Montana Mule Deer Hunting

Mule deer hunting is to elk hunting as an easy morning hike is to a three-day peak bagging trip. Both mulie and elk hunting are wonderful pursuits, but they differ enormously in scale. And of course there are exceptions, such as the high-country, wilderness, "pack 'em out six miles" hunts that my young friend and superb bow hunter Chad Krause engages in.

A word about ethics: since I am talking about hunting and not mere shooting, I'll omit any serious consideration for the way that many of my fellow Butte residents "hunt" mule deer. As one good friend and former student (and a pretty good guy in most ways) puts it, "Hell, elk hunting is about hunting. Mule deer? We road hunt them fuckers."

Mulies inhabit a wide range of habitat in the Northern Rockies, from the flat sagebrush prairie to the jagged, broken foothills to the alpine meadows and goat rocks. Thanks to my friend and former hunter Dave Carter, I learned of a jagged, broken ridge that fits my ideal for a perfect mule deer hunt. It is far enough away from roads to keep the riff-raff out, and yet with a little planning and good luck you can find, kill, and haul out a mulie buck in a half-day's hunt. Sometimes.

This past weekend, I was blessed with two mule deer hunting partners: our "little brother" AJ and my old friend Don Kieffer. The latter made a long-overdue visit from upstate New York, where he is blessed with fine white-tailed deer and turkey hunting. Here's Don, hiking across some typical sage brush and mountain mahogany habitat on the slopes of our ridge, where we expect to see both white-tailed and mule deer:

Oftentimes, especially during the rut and with heavy hunting pressure, a mule deer buck and "his" does head for the highest, most rugged country they can find. And so this is where we spent our time, clambering along the top, staying off the ridge line, glassing carefully for bedded deer, and stalking every group we could find. I'm fussy about mule deer hunting, and generally avoid shooting the big bucks or any buck with a lot of does. Dominant bucks are stinky, and I'm talking gag-a-maggot stinky here. Usually, the stink seems to stay on the hide, but occasionally it permeates the meat no matter how carefully you field dress, skin, and butcher the critter. Ask Brent Patch, who once killed a stinky big buck whose strong-flavored wild flesh refused to be tamed by the strongest and hottest of spices!

Three humans moving through mulie habitat is a bit much. Mule deer have sharp vision and acute hearing, and still-hunting is difficult at best. After a brief conference, AJ hunted one way along the ridge while Don & I went the other. AJ was barely out of sight when we heard my little 25 Roberts crack once and then -- a minute later -- once again (I gave him three cartridges this year). Sure enough, AJ killed his buck:

And what an unusual rack: a 6 X 6 with triple brow tines on once side, double brow tines on the other, and one set of double points:

Maybe it was a mulie-whitetail hybrid, or maybe just a case of too much testerone. He was a stinky one, and ruled over about twenty does. Almost before Don & I could figure out what was going on (we're a little slow on the uptake, sometimes), we saw AJ a mile below us washing his hands in the river, his buck safely stashed along the railroad tracks. Like last year, we found a mountain bike handy for the two-mile trek along the railway grade. Tough going, but it beat dragging all the hair off on the rough ballast between the ties:

Don & I have 50-some year old knees, and by the time we got AJ & his buck back to the truck, we were tuckered out and it was dark. Did I say that you could hunt this ridge in a half-day? Well, there was a qualifier about "good planning and a little luck" with that claim. And not being 15-years old--an age when no task seems too daunting if you want to do it.

After letting the ridge quiet down for a day or so, Don & I went back and sure enough found the perfect mule deer buck: a fat forkhorn. Not too rutty. Young & tender. And in an appropriately rugged spot near the top of this outcrop:

Just before we saw the buck silhouetted on the ridge, we watched a 3/4 curl bighorn ram strut out of the sagebrush ahead of us, and a yearling moose ford the river far below us. Don's 7 X 57 is a great deer rifle, and he was generous in letting me shoot it. The rifle dropped this little buck in its tracks. It took longer to move it the first two hundred yards out of the rocks than it did to drag it the next mile to the truck:

With the two of us ferrying packs and rifle and taking turns on drag duty, we were home well before noon. A sandwhich and quick cup of coffee, and us old guys were starting to feel young again. We had time to drive back over to the lower Big Hole for a quick afternoon antelope hunt.

It took awhile to locate them in the basin where I usually hunt. We drove by three or four mulie bucks that would have been a Butte road hunter's dream. Turns out, all the antelope bucks and does were together in a herd of fifty or more critters. By the time we spotted them and stalked within almost-shooting distance, the sun was well behind the western ridge. Though I was sorely tempted, Don wisely suggested we save this one for another day. As Chad Krause pointed when I told him this, "A lot can go wrong real quick. Especially when it's getting dark." Good advice, Chad. Good judgment, Don.

Antlers

Well, another spate of warm weather has wrecked the skiing, so instead of skiing today I walked to work. I've been sawing out buttons from a deer antler to restore an old Woolrich coat, so along the way (it's about a mile and a half, so I have some quality thinking time) I thought about the whole "antler thing." That is, why do we save and treasure antlers? Is it a mere acquisitiveness, like rats hording useless items or children collecting baseball cards? Well, I like to think it's a little more than that.

Maybe it's more like scars. Get a bunch of men & beer together, and they (the men) will start talking about their scars. The thumb they split with a wood chisel, the stitches where the chainsaw kicked back and split their scalp, the band of scar tissue where they nearly cut off a thumb while reaching up inside an elk's chest cavity while wielding a sharp knife in the other hand... Antlers, like scars, are a material reminder of memorable events.

Certainly, many antlers just end up a debris in the corner of the basement. At my house, most antlers do not get saved anymore.

But some do. Rarely, I might use them for something quasi-practical--like buttons.

In Pennsylvania, I grew up in a deer hunting family that did not treasure antlers. Usually, they ended up "recycled" back to nature along with the offal, feet, bones, and other inedibles. Or they ended up in the yard, gradually reduced to oblivion as the hounds chewing on them. In my twenties, though, I worked at an oil refinery and got to know fellow chemist Bill King. Nailed up in his garage, Bill had the rack from every deer he'd ever killed . Because in most years he killed a buck in both New York State and Pennsylvania (we lived very close to the state line, and it was common to hunt in both states), there were more than fifty of them. So I began saving mine, nailing them up on various posts around a now-gone family oil property.

I left the refinery and went back to school for my PhD. In central New York State, I shot a classic "8-point" (eastern count) whitetail and mounted it on a nice hickory board slabbed out of firewood. This deer was all-the-more-special because as we were skinning and quartering it, my friend Andy Wilson found an arrow shaft with point embedded between the shoulder blades. The deer had healed completely. It makes a good hat rack and catchall for things like Great-Grandpa's M97 Winchester.

When I moved to Montana 17 years ago, I began to adorn the interior of our home with antlers. The first to go up was the rack from my first elk bull. As I look at these antlers, I recall it all seemed so easy: I just went out the first day of season, hunted elk like I had always hunted whitetails, found a big track, followed it all day, and late in the afternoon shot the bull. Wow. Sometimes it is just that easy.

Having grown up seeing small whitetail antlers, I am still amazed by the size of mule deer antlers. Even young bucks sometimes carry a rack that won't fit in a broom closet. So another hat rack made it inside the house.

My wife was feeling a little crowded by this time, so the next memorable buck I shot had its rack go to the office. It's not a big rack by any means, but it's a bit unusaul: a biologist told me the deer was a mulie-whitetail hybrid (not uncommon, I've found).

Since then, memorable racks go up on the back of the house on the outside wall to the mudroom. Oh yes, you can also see a buffalo skull with horns on the upper right (on the roof). I shot a couple of buffalo for a high school history outing when my daughter was in the history club; sent one skull to my friend Don for his barn (he has a nice elk rack I sent him, too).

What makes a memorable rack? Something about the hunt, usually. I must admit, I cannot recall most of my mule deer hunts. They all blend together into one universal, Platonic hunt that ended up with a 125 pound forkhorn providing good meat.

But I do remember every successful elk hunt--whether I took a cow or a bull. These two racks -- a mulie and bull -- are especially memorable because I shot the two within minutes of each other, and I shot them with my old hunting buddy Dave Carter. Though Dave had given up hunting, he joined me one day for a deer hunt in one of our favorite mulie haunts ("Dave's Deer Mine"). And for the first time, we saw an elk there, too. Also, the bull's left antler is deformed --it never grew out much, and part of the base split off and a brow tine grew down the elk's head between its eye and ear.

Speaking of Dave's Deer Mine, this is from the first buck I shot there. I learned that, to get these deer to the nearest road, you have to wade across an icy river. I've since learned to quit shooting big mulie bucks. Frequently -- if they are in rut -- the meat is so strong as to be nearly inedible. People will deny this, but then they start describing the strong seasonings and other cooking methods...

When I shot this bull, it was a long haul out through very deep snow. I left the head in a tree and hiked back up the mountain to retrieve it the following July. A porcupine found it first, as you can see by the nearly-chewed-through spot on the main beam of the left antler.

These two bulls were shot from opposite sides of the same bedding area in two consecutive years. The bull that carried the upper rack was a sort of dwarf: its body size was more-or-less normal, but its legs were abnormally short and it had only half a liver.

Well, I'm no trophy hunter, and certainly none of the racks I've taken over the years are trophies. But they are memories. By the way, ask me sometime to tell you about that scar on the inside of my left forearm...