Opening Morning
My fake sleep was shattered by my alarm at 5:30. I made my way to my glassing knob a whopping 30 yards from my tent and took in the quickly brightening scene of opening morning.
Within minutes of first light, I picked out a smaller 4x4 that I had never seen before accompanied by a doe on the slope I expected them to be. Below them about 600 feet of elevation were two hunters in blaze orange. A few minutes later, and even higher up on the slope, nearly exactly where I'd left them two weeks before, bucks. Six bucks, four of whom were definitely very interesting to me, drifted through boulders at just above 12k ft. I was excited simply for the fact that I knew the other hunters couldn't see these bucks, and it meant I'd be attempting a stalk.
Shortly after spotting the bucks, my brother wrapped around the knob to check the N facing slope of the basin. He jogged back quickly to inform me that he had heard two bugles and there were cows filtering through the strip of timber on the slope 7-800 yards behind us. I grabbed my gun and followed him to take a look.
Sure enough, after wrapping around the edge of the knob, a bugle erupted from the willows and timber below us, as we watched dozens of cows pop in and out of the small chutes on the slope. As we made our way forward to see if we could actually get eyes on the bull, I quickly dropped to my knees at movement about 300 yards to my right.
On the alpine flats to the side and between us and the elk, three bucks were unreservedly playing and feeding in the wide open. One of them was probably a mid 150's buck with bright red, bloody antlers. He was unquestionably a step smaller than the bucks 1k ft above us...but he was here, and now. And I had 3 tags in my pocket. I told my brother, "I'd shoot him."
We watched as they continued to feed and chase each other closer and closer to us. I crawled out to a ledge to shoot just as they cut further to our right at about 150 yards. I got up, and looped around through strips of impenetrable alpine spruced with gaps perpendicular to their path. I crept down behind a SUV sized boulder at the opening of one of them, with a large pool about 50 yards out. I knew he would likely walk between me and that water. I got a glimpse of him running a loop chasing his buddy, then disappear again out of view.
I had my muzzleloader 90% ready, kneeling on one knee and watching for him to emerge gracefully in front of me, unawares of my ambush. After about a minute of silence, instead, the buck broke the silhouette of the boulder in front of me at a full sprint and slammed on the brakes just past it, staring at me, coiled like a spring at 15 feet away.
I have gone over what happened next in my head a hundred times. When I retell it to myself, it's impossible for it not to sound like a series of excuses. Regardless, here is my best piecing together of the facts of what happened based on my own memory, my brother's account (who was 10 yards behind me), and what we saw on the deer:
He was quartering slightly to, facing my right, at 15 feet, staring directly at my face. As fast as possible, I raised my muzzleloader the final 10% to sight him, pulled back the hammer, and shot. Simultaneously, he dipped and loaded up to leave and turned to his right, my left. I followed him in the sights in this motion. At the shot, he was bowled over, falling away and to his right, with his belly and legs now facing me. He kicked frantically in the way I have seen several animals die before.
Within 5 seconds, I was beginning to reload. By the time I had poured powder down the barrel, he was up and hobbling to my right, downhill, towards the bottom on the basin. "F*ck." I could see a streak of blood about 6" long coming from an obvious bullet wound high front shoulder. Approximately here:
By the time I had a bullet seated at the muzzle, he had begun to trot and was 50 yards away. "F*CK."
By the time I had the bullet pushed down and a primer in the breech he was 100 yards away and running downhill. "f***ck."
I took one attempt to aim, but then got up and ran to the edge of the cliff as he continued he run to the bottom of the basin and increasingly prevalent cover. This whole time, I was half expecting him to just tumble over at any step, but also extremely concerned by his quickening pace.
My brother stayed at that vantage while I ran as fast as I could 200 yards back to our original glassing knob and the best possible view of the bottom. My brother recounts that he dipped through two small patches of timber and emerged from the last one stotting, with a upside down V of blood coming from his wound about a foot, but not reaching the bottom of his belly. By the time I got to our original knob, I would not glimpse the deer again. From his vantage, my brother saw him enter a larger patch of timber at the bottom of the basin. The deer had now traveled almost a half mile in the matter of maybe 2 minutes.
My brother watched for 10 minutes, then ran up to inform me of what he saw, while we basically set watch on the patch where we thought he was. Due to the vantages and the initial gaps in coverage, we didnt have eyes on that patch for probably a minute total. We waited for about an hour and a half, glassing, watching, and waiting. To say it was an anxious hour and a half would be a massive understatement.
Eventually, we descended upon the timber patch, the wind in our face, moving slowly and glassing carefully. There was nothing. We combed the ground for sign where my brother saw him enter. We found a track or two in the dirt, but the surrounding area was boggy marsh thick with willow and various forbes, some of which were beginning to get fall flecks of red. I will summarize the next 6 hours by saying we thoroughly gridded the area around this patch of trees. The tracks in the wet ground were indecipherable. Moose, elk, and deer tracks were everywhere, of various ages impossible to tell due to the wetness. We found 0 blood. We went all the way back to where I had shot him, following nearly useless sign as best we could back down to the patch. 0 blood. We gridded the thicker timber cover closest to the smaller patch. Nothing.
If I had found any discernable sign whatsoever in terms of his direction, I would have kept looking for another two days. Instead, I had literally nothing to go on besides his general direction, and a "last-seen" spot. At the speed he was traveling when my brother last saw him, he could easily have been a mile away within 10 minutes of the shot, in an ocean of timber.
We repositioned, feeling completely hopeless, at our original knob. I punched my tag. My best guess is that as he was loading up to bail, and as he crouched to spring away, his scapula would have popped high as his body dropped towards the ground. I was aiming where his body had been a millisecond prior, not where it was then. The shot likely passed through a no man's land in front and high of the tops of his lungs, but just below his spine. I just cannot believe that a .50 caliber bullet did not slow him down more, despite clearly passing through at least one and likely the tops of both scapula.
This was my first experience with wound loss, and it truly sucked. I am sure there are things I could have done better, both in the shot execution, decision making, and tracking. But my main takeaway is that was the first time I have ever shot at an animal that knew I was there, and essentially knew I was a predator. That was my true mistake. I'd give a lot to go back and just stick to my plan and stalk the bucks 1k ft above us, but regret wasn't, and isn't going to change a thing about the reality of the situation.
