New #2 Colorado Non-Typical 306-3/8 B&C

Excerpt From Great Deer of the West by Roger Selner

I didn’t get my first choice tag for our ranch, but after a few weeks, I found out my uncle and I had drawn tags for an area my dad drives by on his way to and from work. He had been telling me about the monster bucks he had been seeing. There was only one problem; we had to wait until the third rifle season.

My dad had been scouting all summer and had seen many nice deer, including one non-typical that looked like a monster. As the season got closer, he started seeing fewer deer. The day before the opener, he didn’t see any at all.

“Beep, Beep, Beep!” The alarm went off; my hunting season had finally arrived. To no surprise, my dad was already up and ready, along with my uncle. I grabbed some breakfast and began to get ready.

We decided not to go to Dad’s “honey hole” until later. So, we chose to go to a more popular area to see how many hunters were out in the unit. By the end of the day, I was empty-handed but my uncle taken a great buck, which Dad green scored at 194. It was the first animal with antlers my uncle had killed.

We hunted hard the next day, including a trip into the “honey hole.” I missed a great buck, but again came home empty-handed.

The next morning I got up and went to school, still feeling frustrated and thinking about the buck I had missed. I wasn’t able to hunt the next evening. That turned out to be even a more frustrating day. I just kept thinking about the one that had gotten away.

We had another fruitless hunt one evening, but then Dad and I were both able to take off early one day. Dad said he had a gut feeling it would be our lucky hunt. We made it to our “honey hole” and, in no time, we quickly and quietly maneuvered our way up the drainage through the tangled mazes of burned timber to the base of the mountain. It was a good three-mile hike.

As we started to top out at the head of the drainage, the hillsides began to become more visible. Dad paused for a moment and pulled up his glasses to look ahead. He quietly whispered that there were two does up ahead, so we sneaked around to their left. As we did, they spotted us. We paused for a moment to see what they were going to do. The excitement was starting to build. Just the sight of those deer and how close we were to them made it feel as if we had stepped into their bedroom.

The does curiously started walking toward us. As we held our position, I could only wonder what was going to happen next. They paused about 50 yards from us, discovered we weren’t deer, and quietly trotted off. They left in the direction they had come from, which worked in our favor. Dad’s plan was to go away from them and toward a steep hillside that had lush, green vegetation on it.

As we turned to start in the direction of the hillside, Dad stopped and looked ahead again. He said, “Kyle, there’s a good buck looking at us.”

As Dad looked through his glasses, he told me it was definitely a buck we should take. Dad was standing next to a burnt tree and, as he stepped around it, he told me to rest my rifle against the side of the tree to take the shot. As I got my first look at the buck through the scope, the buck appeared to be just what Dad had said. He was facing us, looking in our direction with an intense stare.

I steadied my breathing, let out my breath, and squeezed the trigger. POW! That buck jumped a mile high as the shot went off. He turned in mid air and did the “old bulldozer,” as my dad calls it. He collapsed out of sight. Dad exclaimed, “You got him Kyle; good job!”
We hugged and then gave the buck a little bit of time before we went to find him. My adrenaline was flowing. Dad told me to get another round ready as we took off to go see him.

When we arrived at the spot where we last saw the buck standing, we immediately found blood and tracked him about 50 feet. As we were approaching him, it looked like he had fallen into an old dead bush. My dad made it to the buck first and told me to get my gun ready. My heart was pumping as Dad picked up a rock and tossed it toward the buck’s belly. The rock hit and bounced off the buck’s body. Dad said, “He’s done, Kyle.”

As I was securing my rifle, my dad kept saying, “Oh, my God” over and over. Neither of us was prepared for what we found lying there. His antlers were heavy, and it seemed as if there were hundreds of points going in all different directions. From that point on, there would be no words to describe the buck. They would have to see it with their own eyes. Dad gave me a big hug. We had several high fives. There is just no way to explain the excitement and emotion of what we were looking at.

Then our work began. We still had a three mile hike out to the truck. We started off on top of a ridge, but the ridge soon died out and turned into a nasty drainage littered with a tangled mess of deadfall. We dragged the buck a hundred yards at a time, and then had to stop to clear out another hundred yards.

Three hours later, near dusk, we got the deer to the pickup. As we climbed into the truck to head home, there was one more hug from Dad, congratulating me and telling me how proud he was and what a great experience it was. As we drove up the hill I could hardly wait to call my mom and my brothers. Everyone that we stopped to show the deer to was amazed. Everyone told me it was truly a deer of a lifetime, but I think it’s truly the deer of a thousand lifetimes.

I would like to thank my dad; he is not only an awesome dad but a tremendous guide. I couldn’t have done it without him. The scouting he did while going to and from work and his knowledge of hunting played a big part in my success.