Well, this place is an example. It is just getting good whitetails after years of development, so its not typical at all. There were some western hunters there the next weekend, 2 guys, one helping the other. They went into the ranch without me and hardly saw anything. They only caught glimses of animals through the trees. They came out at 3pm that day. We talked and I took them to another ranch about 35 miles away and we had a gold level fallow buck on the ground by dark, they are $1500. The hunter had seen fallow and axis on the roads driving there and decided he liked fallow. There is something to the guiding, knowing the ranch and the animals, what works and what doesn't, that example illustrates it. All $4500 goes to that ranch, but they have to pay liscenses out of it also, he's a liscensed whitetail breeder, I believe, the owner, but I just know there's whitetails there, I don't know the costs for the liscense to have them like that. The liscense fee for having a ranch like that goes to the state, and for each hunter, there is a liscese fee that goes to the state. That liscense is more for whitetails than it is for exotics. The deer there start at $750 for a cull 8 point about 14-16 inches wide, so they are not all $4500, just the biggest ones.
I don't go through the history of their hunting with each hunter, but we talk about it a lot. The guy that weekend got a freerange pronghorn, the year before. He always hunts whitetails on a lease and on his land now, which is free range hunting. I think he thought the $4500 was a deal, because he paid $6000 for a Mexico hunt, the year before. He saw a nice one the first day on that hunt, but waited, thought there might be better ones, and never shot. Seeing what we saw in a weekend, he said $4500 was a deal, in coparison to the Mexico hunt, I think, mostly. They pay a $125/day hunt/guide fee, so he would have been much better off there, instead of Mexico, in hind sight. Some of the hunters have hunted all over the world. One guy, a few years ago, had darted a rhino, and got his picture taken, then it was released. He also got a muskox, way up north. He was pretty interesting. His job involved responsibilities in 140 countries of the world, so he had hunted all over. He was very nice also, pretty amazing.
I never hold their hands Marlin, maybe that's what you like, but that's not it here. I might help lift you up, if you fell, but that is about it. I work to get them a good shot on what they are hunting. Then I work to get the animal taken care of. Its hot here now, like 90s, so we can't waste time and we usually take them to a cooler at a taxidermists place in town. We have ice in coolers in camp and put that in the chest cavity often also. They're trophies, so we gut them in the field, carry, drag, and load them in a truck and head to the cooler. I have a plywood sled, to get animals out of the woods, where I can get them in a truck. No hanging them in a tree and skinning, its too hot here now for that.
Axis got hard antlered starting in June mostly, red stags are getting hard now, most all fallows will be hard for Sept. Sika (?) and whitetail for Oct.
Yotegunner, if you flew to Alaska and they picked you up, drove you around, flew you to camp, fed you, put you to bed, then took you to shoot something in the morning, what would that seem like? What would it cost you? Would you do that? Say blacktails on Kodiak Island, they were planted there a while back, as I understand it, to beef up the population.
Is that hand holding Marlin? They even cook for you on this example and get your bed setup ahead of time. See how easy it is to focus on the wrong thing, i.e. miss the point of it being hunting.
Not all private hunting is like this place at all, its just one example, even extreme here, but its real.
