Having grown up around farmers and confirmed pessimists, I try not to complain too much about the weather, and just make the best of any given situation. Not that I’m always successful…

October means hunting season is underway, and half-empty glass types have abundant fodder for complaint. In fact, it would seem that Mother Nature is downright anti-hunting! We know better, though, and have been fortunate enough to roll with the situation and put a fair bit of fresh meat in the freezer. Well, OK, my son has… He’s the protein provider around here, it seems, which suits me just fine, and I haven’t punched a tag yet. I can use the excuse that I’m trophy hunting, which is absolutely true, but I’m sure glad Cody isn’t as picky. Although, his antelope is not too shabby at all…

First, though, he arrowed a mule deer doe right here on the Rockpile Ranch. Stalked it on the ground (no small feat), and it dropped within twenty yards of where hit. Our freezer was getting low, in fact we were reduced to eating rutty mule deer buck from last season, and this muley doe is gourmet fare in comparison. Or perhaps I should say "was" gourmet fare. We devoured her in short order.

Some maintain that mule deer cannot adapt to civilization or suburbia or what have you, unlike whitetails who thrive in more urban settings. I dunno, though… Our neighborhood here has a fairly low housing density, although it’s downright urban in comparison to places like our antelope hunting spot out in the Big Open. Mule deer are thriving around here, though, and it seems a lot of them are living right down here on the flats with us, instead of up in the adjacent Bridger mountains. It’s kind of a no-brainer, I’d think. It’s an easy life with abundant forage and little pressure from predators. Even when hunting season rolls around, we’re in a Primitive Weapons Area, meaning only archery, black powder, or handguns are allowed. And besides that, in order to hunt a buck you have to draw one of the coveted Bridger buck tags, not to mention most everything around here is private property with limited to no public access, so you can see these deer are not subjected to undue hunting pressure.

Kudos go to Cameron Marcoux, though, who not only drew a buck tag, but used to live in the neighborhood and so knows a lot of the landowners, and more than that is well-mannered (a common-sense thing that inexplicably evades many) and so had secured access permission on a reasonable portion of the neighborhood. He’d been hunting one specific buck for over a month! Whitetail deer can be patterned and are often successfully hunted from treestands. Mule deer are somewhat more random in their movements, though, and bowhunting them is a whole different and very challenging matter. Cameron had come close numerous times, but many things can go wrong with an archery stalk, and invariably did in this case. In fact, it was beginning to appear that his quest was jinxed, but in direct contrast to my just-made statement about their unpredictable movements, this one group of bucks was passing between my neighbor’s house and ours morning and evening for several days on their way to and from bedding in the pasture behind, to feeding on alfalfa out front. Cameron secured permission from both of us, and was theoretically in fat city until the random nature of mule deer re-asserted itself and another couple of stalks/ambushes went awry. Finally, though, while he was crouched along the bush at the corner of my neighbor’s house, the buck made the fatal error of strolling by and another rapid bow kill resulted. Atta’boy, Cameron!

Next up was antelope (well, actually frantic and copious amounts of work went on between and throughout these episodes). That’s when Mother Nature turned difficult. The Tuesday and Wednesday prior to the antelope opener, we were "blessed" with a remarkable snowstorm. Here in the Gallatin Valley we only got a dusting of snow, with most of the precip remaining in liquid form. Immediately on the other side of the Bridgers, though, Clyde Park received eleven inches of snow, and literally from there east to about the middle of North Dakota there was anywhere from six to eighteen plus inches. Needless to say, this wreaked havoc on not only travel, but since the leaves were mostly still on the trees many limbs and whole trees were broken off, taking out adjacent power lines in many cases. In fact, for a time the power was out for most of eastern Montana and the western Dakotas. So that made a fine mess indeed, and those who still ventured out for the antelope opener were further confounded with widespread rain on opening day! Needless to say, when it gets wet out in the Big Open, only fools or fearless venture off the pavement (which there isn’t really much of), and we are talking a truly epic expanse of impassible gumbo goo! We thought better of it, and attended an auction of surplus farm equipment at the Flying D Ranch instead. I was mainly interested in a land roller (a heavy 14’X48" steel cylinder) used for pushing rocks back into the ground, which could prove to be one of my most vital implements here on the Rockpile Ranch. Auctions are as unpredictable as hunting, though. There was a lot of very nice equipment, and it went high, so we came away with only a set of harrows. More entertaining was observing the variety of rain gear employed. You’d have thought we were at a rodeo based on the number of cowboys sporting bright yellow rain slickers. Those are practical enough, I suppose, long as you’re not trying to sneak up on anything. Less sensible are cowboy boots, though, which are truly worthless wet-weather footwear unless encased in rubber overboots (which an inexplicable number of these John Wayne types must have forgotten). Speaking for myself at least, having cold and wet feet really detracts from a situation, but hey, if you’re a real cowboy you have to wear the uniform and grimly suffer the consequences if misery results. Those of us wearing Gore-Tex and Schnees had a good time, anyway…

We were mildly confounded by this situation as we had once again secured the sweet access for antelope hunting with a ~150 section ranch to ourselves. That didn’t do us much good, though, as there isn’t a paved road within miles of the place, so we delayed until Thursday before embarking on our ongoing quest for a record book speed goat. By then, it was just dry enough to get around, if you were careful. We had reports that the antelope were bunched up in bigger herds, presumably in reaction to the storm, and a ~150 mile tour of the "neighborhood" Thursday afternoon resulted in a striking lack of antelope sightings, at least compared to what we’re used to out there. The original plan was to park just off a well-graveled county road that touches the north end of the ranch, and hike in from that point, but antelope were uncharacteristically sparse in those parts. So on Friday we drove in from the south end of the ranch, and to our relief found antelope in abundance. We’d glassed a couple of bunches, unsuccessfully stalked one decent buck, and had reached a high point (or what passes for one in those parts) where I’d seen several good bucks the year prior. Sure enough, way off in the distance down by a little reservoir was a herd of antelope with what appeared to be a quite good buck. While at a glance that country appears remarkably devoid of topographical features that might enable a stalk, in practice there are all sorts of little ravines and coulees that afford cover, and so about a mile and a half later we were closing in on the herd. We crept to the top of a little ridge, and about 150 yards away stood the buck. From that vantage point we couldn’t see any of the others, but at a glance further deliberation was deemed unnecessary and Cody dropped him with a single shot. Somewhere around forty does came streaming out of the coulee bottom, with nary another buck, which I’d take to mean that he was the boss goat in those parts! If you’re into these matters, he scores 75 4/8 B&C, in spite of his horns only being 13.5" long. He has good mass and long prongs, though. The minimum score for the book is 82, (80 for the Montana book), so he’s not a Booner but still the best we’ve taken out there, and we were tickled pink! Not to mention; boning out and backpacking an antelope is a casual matter compared to say, an elk.

We had a grand time stalking several other bunches, but I never saw a buck bigger than Cody’s, and since the meat on these sagebrush denizens leaves something to be desired as table fare, I held off with no regrets whatsoever. One novel technique we employed was using a decoy. I’d bounced the idea off a few people, most of whom expressed skepticism if not outright mocked the concept. I originally thought about using an antelope decoy. This could be suicidal in more heavily hunted areas, but again, there’s nobody else hunting this ranch. Still, it seemed perhaps questionable, so we took our cow elk decoy instead. Elk aren’t exactly common out there, so the soundness of this idea was questioned also by less innovative minds, but hey, I figured we had nothing to lose, so… We’d stalked to within about 400 yards of yet another bunch of speedy goats, with no way to get closer without them seeing us. At that point I was pretty sure I didn’t want the buck, and so popped open the decoy and crouched behind it to cross an opening into a ravine. That didn’t seem to bother the antelope unduly, and I was able to creep down the ravine to within about 75 yards of the herd, at which point I was sure I had no interest in the buck. I popped open the decoy again and raised it over the little bank I was hiding behind. The results were hilarious! Those antelope didn’t know what to think… They came charged up to within rock-throwing range, and then tore off as if they’d seen the very devil himself, which in their view I suppose I was! It was an eminently worthwhile exercise, if for no other reason than story-telling value, and a matter that clearly calls for further research! Perhaps a grant of some sort could be secured…

So anyway, that was a grand experience indeed, at least until we were on our way back out of the ranch. On our way in we’d passed through a particular gate that the ranch manager had advised us to take a run at. The ground was definitely soft, although dry on the surface. At that point, we had momentum and gravity on our side, but on the return we were going uphill instead of down and to our immense consternation suddenly started spinning the tires and forward motion rapidly ceased. Uh-oh….

At that point we were probably twenty miles from the nearest human. This was not a good situation, especially when we discovered I’d made the grievous error of not bringing a shovel. We did have an axe, which I assure you is a vastly substandard implement for shoveling gumbo mud, but Praise the Lord we did have a set of chains which saved our bacon! With no little difficulty we got those on the back tires which enabled us to back out of our little dilemma to more solid ground. We then swapped the chains onto the front tires, carefully plotted an off-track route through what appeared to be the potentially slightly more solid gumbo, wound the diesel up tight and took a very tense run at the gate. The consequences of failure were kind of grim, with no cell phone reception and as mentioned, nothin’ but an awful lot of nothin’ for a long ways in every direction, but we roared through the gate and up the following hill without sinking into the goo, to our enormous relief (and I believe the ranch manager’s also, who undoubtedly was not relishing the prospect of extricating us from wherever we’d mired). In fact, when we got back to cell reception, his relief at our return resulted in invitations back for next year, and so maybe I’ll come out of there with Mr. Big yet!

And then that weekend my wife and I spent our anniversary at Chico Hot Spring, an annual tradition ongoing for fifteen years or so out of our 23 year marriage, and a grand time was had. Again, from the sounds of it you’d think we are members of the leisure class, but to enable these ventures we’ve been cramming a week’s worth of work into three days or so, and the telephone and e-mail is relentless (mostly buffalo business here lately). Not to complain…

Then, Montana’s general big game season opened this past Sunday, and so after another of the just-mentioned burning it at both ends, twice the light in half the time work weeks, Cody and I loaded up the ponies and packed into the Madison Range to one of our elk hunting honey holes. Many would perhaps accurately characterize the weather as absolutely lousy for elk hunting, and I believe it’s one of the few (and perhaps the only) times when sunscreen was more useful than wool duds and Gore-Tex. There are plenty of elk in the neighborhood, but with the bluebird conditions we assumed they would mostly be on the very tops of the mountains, or otherwise the most inaccessible portions of their habitat, which they were. Sunday morning found us high above what we call Gutpile Gulch, but for a change there were no elk in evidence. Oh, they’d been there, it smelled like an elk feedlot and sign was abundant, but they’d obviously decamped for yet more secluded environs, and so we dropped off into the north-facing timber of the adjacent canyon. There was a little snow there, although it had repeatedly frozen and thawed into Styrofoam consistency, and so we were carefully descending and only stepping on bare ground wherever possible. After few hundred yards of slow and careful descent we heard the "crunch, crunch" of a largish creature who wasn’t being as careful about where he stepped, and so we bagged stealth ourselves and ran out to the edge of a nearly rockslide which was being crossed by a bull elk. We could see he wasn’t the Bull of the Woods, but in another second or two he would disappear into the timber, and in a snap decision we opened fire and dropped him. Actually, in rapid succession Cody hit him, then I, and then Cody again which put him down. Although, he didn’t just drop, but went cartwheeling down the rockslide resulting in breaking off an antler. Upon reaching him, Cody was a little disappointed. He wanted something bigger, and in fact noted that his elk keep getting smaller! Still, he’s only sixteen and this was his third bull elk. He got decent bulls his first two years of hunting, but then came up short the last two years, and under the conditions I think we still made the right decision. I think… In any case, there’s no such thing as catch and release hunting, so we were bound by our decision, and immediately were struck with the realization that retrieval was going to be difficult. Perhaps very difficult… With no snow on the ground for lubrication, the prospect of getting several hundred pounds of elk down to a point we might reach with packhorses promised to be strenuous. First we field dressed and cut the elk in half. Dragging half an elk through a rockslide consists of rapidly walking backwards with elk in tow, attempting to avoid breaking a leg in the treacherous footing. Eventually things flattened out a bit, but we were still obviously at least a thousand vertical feet above anyplace we might realistically get horses to, so at that point we boned out the loins and rib/neck meat which went in our backpacks, and we resumed our trek each dragging a shoulder and back leg. At first we just cut slits through the tendons and pulled by hand, but given the amount of deadfall and obstacles that rapidly turned excruciating. Cody had the idea of cutting saplings and inserting them through the tendon slits, forming sort of an oxbow affair that one might place about waist high and continue our descent with a big chunk of elk on either side. It was about then we ran out of water…

What seemed like an eternity later we were not only dehydrated but nearly exhausted and about ready to sit down for a good cry when we finally hit a sort-of-flat bench that I thought we might be able to get horses at least close to. Gratefully forsaking my loads, I explored a bit further and verified this matter, and so we stashed the meat with some exceedingly sweat-soaked undershirts in an effort to discourage bears or other scavengers and headed for camp. The next morning we returned with four horses, and to our delight were able to get them to within about two hundred yards of our elk, which was a casual matter compared to the previous day. In what could have been a serious lapse in judgment I’d decided to see how two of the new ponies reacted to packing meat. Strider had been packed with cargo a few times, and shown remarkable aptitude for it, so I wasn’t too concerned with his reaction, but four year old Buddy could have easily been a different matter. We’d put the hind quarters into some nylon feed sacks, and when I led Buddy up he was definitely interested and smelled them, but never even snorted or acted up in any way while I loaded him up. Not only that, he never even bobbled slightly from there to the trailhead, about twelve miles of rough terrain, perhaps half off-trail. I’m really liking that horse…

So, I still have an elk tag (and antelope, but I don’t have time or interest for that trek again this year), plus with any luck we’ll both drop trophy mulies, not to mention a buffalo, and so we feel richly blessed in the protein department. Maybe it would be a lot easier to just buy our meat at the grocery store, but hey… it’s not the same thing at all. Not even close. This is Real Meat, none finer. Although, Cody says we’re not shooting any more little bulls in that spot, which I believe is a plan with considerable merit!