The four of us got out of the truck and prepared for a day of hunting. We had left the house before daylight and travelled about 1 hour into a nearby valley. The day was dawning as we assembled our gear and took a last drink of coffee from our thermoses. It was cold and all of the trees and grass were covered in frost. There wasn’t any snow yet but everything was shiny and it promised to stay overcast for the rest of the day.

It was a perfect day to get a deer and we were all looking forward to filling our tags. The area we were hunting was almost straight up but there were trails up the hill where it looked like a herd of cattle had been grazing on the hillside and left trails cut deeply in the dirt that hung to the rocks. There wasn’t any cattle in the area so the trails had to be made by a lot of Mule Deer over a long period of time. Our game plan was to spread out and follow the game trails up the hill until we found a deer or group of deer.

As soon as we left the road, we were climbing and it looked like it was going to be a big workout day. It was a good thing that the deer had provided a nice well worn trail to walk on because as soon as you stepped off the trail the ground was covered in dry leaves that crunched loudly under foot. In order not to make a lot of noise you had to stay on the deer trail.

In preparation for this trip I had pretty much all new gear. I had purchased a .270 rifle at the start of the season and put a 4 power scope on it. On a trip a couple of weeks earlier I had slid down a scree slope, smacked my scope on a rock and put a big dent in the scope tube. The scope was no longer useable so I had to send it in to the manufacturer to get it fixed.

The repair process was going to take a couple of weeks and I didn’t want to be hunting without a scope. So I went out and bought a new 2 to 7 power scope and mounted it on the rifle. The rationale was that the 4 power scope would make a great backup for the 2 to 7 power.

I had even gone to the range and made sure the new scope was sighted in properly. So I was ready, I had a new rifle that was capable of easily shooting any game at any range that I might be faced with. The rifle was equipped with a new scope with increased sighting capability, I even had a brand new knife. I was confident that I could shoot a deer even if it was quite a distance away. Since visibility distance on this mountain side in the trees was fairly limited, I set the new scope on the 2 power setting.

The trail I was following went steadily up the hill at an angle. I stopped several times to catch my breath and to listen. Several times I stopped when I heard a noise in the dry leaves. Each time I heard a noise in the leaves I anticipated seeing a deer coming down the hill. But each time it was a squirrel.
After about 3 hours of climbing two of my partners were quite a ways above me on the slope and one of my partners was along the slope about 50 yards and below me on the hill. I was still on what looked like a main trail and it looked like this trail would lead all of the way up the hill. We had planned to meet at the top of the hill for lunch and plan our hunting for the afternoon.

At about 11 AM I heard a shot above me and ahead of me. I stopped on the trail and waited watching the direction of where the shot came from. I was thinking that if one of the guys shot a deer and wounded it, it would come down hill and right to me Or maybe they would have spooked other deer that would come down hill towards me.

As I waited, I could hear something rustling the leaves coming down the hill. The noise sounded like it could be a deer but I could only hear it but couldn’t see it. If it was a deer, it was heading right to my hunting partner that was below me on the hill. I realized that there was a slight breeze blowing up the hill and if it was a deer coming down the hill it might catch the scent of my partner below. Hopefully if that happened, the deer would turn and come down the hill towards me and not take a trail going away from me.

I stood silently, ready to take a shot. But now there was silence, there was no noise in the leaves. I looked up the trail and there was movement. It was a deer. I had no idea how big, all I knew was that it was a Buck and it was coming down the trail straight towards me. And He was coming fast. By the time I got the rifle raised he was so close that all I could see in the scope was fur. I pulled the trigger and the buck dropped 7 feet from me.

So much for having a far shooting rifle with a variable scope. I could have easily taken this deer with a long bow.

I had my first Mule Deer. As I approached the deer I realized that he was big. His antlers had 4 even points on each side and his body looked big. When I tried to drag him in to position for dressing I realized he weighed more than I did and it was going to take some work to get him dressed. Right about then help arrived and my partner that was below me helped me dress my first deer.

About the time we got the deer dressed our other 2 partners arrived dragging a 2 point buck. That was the first shot I heard above me. They said that when they shot the 2 point, the big buck had been laying in the brush just out of sight. At the shot he had bolted down the hill and they hoped that one of us would pick him up. Luckily I was in the right place at the right time.

We slid both bucks down the hill and it was one of the easiest game retrievals we even did. Instead of having lunch at the top of the mountain which we all enjoyed, we had lunch at the truck. We were back in town with 2 nice bucks for the freezer in time for afternoon coffee. My first Mule deer dressed out at 220 pounds and provided many delicious meals over the Winter. I had the deer hide tanned and turned it in to several pairs of deerskin gloves.

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