The name of the game in hunting is getting away from people.
It’s also finding animals, but the human variety are the ones you have to worry about most. They’re loud, smelly, terrible at hiding, and generally are about as graceful as toddlers hopped up on ice cream in a Crate & Barrel.
So when humans are around, animals are not.
This is my second year hunting, and I’d yet to find success. I’d gone for turkeys twice and failed, and my elk season last year was one spent climbing beautiful mountains, glassing big bucks, running into another hunter who’d just bought a house up the street from me, and getting shamed by my daughter who told me, “I want an elk, dad!” since I never brought one home.
Yet, over the winter, spring, and into summer, I went hard to rectify it all, including snagging a buck deer tag. I changed my arrows, I practiced with my Elite bow like a crazy person, I watched and listened to all the hunting podcasts and YouTube shows I could, and I trained my body to climb mountains with 60 pounds on my back with my dog in tow.
None of that mattered, however, as I didn’t have time to scout.
Work routinely called, life got busy, my kids started school and camp and dance and gymnastics, and my house needed fixing. I know that I only have so many hunting seasons, but it got really hard to find the time to get out into the field. But with the buck deer tag in my pocket, I tried to go when I could. It added up to a sum total of three partial days, which if you’ve hunted a lot or consumed hunting media, you’ll know is not enough.
And then, only a few days before my season would end, I took my wife and kids out in our Can-Am Maverick X3 Max.
We went to a new spot, one where the trail started with a river crossing to enter a high-sided valley of timbers, aspens, rocky peaks, and icy alpine streams. Best of all, the off-road trail that led into the valley was big-ass rocks, boulders, sketchy cliffs that’d collapsed into the river, and steep climbs.
Most people would see the first few feet, and then pull a U-turn. We actually saw a few people do just that. Crucially, we didn’t make the same choice. The Can-Am could take it.
I'll add that the next day, after I decided to come back, the one change I made was adjusting the ride height.
But it was animal heaven. Or at least, that’s what it looked like to my green hunting eyes. There were very few people. Plenty of country to cross. Ample water and greenery. And escape routes up sheer cliffs everywhere. After a short walk through the area, not only did we find tracks, fresh scat, and a few scattered bones from other deer, two does walked right in front of us. One couldn’t even be bothered that it was only five yards from me.
I decided right then and there that I’d come back to this secluded spot.
The following day, after my ride-height adjustment, I geared up, threw my bow case into my Pelican top box, cinched up the Dometic cooler, saved an offline map on onX Hunt, and headed to my essentially private valley. But getting there, again, required rock crawling, going up on two and three wheels, crossing the river, and generally pretending I was in Moab. Thankfully, most people hate doing anything outside of what’s comfortable, especially most hunters around me. So not a soul was around when I got there a few hours before dusk.
Yet, after sitting in a spot higher up on a ridge for two hours, nothing walked by. My does had peaced out, and I started to wonder if I’d spooked them the day before. Or if the Can-Am’s Yoshimura exhaust had caused them to flee the country, even though I know they don't actually care about that sort of thing.
I was getting discouraged after finding what I felt was a perfect spot, so I packed up my stuff and decided to walk a little way down the valley. “Maybe something was lower down?” I told myself.
But after 15 minutes, nothing had appeared. The same rocky, boulder-ridden trail wasn’t far from where I’d gone into the aspens, so I hiked across the river and onto the trail. Again, maybe a little lower would hold a buck? And maybe the does were holed up lower in the pines?
Not 40 yards after I’d walked out of the forest and onto the trail did a buck suddenly appear just to the left of me.
He was walking through a disused campsite, across the river that bisected the valley. I, on the off-road trail, froze. Slowly, I pulled out my Maven rangefinder and found that he was 33 yards away. I’d been practicing for 60 yards, so he was well within my effective range. And so with my arrow nocked, I pulled back, talked myself through the shot, and sent it.
This was the first time I’d ever shot at an animal and, from my eyes, everything went perfectly. The shot broke beautifully, I had my pins buried in the buck’s vitals, and the arrow passed straight through him. “He’ll be down in seconds,” I whispered to myself.
That’s not what happened, though.
What was first elation quickly turned to panic as, after waiting a few minutes to cross the river, I couldn’t recover the arrow. I spent a half hour looking for it, and nothing.
Then I went looking for the buck and, like the arrow, found zilch. It, too, was gone. With the light fading rapidly, I started replaying the shot in my head over and over and over again. I spiraled as dusk turned to inky blackness as I searched for the buck's trail through the marshland he sped into, and I was forced to back out of the area.
It was a long drive home through the gnarly, boulder-filled trail since I hadn’t brought my camping gear and had removed the Can-Am's Roofnest roof-top tent. I replayed the scene repeatedly and was filled with horror that I might’ve just wounded the buck. Two thoughts raged within me; that I either wounded it, or I missed. I could’ve sworn I didn’t miss. But that night, I hoped I did.
Sleep wasn’t going to happen, so I mentally prepared myself for the following day. I checked the Can-Am’s tire pressures, got gas, loaded up all the gear I’d need to stay out for a day or two, and just flew to the spot, the gas pedal buried in the floorboards in a handful of sections.
Friends who’d been helping me in my late-onset hunting career had given me tracking pointers on the way and throughout the morning—but everyone was working, so I was again on my own. They told me to set up line tracks as “If you got him like you said you did, he’ll be within 150 yards or so,” and “Do a zig-zag grid search and you’ll find him.”
I’m glad I’m a stubborn-ass mule, because he was not in that area.
After nearly two and a half hours going back and forth and back and forth through the 150-yard area and turning up exactly nothing—no blood, no tracks, no deer—at the edge of the 200-yard mark I’d also set in onX, I went for broke.
I’d felt that I’d done everything I could to find this deer, but my guts were churning inside so much so that I knew I’d sleep like crap for ages if I didn’t give it everything. And so, seeing what looked like fresh deer tracks going up the valley’s ridge, I headed toward it.
And there, at about 200 yards from where I shot, as well as where I stashed the Can-Am that morning, I found the first speck of blood. And it was absolutely a speck.
It was about the size of a pencil’s eraser, though slightly smaller. But it led to another, and another, and then none; and then a light grazing of blood underneath a leaf, and then none, and then another.
And then, 278 yards as the crow flies, I found my buck.
He was absolutely beautiful; a burly beast of a thing making it so freakin’ far, though he must've stepped forward as I shot as the placement wasn't the best, and this fact likely contributed to him going farther. But I found him!
What was joy, then fear and anger at myself, finally returned to joy as I recovered the animal. I couldn’t have been more stoked.
With my adrenaline flowing like never before, I got the buck down off the side of the valley’s ridge, and down near a stream where I planned to get to work. However, I first had to run back to the Can-Am and grab my Sitka backpack as it held all my tools to break down the animal. I’d foolishly left it behind, thinking the deer wasn’t going to be that far away and lighten my load while searching.
Stupid, I know.
But when I got into that Can-Am, started it up, and headed down the trail to a spot closer to where I’d recovered my first-ever mule deer buck, my emotions got the best of me.
I hooted and hollered and thanked this UTV. It had taken me to a far-off valley, somewhere where few people often ventured, and it helped me find my first hunting success. I legit couldn’t have done it without it. And when I went back the following day to snap some pictures for this story, not only did it do the trail for a fourth time without issue, I also finally found my arrow.
And now I’ve got some venison tacos to snarf down, though I'll be also thinking about my next backcountry UTV hunt, too.
