Wyhunter
Well-known member
The Idaho draw results came out and I finally drew my first antelope tag! Normally i hunt with my best friend, but this time was a special himt. I was able to take my wife along for the first time. We have two little ones at home, so she normally gets stuck on mommy duty while I try to fill the freezer. We hooked up to our brand new camper, dropped the kiddos off and headed out. We got to our area the day before so we can do a little scouting (I'm very familiar with the area, as I hunt it every year for one species or another). Weather was perfect, didn't see anyone else, and plenty of pronghorn running around. It was definitely hard to sleep the night before opening day, but I managed 3 or 4 hours. Opening morning we woke up and took the side by side to the basin we wanted to hunt. Spotted a heard of around 20 at first light, stalked to around 600 meters and threw up the spotting scope... no shooters. We proceeded to hike down the basin and came across another heard. This one had a pretty descent buck (by my standards... especially for a first buck) so I decided to make the stalk. I get to within 300 meters and jump 4 coyote at a watering whole, which run right at the heard... about this time, my heart sank and I figured they would be blown out. I was wrong. The heard was focused so intensely on the coyote that they didn't even look my direction. I dropped my bag and belly crawled into 125 meters, set up in prone position, and waited for the perfect shot. He turned broadside and I fired... dropped straight to the ground without another breath. I was ecstatic, but my wife was even more excited than I was. She has never seen an animal harvested and was ready to get her hands dirty. She helped ever step of the way, including hiking the rifle and a quarter out. Amazing hunt and an even more amazing adventure with my wife!
