dead to rights in my crosshairs when I decided against it. It would’ve been awesome to have a double kill like that, but I still had a bit of time to be choosy. Gosh, just so you know, I HATE trophy hunters. You know, like the guys on TV who pass up AMAZING deer because they don’t quite meet specifications. But in this scenario, I feel that it was legit. I had time, we’d seen a bunch of deer already, and this guy wasn’t that big.

So I stood up and started walking toward Larry and his fallen creature. As I began moving, the lucky buck that I’d just passed up sauntered off into obscurity. Quickly arriving to my dad’s position I was taken slightly aback by how darn fine this deer was. Solid body and a VERY nice 8-point rack. The deer lied on his side with blood literally on its face. The shot had hit him so hard that there was an actual explosion of the red substance, and it had splattered onto its face. He also managed to be lying on his opposite side. As in the power from the shot had somehow managed to flip him over. Insane. We exchanged stories about this crazy thing, and he told me about how it had actually jumped a bit behind him, but he was able to get a lock on him and lay the hammer down from only about 70 yards away. He wasn’t quite sure exactly Thumper had blasted him over either, but he know it was pure devastation. At this point he decided it was best if he would start gutting the animal as I walked back to the truck to get the game cart and his backpack. Good call. He pulled out knife from his pocket as I started moving. Not going to lie, it took me far too long to put that stupid cart together, but once I did, it was smooth as a smooth object… butter perhaps?

Unfortunately, though, we discovered that the camera that we’d borrowed from my mom/Larry’s wife had died/malfunctioned/something, so we were unable to take any legit pics of it, but we both snapped a few with our cellphones (as an aside, I had my phone off basically all week while hunting. Do you know how nice that is to just be away from EVERYTHING for a few days? I mean, I set the alarm from my phone every night while there, so when I turned it on before going to bed there were always a couple of texts/voicemails/whatevs, but they were all ignored. So I’m sort of sorry if I missed anything, but really not so much :p I will admit, though, to texting my awesome Spain buddy Lauren on her birthday. I felt like that was a legit exception.)

By this time, Larry’d finished gutting the deer, so we threw him on the cart and brought him back to the truck. The awesomeness of that contraption led us back to the vehicle in short order. We tossed him and the cart in the back, covered it up with a tarp, and then took a lunch break while we discussed our next move.

T’was only like 12:30 or so, so we decided to drive the rest of this area, and then if nothing happened we’d hit Paleolith up at like 2:30 or so and finish the night there. Sounded like a darn fine plan to me. We quickly pounded down our Twix bars and bologna sandwiches and got back to the getting.Unfortunately nothing really happened. Larry (who was obviously walking the woods now since he already had his deer) kicked up three does, but that was it. The one, though, was probably the fastest moving animal I’ve ever seen. It was just hauling out of the woods at a blistering speed. Kind of glad that wasn’t a buck; that would’ve been TOUGH. But since this didn’t amount to anything, we rolled back to Paleolith.

T’was probably like 2:15 or so when we got there. From the morning’s scouting, we knew exactly where we wanted to go, so that was no issue at all. What was an issue, however, was the cows. They literally followed us to where we were sitting and just stared. From like 2:30 to 3:00 they simply watched us with stupid, non-thinking minds. At a couple of points they even lined up directly across from us like they were protecting calves and they were going to charge. I imagine that’s exactly how Cape buffalo or triceratops would respond to a threat as well… except these were cows so we weren’t exactly afraid. BUT we couldn’t have a herd of like 25 animals just staring at us. I mean, deer might not see us, but they would certainly be suspicious of a bunch of cows all gazing intently in one direction. These dumb beasts had to go. Several times Larry stood up and walked/took a quick run-up to them. Occasionally he’d even throw dirt clods at them. But the animals would only briefly move away before coming back again.

Finally, Larry decided he was just going to wait until they got really close as they had been standing JUST outside of his throwing range. When the time was right, he picked up four dirt clods and launched them one after the other. And I kid you not when I say that this was quite possibly the funniest moment of my life. His last throw sailed majestically through the air. You could see while in flight that it was good, but we didn’t know how good until one of the cows recoiled as a cloud of dirt exploded all over its head. Larry’d crushed the beast right in the dome piece! The animal reacted as if it’d been hit with a SCUD missile, and all the cows bolted off never to come back.

We doubled over laughing at the amazing shot until Larry noticed that there was a doe in the field (no-shooting zone) behind us. We put our serious faces back on pretty quickly as we stalked toward it. We moved more toward the middle of the plowing just in case other deer would show up. We figured that the cows would be blocking the other eastern side of the field (deer don’t particularly like cows), so we moved off to rock the central portion of the northern half. That way we could take anything coming at us from that direction.As we positioned ourselves, we noticed a man with an orange hat standing in the adjacent field where the worker had been earlier that morning. We didn’t think much of it we watched the doe in the no-shooting zone. She must’ve come from the other direction, we’d surmised because we would’ve seen her walk past (or she would’ve been freaked out by the cow escapades and not come from our direction). She chilled behind us for a long time, and at one point was literally no more than twelve feet back. Beautiful animal. Eventually, though, we lost track of her, and I spotted another deer walk into the no-shooting zone from the field the other hunter was in.
This was good… sort of. I mean, the deer weren’t coming from the right direction, but they were starting to move toward their feeding areas. I figured it would only be a matter of time before they started coming right toward us from the trees where we’d seen them earlier that morning. Oddly enough, the aformentioned hunter had disappeared by this time. Probably out doing one of the weird, late Montana drives. Kids, these days, I tells ya.

It was starting to get late, though. It was about 4:00 and we hadn’t seen anything on our side. Theoretically, I should’ve been in class at this point (well, between classes, but the point remains the same), but I prayed A LOT for God to allow me to get out of any obligations for that day, and He’d answered. It was amazing how he answered that one. But I feel bad saying this, but I was starting to wonder why he’d done that if I wasn’t going to get my deer on this day. At this point I told myself to shut up as I was having a phenomenal time AND Larry had already gotten his. NONE of that would’ve happened had I not gotten out of class. I shook my head at my stupidity and disrespectfulness to God, apologized, and started focusing again.I looked off to our right (it should be noted for future reference that Larry was sitting on my right) and saw a doe just standing in the plowing we were in. Beautiful. It was starting. I motioned to my dad, and we both started watching it. She walked to the far trees where we’d seen the line of deer that morning. My gun rested on the shooting sticks and my crosshairs lined up right behind her shoulder as I pondered killing her. Again, I knew it was not to be.

I took my sites off her as Larry whispered, “There’s some deer.” I didn’t see them at first, but he said there were three, and then a fourth, and then a fifth. They were running toward the safety of the no-shooting zone. With the sun already set and literally only a couple of minutes left of legal time, I swung my gun in their direction and spotted them.

“The second one’s a buck!” whisper-shouted my dad as he looked through his binoculars. I yoked up the crosshairs and got them on the creature.

“You’re in the way!” I said. Larry quickly leaned back as the deer slowed momentarily. I squeezed the trigger and watched the animal’s head recoil upward before it crashed to the ground. “DOWN!!!” I shouted as I worked the bolt.

I quickly got to my feet and started moving toward the deer, but he wasn’t done. He started crawling toward the sanctuary that was the field. I wasn’t going to take a chance of losing him, so I took another shot, but I didn’t take enough time, and I shot JUST over him. I only had one round left in the gun, and there was no way that I was going to take the time to reload. I looked over to my dad who was walking alongside me. Somewhat frantically I said, “Let’s go!”

“GO!” he responded. That was all that I needed. I took off running over the uneven plowing toward the animal. Even given the terrain and the fact that I was carrying a gun, I don’t think that I’ve ever run faster in my life. I bolted toward the creature. He was NOT going to get away.
I pulled up not more than 10 yards away from the animal and took to a knee. I adjusted the scope on the .270 Winchester and stared into the almost pleading eyes of the deer. “Sit down,” I said as I fired a last shot into his chest.

His head fell to the ground for the last time, and I turned around to see my dad making his way toward me. The smile on his face was just too big. He was probably just as happy as I was. He told me that I’d made the shot at 4:46 – two minutes before the end of legal shooting time. Awesome. At this point, though, the sun was totally gone, and it was pretty legitimately dark. So I quickly went back to where we’d been sitting to grab the shooting sticks. On my way back I paced out the distance to the deer: 146 yards. Not a bad shot at all. I took a gander at the animal before I started for the game cart and the truck. T’was a beautiful 9-point with a good body. I mean, I knew he was good as I looked through at him through my scope, but I didn’t know he was this good. Just a gorgeous animal. After this brief examination, my absurdly happy self walked back toward the truck to snag the game cart and make things happen. Of course, I was tossing up boatload of praises skyward and pumping my fist an uncomfortable amount of times while I walked. Not going to lie, I was pretty friggin’ jacked up.

I arrived back at the truck and jumped into the back to try and recover the cart. Problem, though, Larry’s deer was totally blocking it making for a complete hassle in getting it out. While working at this, I noticed some dude in a truck drive insanely slowly past me on the road. That’s all that story amounted to. I mean, it was weird to see because he was probably literally only going five miles an hour, so it was weird to experience, but since nothing came of it that was probably boring for you to read *shrugs* Anyways, I waved at the guy, FINALLY got the cart out, and then rolled back to Larry.

On my walk back I thought about how very similar (this is weird, I know) this kill had been to the end of Brom Stoker’s Dracula. I wish there weren’t copyright laws and such because I’d love to drop the last few pages in here just for funsies. I mean, not to spoil the book, but I’m going to (at least what I remember). At the end of the novel, the sun is moments away from setting (so you know, Dracula’s about to get his crazy powers back), and there’s a group of horsemen pulling him inside his coffin back to his castle (or something like that), but JUST before the light disappears and the Count gets back to safety/becomes an unstoppable wrecking ball, Van Helsing, Jonathan, and whoever else is with the good guys manage to catch him and then kill him via cutting his neck and stabbing him in the heart. Pretty similar, isn’t it? Last second kill as the animal runs for safety while he’s surrounded by protectors of some sort. I’m not saying, I’m just saying. But moving on, by this point, Larry had finished gutting the creature, so we tossed it on the wheeled-contraption and rocked our way out the place. We tossed my deer into the back of the truck, I worked the gate one more time, and were done, son! We got back to Glasgow fairly quickly, bounced into a Pamida to grab a disposable camera (which apparently they still make), and then hit Subway for some $5 footlongs. I must say, though, that people in that town are very friendly. From Dave and the rest of the people at the motel to the workers to just the people on the street, everyone seemed to be pulling for us to get a deer. It was super-nice. There were churches (and casinos) at every corner too. But I should also mention that they have a radio station in the town called “The Klan.” Yeah. With a K. Just throwing that out there. Seems like a very Republican area :p But I digress, so we got back to the motel at whatever time that we got back to the motel, took off our gear, and just kicked back. We watched a bit of TV while we ate our subs and put together the plan for the next day. We were going to get up early and butcher (as Roger had said that we could use his garage) and then we were going to hit up some bird hunting back at Bison Draw. Money.

We awoke the next day, showered, and did all the usual stuff before heading out to the lobby of the Holiday Inn to wait to meet Roger so he could show us to his garage. We didn’t have to wait too long before he returned from dropping his daughter off at school. Turns out it was connected to the motel itself as we just walked all the way through it over around to the back. I opened the door to the place as Larry drove the truck up.

Shortly thereafter we had the deer on the ground and we’re beginning to cut them up. Now I’m just throwing this out there, before this day I’d never butchered an animal before. Larry’d always done the dirty work on the antelope and such when I was younger, and now that I was older, I always had to be back at school after shooting the deer, which left him to rock it by himself. So honestly, I was kind of looking forward to doing this. I’d dissected a cat senior (I think) year of high school, and it was super-cool, plus I’d watched Larry do this whole thing many a time back in my younger, more formative years, and it all looked pretty cool. I’ve always had a sort of fascination with physiology/musculature and stuff, so there was no doubt that this was going to be really interesting. I watched at first as my dad caped the deer (as in he cut the fur/skin from around the necks of the deer so we could mount them later) before he told me to grab the bone saw he’d brought with to sever the head/upper neck from the rest of the body. Money.

After I finished this, it was basically time to start going to town cutting hunks of meat of the animals. In general, the idea is to just save all the muscle and throw the fat, fur, and sinewy stuff away. It’s actually a fairly long process (especially since we were doing this all on the ground as opposed to having the deer hung up), but it did turn out to be super-interesting. Larry measured everything out for the mount while I just kept cutting. Eventually, he finished that part up, and we took to ending the butchering process together. Nice. At this point it was around noon, so we figured that it was time to go birding. Hecks yeah! Just to make sure that everything was legit, we headed over to D&G’s Western Sporting Shop (or something like that) to grab ourselves a copy of the upland game bird rules just to make sure we had everything on lockdown. Larry’d been wanting to show me this place for a while because of all the great mounts on the walls, and I will definitely say that the store delivered as there were some great deer, birds, elk, and other awesome things to be found. We didn’t hang around too long, though, as we had flying creatures to end. So we snatched a copy of the rules and headed out
Once we got back into the truck, we realized that we had the wrong rules. How very odd. So I wandered quickly back into the place to rectify the situation. Turns out that they didn’t have of the regulations we needed, so the friendly lady directed me to the Fish, Wildlife, and Parks office on the far end of town. So I passed this on to Larry, and we were off.

We jumped out of the truck and headed into the FWP building to do this up when Larry started randomly talking to someone unbeknownst to me. I turned back to see that our good buddy Penn was standing outside with some other cat. We thanked him and told him how great his advice was as we explained our hunt. Pretty sure we actually embarrassed him a bit in front of what we think might’ve been his boss, though, but I was really glad that we got to thank the guy for all his help. This was short-lived, though, as we had some hunting to do, so we said our goodbyes, grabbed an actual copy of the rules, and headed off to Bison Draw.About 17 minutes later we pulled into the familiar area that we’d seen on Monday. Things looked pretty much the same, except there weren’t any deer standing right out in the open this time. We loaded up our shotguns and started walking. To be perfectly honest, we weren’t really sure how to go about attacking these creatures. Neither of us had ever really done this before. I mean, he’d shot sharptails before, but still. So we just sort of walked toward where we’d seen them a couple days prior and through any grass that looked like it might contain birds.

We weren’t having any luck when we decided to make a loop back toward the truck to try a different direction when suddenly a burst of white jumped up into the air. Both of us were taken by surprise, and I’d just realized what was happening and had raised my gun up when I heard Larry shoot. I saw a bird drop on his third shot, and I was quite positive that I’d hit one with third shot as well (it rocked and it looked like it was going down behind the hill). Neither of us were too pleased, though, as those birds were so slow moving that we should’ve each iced three (about seven jumped up), but we weren’t anywhere near ready when they started flying. I was in the process of reloading my gun and had just gotten one shell in when I heard something jump behind me. I quickly turned my gaze toward it as I worked the pump. “Shit!” I may or may not have yelled as I brought my gun up. “Shoot him!” yelled Larry (yeah, I know you’re supposed to start a new paragraph when a new person speaks, but I’m just not going to do that here, so take THAT, establishment! :p). I waited an extra half second as I got a bead on the sharptail. Once he disappeared from my sight as the gun blocked my viewpoint of him, I fired.
The poor thing folded up like a taco and went down hard. It was basically instant death as it’d only been like 15 yards from me. I grabbed him and walked over to Larry as he examined his bird. I told him that I was pretty sure I’d hit one from the first flock, so we kept heading in the same direction to see if we could find it. And by gum we did. Just after we got over the top of the little hill a sharptail slowly jumped up. My dad blasted him before he had a chance to know that there was a problem. Looks like we’d doubled up on bird. Solid.At this point we made the mistake of walking back to the truck to get more shells. This of course is always a mistake because once you do this, you NEVER see any more of whatever it is you’re hunting; after this Larry and I totally walked around for another some amount of time without seeing any more birds. So it was probably around 3:00 or so when we decided to try heading for a different place to maybe find some pheasants or something (I should say, though, that we did everntuall run across what we presume to be the same three mule deer does from Monday.).

Unfortunately, this was not to be as our BLM map wasn’t detailed enough to tell us the roads to go on to get to the areas with high pheasant numbers (I’d done some research to find out where the highest concentrations of birds were), so we ended up just driving around for a bit, but whatevs, we had our deer and our sharptails. I think it was pretty safe to say that we were VERY happy with everything. We got back to the motel and just decided to chill for a bit since it was still too early to go out for supper. I’m proud to say that I used this bit of downtime to introduce my dad to Man vs. Food, which is fantastic show centering on this guy who travels all around the country taking of eating challenges of local restaurants. A couple hours of this and we were ready to eat.

Once again we chose Pizza Hut as our place of choice. Except instead of pepperoni we decided to rock some sausage this time… you know, because we were wanting to eat cow due to the whole fiasco from the previous day :p The pizza was still as awesome as ever, and it was darn nice for our last legit meal in Montana to be the same as our first. We got back to the motel, watched some more Man vs. Food, FINALLY got in contact with the proprietors of the place in order to set up a check-out time for the next morning, packed our stuff, and then went off to bed. We awoke the next morning basically ready to go. We wished each other a Happy Thanksgiving, made some sandwiches for lunch, loaded up the truck, and checked out. We were on the road by like 7:15 or so Montana time. In direct contrast to the way up, though, we saw a couple of antelope and about eight mule deer off the road as we left the crazy state. A nice little sendoff, I’d say.

We made baller good time throughout the entirety of the drive as we only ever stopped for gas (i.e. three times). We pondered our options for supper as we drove, but eventually came to the conclusion whilst in Fergus Falls that all the fast food places were closed, so our Thanksgiving meal ended up being bologna sandwiches, pop tarts, and Kit-Kats, but whatever, it didn’t matter. Everything was awesome.

I managed to even further realize on this journey how friggin’ awesomely hardcore my dad is too. He told me a bunch of stories about his elk hunt from the previous year that basically involved him going out in the literal middle of nowhere, by himself, completely sans any sort of communication with the outside world, with nothing but a bow for a week. He talked about everything from his elk stalks, to the total lack of people around, to crazy terrain that he had to deal with all while I just sat there thinking about how ridiculously awesome that was and how much I wanted to do that with him. Someday, my friends. Someday. Well… he and I are going to Africa first, though. For sure :pBut like I said, we made sick time and actually pulled into our driveway back in Olivia before 8:00. Amy was home since Paul had moved off to Pennsylvania to start training for his new job (Amy was going to wait until the end of her semester at MSU before going over there to be with him), so needless to say I was a bit excited for that (not to mention that I missed my mom too). Awesomely enough, this actually ended up being the first Thanksgiving since 2003 (six years!) that all four of us were together. Heck, last year Larry was in Montana hunting, my mom was at home, Amy was in Mankato, and I was in Spain, so we were ALL apart – craziness. This was especially unexpected because there was a fair possibility that my dad and I were still going to be hunting at this point.

We walked into the warm house and started exchanging stories, chatting it up, and just living like we used to. Not going to lie, I miss the old days of the four of us together in the same house. I mean, I love where we’re all at now, and life is darn amazing, but there aren’t words that can describe how phenomenal family really is. And if I’m thankful for something it’s my the amazing group of people the Lord has blessed me with that I call my family.