Big Whitetail Deer …

            It was a Tuesday evening and I got a late start.  While dropping children at piano lessons, I painted my face up with green face paint, which had seemed to be work well on previous hunts.  I got out to the finger draw to the greater A canyon just as the mule deer were coming out of the draw and into the fields.  I went slowly, and stopped at what appeared to be a well used crossing.  A yearling appeared, and lazily moved up to, back away from, up to, and along the what-used-to-be-a-road.  Soon came the mother, moving with more urgency.  She provided a long shot at the road, which I passed up.  I waited for another chance, which wouldn’t come.  As I inched forward for another possible shot, she noticed the movement and quickly got behind some brush.  She then made her way downwind of me, got my scent, snorted, and they were off. 

            I waited, and then moved slowly south along the road, hoping to catch some other deer crossing the road for the fields.  Oddly, there were far fewer deer in the area than just days earlier, where it seemed like deer-o-rama.  I made it around the first big side draw and was moving south across the more open hillside, when three whitetail does came bounding my way.  I stood still, about 20 yards away they saw me and froze.  I aimed at the backbone of the big one, my arrow arching over the grass and out of sight presumably into the deer’s side.  The deer dropped his head and headed downhill; the other two turned around and ran in the direction from where they had come. 

            It was already dusk, and I waited as long as I could and moved slowly to the point where the deer were standing.  My guess was that I had a stomach shot.  I would check for blood, and, depending in what I saw, would come back in the morning to get the deer.  I found my arrow stuck in the ground, covered with blood.  The blood smelled of green vegetation – indicating a stomach shot.  I looked for a blood trail, but blood was sparse.  I stuck the arrow back in the ground where I would take up trail tomorrow, and slowly started backing out.  My only worry was that coyotes would mess with my arrow – a worry that would later turn out ironic.

            As I took in the situation, about 300 yards to my south, a big animal appeared at the horizon up in the field.  `So that’s where you have been’, thinking it to be the 5-point bull elk that we had been trying to get in on up the main canyon – but had since lost his whereabouts.  As I continued to happily watch, I realized it was not an elk, but a very big deer.  I pulled up the binoculars.  Another deer appeared with him.  I sobered even further when I realized the big one was a whitetail buck, not a big muley as I would assume.  The smaller buck with him was a legal mule deer – but smaller both in antlers and in body than the whitetail.  The size of the big buck – and the vanishing light – were somehow foreboding.  I would have been comfortable with an elk that size, or even a mule deer, but this whitetail was unnaturally big. 

            I had a deer down; I had theoretically used my tag.  For one moment, I considered trying to fill `someone else’s’. I could get a good set-up on this buck as he moved along the edge of the field, toward me.  But I considered it only for a moment.  I watched on as the big buck – definitely the king of the country, continued along in my direction, out in the field, to my east, against the ever darkening sky.  To erase all temptation, I started the business of getting out of there – and the bucks disappeared.

            The end of the story was an unpleasant one.  I had passed up the big whitetail because I had a doe down.  At first light the next morning we went for the doe.  It had bleed slightly at first, for perhaps 50 yards, until the stomach cavity filled with blood, and then the trail looked as though a hose of blood was coming from it.  It had run downhill just a few yards, and then headed south.  It made it as far as the next brushy draw and laid down.  But by the time we got to it, only few hours of darkness later, coyotes, and perhaps a cougar, had reduced the deer to a ribcage, backbone, some fir, and the head.  There was not a pound of meat or internal organs left.  The animals had even eaten one eye.  Perhaps some of the foreboding-ness of the evening before (and perhaps an unusual absence of animals overall, and the restlessness of the whitetail does as they came my way) were generated by the presence, unknown to me, of whatever animals would shred my deer as soon as I left.  The fact that we had been hunting, with only bow and arrow for protection, in country with such ravenous creatures, was somewhat discomforting.

             And that the big one got away, in trade for a demolished doe, added to the discomfiture, for sure.