What a Wonderful Year: Part II

In part one of  “What A Wonderful Year” I touched upon how 2005 was one of the best years I have ever had in the outdoors.  In this part 2, I want to continue into hunting season and show how indeed this was a Wonderful Year! 

 Heading south and west I notice a few snowflakes in the air.  Once I arrive at the ranch I will be camping on, there is a light dusting of snow on the ground. I am about excited as I can be!  I get settled into the camper and decide it is time to head out and see if I can locate a speed goat.  As I head out, I was amazed at how quickly I found antelope.   As I saw the first herd I quickly got in position to shoot and picked my target.  BANG!  My shot rings out, and it was an obvious miss.  I shot too high!  As quickly as the shot, the antelope were gone.  I knew I still had Wed. and Thurs.  so I didn’t feel like I had to chase after these goats. 

On the way back to the camper I went and scouted out one of the game and fish’s corn fields.  There, not seventy-five yards in front of me was a nice 4x4 bull elk.  I swear I was floating on cloud nine!  I thought nothing could go wrong at this point.  Wrong! 

That night, North Dakota gets hit with the earliest and largest snowfall on record!  I am officially snowed in with no power!  Thank goodness for the kind family that took me into their house which had electricity supplied by a generator.  If not for their kindness my hunt would have been ruined.

Finally, on Thursday with power restored to most of the area and with warmer temperatures again, I was able to bust a trail and get out of the yard.  I decided to take a drive around the Killdeer Mountains and see if there had been any critters on the move.  I didn’t see a whole lot but it was fun just to get out of the camper.  As I get back to the ranch I had permission to hunt, I notice another hunter is just showing up.  I head over and introduce myself to the young man.  He was fourteen or fifteen and he had permission to hunt the ranch as well, but he only had a cow tag.  We begin to visit and I tell him about my missed chance at the antelope 2 days previous.  The kid and his dad say they just saw a herd of antelope on the way in, not five miles away!  Time to switch gears and see if I could get another crack at an antelope.  I invited the pair to come along as I sought out the permission needed to enter the land the antelope were on.  I contacted the landowner and he told me to have at them!  We spotted the herd not far from where the pair had seen them earlier.  I climbed through the ditch up and over a fence and skirted around a hill.  There was a very nice doe standing just at the peak and I had a clear shot on her.  I shouldered my rifle, took a deep breath and let the 30.06 bark.  BANG!  Again, the shot rings out and AGAIN, my goat runs off.  I missed shooting up the hill!  I climb the rest of the hill and check for any sign of a hit.  Nothing, it was another clean miss, only in the distance I can see the goats running away together.  My heart sank, but then I noticed as they got to the second rise they decided to turn and come right back towards me.  I hit the dirt on there return and picked out the biggest doe of the group.  I lead her just a little and I squeeze the trigger. Bang! I see the doe stumble and I realize I just shot my first antelope!  A great continuation of the wonderful season I had been living!  With my goat ready to be loaded and a great feeling of accomplishment, I now realized it was time to start focusing on how I could get my elk!  It’s time for the big elk tag!

  
As I mentioned in Part 1 I was not successful in drawing a ND license in 2005.  However in 2004 I was drawn for the once in a lifetime elk tag and as I was making plans Uncle Sam and the Air Force decided to deploy me.  There goes my tag, and my 2004 hunting season.  Once I returned, I got to thinking and I decided to write a couple of letters to the Game and Fish of North Dakota, and to the Governor.  Not only did I get a thank you for my service, but I was in shock when they not only reinstated my once in a lifetime license for 2005, but they also upgraded my tag from the cow tag that I had previously been drawn for, to an any elk tag!  It was all coming back together and I knew I would need to start planning and get some help from buddies!  I was back in action.

By July I decided to get serious about that elk tag.  I started by making some scouting trips to Killdeer, ND and meeting some people who own land and live in that area.  Turns out some of the best help I received was from a co-worker of my wife’s.  She is from Watford City and a fellow member of fishing buddy.  He knew people in the area, and got me in contact with some wonderful landowners who were happy to help!  I had called and met two landowners that both had elk on their land and both were willing to help me out!  One of the landowners lived in the Killdeer Mountains and the other just south of Watford City.  By Mid July I was feeling really good about my chances by the North Unit of Theodore National Park! 

I decided on hitting the area by the Killdeer Mountains and my very good friend Andy,  agrees to join me on my quest for an elk.  Andy arrives to the ranch shortly before I got done quartering  my antelope.  The weather had been warm all day and the snow is melting on the roads.  I asked the land owner if he would give myself, Andy, and the other hunter and his dad a ride around the mountains.  He said that sounds like a great idea.  So off we go around the hills.  Once we travel a little way up the road the landowner tells us there has been a bull elk hanging out in this area all summer.  I asked if we could back up and see if there are any posted signs up.  The landowner said it was his cousin’s land and that it was not posted.  I was smiling for the rest of the trip!  We headed north a ways and found some elk tracks heading into some land so we stop and talk to the landowners in that area and were granted permission to hunt the following day.  All of us in the truck were really excited!  We had secured permission to a lot of land that normally held elk! 

We arrived back at the ranch and the 5 of us made a plan for the following day.  Everyone agreed that we should get an early start and hit the cornfields.  Tree A.M. came around very fast; we packed up the trucks and took off.  We weren’t early enough.  As we got to the cornfield someone was in the process of getting stuck down the prairie trail.  The man waived us off and we needed to come up with plan “B”.  The young man and his dad decided that they would go into town and wait for it to get light.  Andy and I decide to back off the field that could hold elk and shut our eyes for a few minutes.  Soon the sun was shining through the trees without any elk feeding in the field.  We decided to just check a few of the other places that the bull had been hanging out in most of the summer.  As we crest the first hill we saw the elk off to the left only about four hundred yards off the road.  I lean over and tell Andy there is no way I can make that shot.  So we devise a plan that I would get my orange on and head down the ditch and through a break in the trees.  I head out from the truck in thigh high snow.  It was not a quiet stalk and thought I would scare the bull off.  The elk just would look up and then continued to feed.  I head around the trees and to the final break in them.  I have a shot at 275 yards but there is a three-strand fence between the elk and myself.  I decided it best to get over the fence for this once in a lifetime shot.  Andy is watching from the road when all of this is happening and decided to move around and try to draw the bulls attention away from me and onto him.  It works!  I clear the fence and put the range finder to work.  I had closed the gap to a respectable 214 yards now.  I placed my shooting stick firmly in the ground and take a couple deep breaths.  Then I remember that the landowner told me to make sure to aim and take out a shoulder so the elk won’t run on you.  I placed the cross hairs right on the shoulder, said a little prayer and squeezed the trigger.  That old elk just lunged a little, spun around, and just stood there.  I cycle my bolt-action rifle and send another shot down, aiming this time for the vitals.  I miss on that shot.  I cycle another round through and as I pull the trigger the elk is dropping.  I hit the elk right at the base of the antlers.  I didn’t find that hole until a couple of days later.  I sure would have been upset if I had lost an antler!  As it turns out, I was able to harvest a very respectable five by five bull elk in North Dakota. What a trip!  Only 20 minutes into the legal season I harvested the first elk in Unit E-2 that year.  I had now harvested 2 big game animals in two days!  This was indeed a wonderful year!

 
I returned home knowing I still need to prepare a few things before deer season kicks off.  One evening I head in to check my stands and brought the shotgun with “just in case”.  As I head into the woods, I see a wood duck in a pond where I bow hunt.  I snuck up to the pond and harvested the woodie.  As I turn down the trail I see a group of turkeys with a really nice tom in it.  Once again, I went to sneaking and I shot true and straight and harvested a nice tom turkey.  After retrieving my turkey I heard a rooster cackle, and thought to myself, “this is unbelievable” I head towards the sound of the rooster, and end up flushing and harvesting the pheasant.  Not bad for a quick run out to just check my stands!  This was “my” year for sure! 

With bow season underway and my stands looking in good shape I decided to head out the next night.  I sat in my stand over looking Lake Darling.  It wasn’t long until deer stated moving.  Before I knew it I had a monster 150 class buck working the tree line right towards me.  If this would come together it would be amazing!  He stopped and worked a scrape just 15 yards away.  I was shaking like a leaf!  Just as I was trying to stand a little six pointer comes up and the big boy gets nervous and turns back into the field to wait out whatever was coming up the hill.   The deer were moving everywhere.  The 6 pointer was right under my stand when one of his buddies comes up.  A respectable 120 class buck.  I was ready, drew the bow back, let the arrow fly and heard a “tink” but didn’t think to much of it.  I watched the deer bolt off, and I thought I could hear him crash at the bottom of a hill.  I looked for that buck for three days and only found a couple of hairs.  I was upset, as I had never lost a deer with my bow this one became the first.    I continued to bow hunt right up until rifle season.  

Rifle season allowed me several chances at big bucks, I just couldn’t put it all together.  Apparently I had used up a lot of my luck earlier in the season.  I ended up harvesting a couple of mature does, but my luck on bucks was a little different.   After missing 3 nice bucks in 3 days, my patience had grown thin. On day three I was walking an abandoned farm and out comes a buck!  I drew my rifle and let the 30.06 bark, down comes the deer!  The old buck sure had some ground shrinkage but it was some fine meat for the table.  The seasons had come and gone, and after this amazing season only my bow tag was left unfilled.  I had a chance to finally complete my successful year by harvesting a smaller eight pointer in a pretty non-typical fashion right before Christmas.

2005 was quickly coming to an end.  It is fun now to sit back and reflect on the time I had last year in the great outdoors.  I hope that one day I might be able to top this season, but if I don’t I can always daydream of 2005.  Often times I wonder what it will take to top this year, and reflecting I think the answer is watching my two boys; Dylan, age 6, and Keagan, age 3, as they grow up in the outdoors.  Lately it seems there isn’t a scouting trip that goes by or a day sitting in the deer blind that one of the boys aren’t found by my side.  Nothing has made me prouder as an outdoorsman or as a father then watching my two sons sitting on the end of the same dock as I used to sit on and watching them squeal with delight as they reel in sunfish after sunfish.  So maybe it won’t be too hard to top 2005 when I watch the outdoorsman develop in my sons.  I was always taught to learn what you can from Mother Nature and to treat her with the utmost respect, and always be happy in the outdoors.  One day I hope that my little guys will feel the pleasure I have received from all the good Lord puts before you and me.