By: Randy Tucker
We often refer to it as “black timber,” not because it’s the residue of a forest fire, which can leave trunks blistered and blackened, but because the woods are dark when trees grow so close together. While I prefer hunting deer in the open hillsides and draws of the heavy sagebrush in the high desert of Wyoming, I also enjoy the different challenges of hunting in the mountains. My brother-in-law Matt and I had a long weekend with a couple of general tags for mule deer and another each for antlered elk. While we didn’t spot any elk, we did see quite a few does and fawns on the first day of our hunt.
We were west of Dubois, in the Shoshone National Forest. The Shoshone was just one of the marvels that President Theodore Roosevelt preserved for all future generations back in 1906. The forest was still as vibrant, as it was when Teddy did his legislative magic, and the game was more plentiful as well, thanks to more rigorous game codes and hunting regulations established by the state of Wyoming.
Matt was using my dad’s 6mm Remington ADL, and I had my venerable .308 Remington 788. It was hot that October, unseasonably so, and the elk were still well above us near the tree line. The mule deer were plentiful but sporadic in small herds, with hundreds of does and fawns, but very few bucks.
Regulations called for two-point or better bucks (four points for those of you used to eastern whitetail hunting), but forked horns were about all we spotted. I did get a glimpse of a fast-moving four-point buck, but he was headed uphill towards the north at warp speed and there was no way I could get a shot.
On the second day, we were not so particular in the size and number of tines we were willing to take a shot at. Forked horn bucks were on the menu. Our beast of burden that weekend was a Red, 1986, Chevrolet Suburban that Matt had won at a sealed bid auction. The old girl was already well past her prime with 20 years and a couple hundred thousand miles on her, but if you didn’t mind the stiff suspension, and the way it bounced and fishtailed around washboard corners on the road, it was a great way to travel. We had a single cassette tape that we played over and over since there were no FM or AM stations during the daylight, and only a handful of distant AM stations that arrived after dark. The tape’s title,”40 Miles of Bad Road” seemed fitting.
After a fruitless morning hunt, we ate lunch, then set up on a ridge above one of the many creeks that feed the Snake River and waited for the deer to come to us. We didn’t wait long. I spotted a 2×3 buck just 120 yards in front of us, downhill about 25 feet below us in the black timber. The trees were so thick that Matt couldn’t see the buck since his line of sight was impeded by rows of lodgepole pine. Matt was a few feet in front of me to the right. I whispered to him, “Back up, I see a buck.”
“There’s no buck down there,” Matt said.
“I’m going to shoot, you need to move,” was my final comment.
He wasn’t going to give away his position by moving.
“What the heck,” I thought. “It’s his ears, not mine.”
I had about a four-inch gap between two trees when the buck slowly moved into position behind them. I waited until I saw his left eye pass, then targeted in front of his ear.
One shot, one kill, roared out of my .308 and the buck dropped. Matt recoiled a bit too, with his ears ringing heavily. He wasn’t happy.
“Why did you shoot?” he shouted way too loud, but then again, he was listening to a sound similar to living inside the bells of Big Ben.
I pointed to the buck laying below us, and got an “Oh,” from Matt.
It wasn’t a monster, but it was a good buck.
It wasn’t the wide-open hunts I’d grown used to in the broken sagebrush of Niobrara County, or the easy hunting in the oat, corn, and alfalfa fields of Fremont County, but it was still a great hunt.
The scratched-up Remington 788 delivered once again, as it always does.