Jim, Bill and I were headed west to the ranch the Connecticut guys were on the previous day where they had seen a few decent mule deer. Jim admitted he hadn't been there in a few years. He took a few indecisive turns and a few turn arounds. This led to a couple hours of time spent locating the right ranch, including exhaustively referencing the GPS and stopping for help from a few ranch houses. Jim was quite embarrassed by the situation. I wasn't too thrilled that so much early daylight was being burned, but we just had to make the best of the situation.
Eventually Jim got directions from the right person and we found the ranch. This was more classic Wyoming high country with rolling hills, flat areas and lots of sage without much in the way of trees.
We spent some time looking for mulies and saw a few of them. Eventually we came across a buck that was bedded by itself. It was a mature deer with reasonable width and height, but he was basically a 2x2 with a crab claw on the end of each tine. We let him lay.
Hunting around some more, we noticed a whole heard of mule deer in a pasture across the road in an area we could not hunt. In with the herd were a few fairly decent bucks.
The two bucks were not without company.
We watched them for quite some time hoping they would begin to move, but they seemed very content in that pasture. We left to do some more searching and found several more groups of deer on the ranch we were hunting. One group had a very mature deer with a nice 4 point on one side and a single beam on the other with a split brow tine. Jim thought he was unique enough to take, but it wasn't what I wanted for a first mule deer. It did hurt a little passing on him.
We searched some more and eventually made it back to the pasture deer who had not moved. We ran another time through the property and I had to think very hard about the crab claw deer. Ultimately I passed which was probably the right thing to do.
We headed out of the ranch back to where we started on the previous day. On the road, Jim recognized the rancher whose property we were on and stopped to talk. The rancher had just acquired a new property so we trailed him to take a look at it. It was only about 500 acres and had some ancient out buildings along with a flea bitten tiny house. We drove with the rancher to the end of the property, noticing a big herd of mule deer a ways off. We gave the rancher a ride back to the entrance to the property to a bulldozer which he was going to use to dig out a drainage ditch.
Returning back to the property, we took a closer look at the mule deer. There were several bucks in the group, but nothing to get too excited about. Jim kept going to see if any more were around. As we approached a dug out bentonite hill, Jim yelled something like, "Shooter buck right there, get out and get your gun on the grill of the truck." I saw two white patches and wasn't sure which was the deer. I grabbed Jim's binoculars and located the deer. I put on my orange hat and stepped out. I was lining up on the deer when he stood. As I was trying to get a sight picture, he spun around and started to go over the hill. The shot wasn't too far, at about 150 yards. But the combination of distance, scope turned down, moving animal and extreme cornering away (nearly an ass shot), just didn't feel right. He ran over the hill without me touching the trigger.
We drove around the hill to see him saunter off of the property. I was a bit disappointed. Jim was a bit pissed off. But not rushing the trigger was the right thing to do even if it was one of the better mulie bucks Jim had seen in a long time.
We headed back out of the property. The pasture deer had moved farther away from the ranch we were on so we headed to the ranch from the previous day to look for whitetails for Bill. En route, Bill's legs started to become extremely painful. Jim had to pull over for a while so Bill could exercise his legs. It looked very painful.
Once at the ranch, the fog followed us in, making seeing anything at more than around 100 yards nearly impossible. We sat for around two hours before heading out. On the way out, a decent buck was chasing a doe, but it was on the wrong side of the fence.
Jim stopped for gas on the way back to the lodge and the guys for Connecticut stopped shortly after. One of them had shot a real nice, heavy 10-point whitetail. The other had used his doe tag.
On the road to the lodge, Jim saw some shenanigans that looked like road poachers. He dropped Bill and I off and went back to investigate.
One of the other guys in camp had hit a decent whitetail and they had spent most of the day looking for it. As it got dark, they were forced to call off the search.
So it was a day of ups and downs for all.
I was not too happy at missing a rare opportunity on good mulie, but I won't second guess my decision. If I had rushed the shot, a bad hit was not unlikely and that would have been far worse. Hunting is always an adventure, from starting the day lost to everything else that happened, it was a pretty memorable day. At one point in my life, rushing the shot would have been a given - I'll take it as previous lessons learned that I did not.
Dinner that night was a wonderful beef stew while everyone related the excitement of the day.
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