flat8
AH enthusiast
- Joined
- Nov 7, 2017
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- Phoenix, Arizona
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- DSC, NRA
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- USA, RSA
I’m not a hunter.
Although I have taken animals in both North America and Africa, over the last 11 years hunting has taken a back seat to my business, my wife and my son.
However, a year ago I met a friend, and our conversations always turned to big game hunting. When he asked me last April what animal I most wanted to hunt in the Lower-48, without hesitation I answered, “pronghorn.”
“Proghorn? Great,” he replied. Get yourself to Utah the week of October 23rd and we’ll get you an antelope.”
Although I haven’t hunted since 2006, I’ve remained considerate about the debate surrounding the morality of hunting. I probably think about it much more since I have had a child, as all of my decisions now seem to have greater meaning. In any event, my answer to that ethical question today is two words; reverence, and responsibility. Reverence for my place in the world and responsibility for what that position costs.
I say goodbye to my family and head north to Utah as the week of the hunt arrives. The only information my friend gave me in the weeks and months leading up to the trip was to meet him in Park City on October 22nd. When pressed for more details, he said not to worry about it, it was all taken care of.
When I reach Park City on the 22nd, I find my friend and two other men, one of whom I know quite well. None of us know where we are going, and when my friend tells us it’s “Deseret,” everyone is very pleased.
Although I’ve been out of hunting circles for a while, I know about Deseret Ranch. This 235,000-acre ranch is the largest single private property in the state of Utah. To find Deseret on a map, just look for the empty space that is not traversed by a single public road where Utah meets Wyoming.
A day later we arrive at the lodge. It is perched on a high bench, and tens of thousands of acres rise into the aspen and pine trees that reach skyward to the west and tens of thousands more acres fall into an ocean of sage and grassland to the east. It is magnificent.
For my pronghorn hunt I am guided by Gary. After introductions, we make the most of the first afternoon and head down to the arid low-country where pronghorn are likely to be found. The terrain we will be hunting is exactly as I imagined it would be – gentle waves of sagebrush with enough creases and gullies for the pronghorn to hide out of sight.
Despite the ruggedness and vastness of the terrain, it doesn’t take long to spot our first antelope. He’s a big buck with nice, thick bases and curling tips. He is alert and skittish, and when we try to quietly move in his direction to get a better look, he bounds away into a deep ravine before climbing out and over a distant hill to safety.
Not much later, we find two more bucks. One of the bucks is big, and the land between us is flat as a pancake with no natural obstructions. An opportunity has arisen.
Unlike the first buck, these two do not seem concerned by our presence. Still, they manage to keep a 500 to 600-yard buffer between them and us regardless of where we move. I think about taking the larger of the two, and if I find a good rest I can push for the shot. But at this distance I am not confident about the ethics of the shot and decide to abandon the duo of bucks.
The evening progresses and as the sun dips lower, we spot a very large herd. It is the magic hour, and the soft rays of the setting sun light up 30 or 40 antelope in day-glow against the darkening brush. The antelope rut is over, so several bucks can be seen wandering among the many females. Gary and I are both intrigued. We have good cover and are invisible to the herd so we have plenty of time to study our options.
Gary pulls out his spotting scope and we look over the group. One buck immediately stands apart from the others. His huge head, thick neck and powerful horns have no rival in this herd. In addition to his physical size, he has a series of deep scars across his upper left shoulder where his coat was once torn to pieces but amazingly has managed to heal. Gary and I determine that he has survived an epic fight. We name him “Scar” and decide to hunt him.
The herd begins to move, and it looks like they will drop into shallow valley that leads away from us around the base of large hill. Gary and I plan a retreat from our current position to traverse the opposite side of the hill out of sight from the herd. We’ll then ambush them as they exit the far side of the valley. We set out to make this happen.
Gary leads the way, and about 30 minutes later we crest the back side of the hill.
“Down, down!” Gary whispers excitingly.
I look down and see that the herd is 100 yards away from our position at the end of the shallow valley.
“The wind is all wrong. We don’t have much time,” Gary tells me.
We crouch low, hug the earth, and look for a place where I can set up a shot. I feel the wind push gently against my back, not a good sign.
I quietly chamber a round into my rifle. I can only see the top of the several pronghorn heads in the valley below, and I can’t tell them apart. I see a few bucks, but I can’t tell which of them is Scar.
“Do you see Scar?” I whisper to Gary.
“It could be the third buck on the left, but I’m not sure,” he answers.
I don’t have a good shot at the third buck, and I’m not convinced it’s Scar. As I determine that I need to get closer, I see a dozen heads shoot up on full alert and stare directly at me.
“They caught our scent,” Gary mutters dejectedly.
In an instant, the herd disappears in a clamber of hooves and a haze of dust. I eject my unspent round and feel elated despite the failure of our stalk. Gary and laugh and admit defeat as the herd sprints away. As the sun sets, we call it an evening.
The next daybreak, I meet Gary downstairs and we head out into the icy air as the first rays of sun rise over the eastern horizon.
We spend the morning glassing across ripples of sagebrush. I’m looking for Scar. As the morning progresses, we see ample mule deer that occasionally come down from the high country, but no pronghorn, and no Scar.
The air begins to warm, bringing a brisk but bright sun that portends another unseasonably warm afternoon. We still see no pronghorn, but I don’t mind. I am very content to be out here, chatting easily with Gary, smelling the sage and the brown earth, and looking out across the green and gray steppes. On the horizon, we are dwarfed by a backdrop of jagged white peaks that reach to the heavens.
“Let’s head a bit further out,” Gary says to me, pivoting my thoughts back to the hunt and the task at hand. We hop back into his truck and head out and around the reservoir that dominates the northeast portion of the ranch.
Bouncing along a well-maintained ranch track in Gary’s truck, I spot the first pronghorn we have seen all morning. He’s a buck, and I tell Gary to stop so that we can take a closer look.
“Look at his antlers,” I say to Gary. “Look at that twist,” I add as I inspect him closer, now whispering with excitement.
“Wow, he’s unique Brent. You want to shoot that buck?” Gary asks as he looks over at me, his eyebrow raised in a way that tells me this may be the pronghorn we are looking for.
“Yes. He’s the one,” I reply with conviction. He’s not a physical equal to Scar, not even close, but to my eyes he’s better.
We stop the truck.
In the months leading up to my time in Deseret, I had envisioned a very different hunt. I expected a long stalk and a physical experience very much like the hunt for Scar and the other bucks during the prior night. Never did I anticipate that an antelope would set me up with such an easy shot so close to the road, and that’s what this buck seems to be doing. Although I get the sense that I am not going to have to work for very hard for this animal, the situation feels right, so I go with it.
I get out of the truck and I range the buck at about 220 yards. He looks back at me, disinterested, before turning and moving away at a slow pace. I reach back in the truck and grab my gun. I chamber a round, click off the safety, and shoulder my weapon.
My right eye takes its position behind the scope, and my left eye squints but remains open and aware of the larger horizon. Magnified, I see the buck clearly now. I settle the crosshairs just behind his left shoulder as everything gets quiet. The pronghorn stops walking and looks directly at me. I look back at him.
I feel very little adrenaline and no desire to kill this animal purely for sport as I decide to take this buck. An overriding feeling of focused calm falls over me. The sight picture framed by my scope is perfectly stable. The pronghorn still looks at me – his twisted black antlers chaotically piercing the blue sky – and he has no sign of fear. He is undisturbed by my presence.
The longer I watch him, the more I get a sensation that he carries an awareness of resignation. This impression is strong, real and very strange. If someone told me that I would sense that an animal would communicate with me that he knows his demise is imminent, and that indeed he may be welcoming his death, I wouldn’t have believed it. But on some level, I know this is true.
I squeeze the trigger.
Everything remains silent. For a millisecond, my mind becomes the void.
The first sensation I experience as the world opens again is the sound of the telltale tympanic thwock as the bullet enters the buck’s chest cavity. I re-center my scope on the buck and although I can see that he is still standing, I know he is dead.
“Reload,” Gary yells. “Reload!”
Even though I know that a second shot is unnecessary, I do as Gary tells me. Robotically, I unlock the bolt, eject the spent cartridge and load a new round into the receiver. Readied for a second shot, I center the crosshairs again onto the old buck’s shoulder.
Through the scope, I see that my first shot was a clean hit. I watch as a torrent of blood erupts from just behind his left shoulder. I click the safety on my rifle and take the crosshairs off the buck just as he takes his final few steps and collapses.
“He’s done,” I say to Gary.
We approach the pronghorn on foot and inspect his body. As expected, he is non-typical, with his right horn pointed straight back and his left horn pointed forward. Although his horns are not huge, he is unique and carries the mass of a thick neck that only comes from several seasons of life in the sagebrush.
Gary opens the animal’s mouth and inspects his teeth as a trickle of blood drips out of the pronghorn’s nose. His teeth are barely even there, as years of chewing sagebrush have worn them down to the nubs.
“This guy’s older than dirt, Brent,” Gary states flatly. “He wouldn’t have made it through the winter.”
Once the animal is field-dressed, we each take a handful of grass and place it in the body cavity of the buck.
“This is his last meal,” Gary says.
We pay our respects to the God and the animal and depart the kill site as noon approaches.
Back at the lodge, we see that our pronghorn’s jaw looks to be much older than the oldest buck that had previously been taken on the ranch. By all estimates, this antelope is at least 10 and a half years old.
It’s clear that hunting this antelope was an act of compassion. Once the fierce winter winds arrived from the north, this old buck would have endured a gradual starvation that would weaken him to the point that he would have been taken by predators. His death would have been a grizzly act of Darwinism far more gruesome than my clean shot through his vitals.
My own tag spent, I spend the next few days with my friends as they seek to fill their own elk tags. My goal for the remainder of my week is simply to be out in nature and spend time with the land and the animals, which I do.
A secondary elk rut is occurring at Deseret, and I spend hours sitting quietly and listening to the mournful bugling roll up and down the drainages that dominate the higher elevations of the ranch.
During one stalk, we watch a small group of 7 or 8 mule deer move through the brush about 20 or 30 yards from our location. Flapping like the cover of an open book is a large tear of crimson red flesh hanging from the gray coat of one of the does. No one speaks.
“Mountain lion,” our guide tells us, breaking our silence once the mule deer pass. “That will go septic soon and she’ll be finished off by predators,” he adds. My pronghorn and the morality of his death returns to my mind.
Too quickly, the days pass and my week at Deseret is over. I return home enormously relaxed, and my mind is peaceful, bright and clear. I walk in my front door, kiss my wife and son, and I feel more thankful for them both than I did a week ago.
In the trunk of my car is a cooler full of the pronghorn’s flesh. The hunt is over, but there is still one final job to be done. I take the quartered meat and the back straps out of my cooler, and for the better part of three hours I prepare and preserve the meat.
While trimming the right front leg, I find the bullet. It had passed through the buck’s chest cavity and lodged itself in the far shoulder of the animal. I feel a deep sense of reverence and connection to this animal, and I sense the distance I have traveled in my life over the past decade since I last hunted.
Today, just maybe, I am a hunter.
Although I have taken animals in both North America and Africa, over the last 11 years hunting has taken a back seat to my business, my wife and my son.
However, a year ago I met a friend, and our conversations always turned to big game hunting. When he asked me last April what animal I most wanted to hunt in the Lower-48, without hesitation I answered, “pronghorn.”
“Proghorn? Great,” he replied. Get yourself to Utah the week of October 23rd and we’ll get you an antelope.”
Although I haven’t hunted since 2006, I’ve remained considerate about the debate surrounding the morality of hunting. I probably think about it much more since I have had a child, as all of my decisions now seem to have greater meaning. In any event, my answer to that ethical question today is two words; reverence, and responsibility. Reverence for my place in the world and responsibility for what that position costs.
I say goodbye to my family and head north to Utah as the week of the hunt arrives. The only information my friend gave me in the weeks and months leading up to the trip was to meet him in Park City on October 22nd. When pressed for more details, he said not to worry about it, it was all taken care of.
When I reach Park City on the 22nd, I find my friend and two other men, one of whom I know quite well. None of us know where we are going, and when my friend tells us it’s “Deseret,” everyone is very pleased.
Although I’ve been out of hunting circles for a while, I know about Deseret Ranch. This 235,000-acre ranch is the largest single private property in the state of Utah. To find Deseret on a map, just look for the empty space that is not traversed by a single public road where Utah meets Wyoming.
A day later we arrive at the lodge. It is perched on a high bench, and tens of thousands of acres rise into the aspen and pine trees that reach skyward to the west and tens of thousands more acres fall into an ocean of sage and grassland to the east. It is magnificent.
For my pronghorn hunt I am guided by Gary. After introductions, we make the most of the first afternoon and head down to the arid low-country where pronghorn are likely to be found. The terrain we will be hunting is exactly as I imagined it would be – gentle waves of sagebrush with enough creases and gullies for the pronghorn to hide out of sight.
Despite the ruggedness and vastness of the terrain, it doesn’t take long to spot our first antelope. He’s a big buck with nice, thick bases and curling tips. He is alert and skittish, and when we try to quietly move in his direction to get a better look, he bounds away into a deep ravine before climbing out and over a distant hill to safety.
Not much later, we find two more bucks. One of the bucks is big, and the land between us is flat as a pancake with no natural obstructions. An opportunity has arisen.
Unlike the first buck, these two do not seem concerned by our presence. Still, they manage to keep a 500 to 600-yard buffer between them and us regardless of where we move. I think about taking the larger of the two, and if I find a good rest I can push for the shot. But at this distance I am not confident about the ethics of the shot and decide to abandon the duo of bucks.
The evening progresses and as the sun dips lower, we spot a very large herd. It is the magic hour, and the soft rays of the setting sun light up 30 or 40 antelope in day-glow against the darkening brush. The antelope rut is over, so several bucks can be seen wandering among the many females. Gary and I are both intrigued. We have good cover and are invisible to the herd so we have plenty of time to study our options.
Gary pulls out his spotting scope and we look over the group. One buck immediately stands apart from the others. His huge head, thick neck and powerful horns have no rival in this herd. In addition to his physical size, he has a series of deep scars across his upper left shoulder where his coat was once torn to pieces but amazingly has managed to heal. Gary and I determine that he has survived an epic fight. We name him “Scar” and decide to hunt him.
The herd begins to move, and it looks like they will drop into shallow valley that leads away from us around the base of large hill. Gary and I plan a retreat from our current position to traverse the opposite side of the hill out of sight from the herd. We’ll then ambush them as they exit the far side of the valley. We set out to make this happen.
Gary leads the way, and about 30 minutes later we crest the back side of the hill.
“Down, down!” Gary whispers excitingly.
I look down and see that the herd is 100 yards away from our position at the end of the shallow valley.
“The wind is all wrong. We don’t have much time,” Gary tells me.
We crouch low, hug the earth, and look for a place where I can set up a shot. I feel the wind push gently against my back, not a good sign.
I quietly chamber a round into my rifle. I can only see the top of the several pronghorn heads in the valley below, and I can’t tell them apart. I see a few bucks, but I can’t tell which of them is Scar.
“Do you see Scar?” I whisper to Gary.
“It could be the third buck on the left, but I’m not sure,” he answers.
I don’t have a good shot at the third buck, and I’m not convinced it’s Scar. As I determine that I need to get closer, I see a dozen heads shoot up on full alert and stare directly at me.
“They caught our scent,” Gary mutters dejectedly.
In an instant, the herd disappears in a clamber of hooves and a haze of dust. I eject my unspent round and feel elated despite the failure of our stalk. Gary and laugh and admit defeat as the herd sprints away. As the sun sets, we call it an evening.
The next daybreak, I meet Gary downstairs and we head out into the icy air as the first rays of sun rise over the eastern horizon.
We spend the morning glassing across ripples of sagebrush. I’m looking for Scar. As the morning progresses, we see ample mule deer that occasionally come down from the high country, but no pronghorn, and no Scar.
The air begins to warm, bringing a brisk but bright sun that portends another unseasonably warm afternoon. We still see no pronghorn, but I don’t mind. I am very content to be out here, chatting easily with Gary, smelling the sage and the brown earth, and looking out across the green and gray steppes. On the horizon, we are dwarfed by a backdrop of jagged white peaks that reach to the heavens.
“Let’s head a bit further out,” Gary says to me, pivoting my thoughts back to the hunt and the task at hand. We hop back into his truck and head out and around the reservoir that dominates the northeast portion of the ranch.
Bouncing along a well-maintained ranch track in Gary’s truck, I spot the first pronghorn we have seen all morning. He’s a buck, and I tell Gary to stop so that we can take a closer look.
“Look at his antlers,” I say to Gary. “Look at that twist,” I add as I inspect him closer, now whispering with excitement.
“Wow, he’s unique Brent. You want to shoot that buck?” Gary asks as he looks over at me, his eyebrow raised in a way that tells me this may be the pronghorn we are looking for.
“Yes. He’s the one,” I reply with conviction. He’s not a physical equal to Scar, not even close, but to my eyes he’s better.
We stop the truck.
In the months leading up to my time in Deseret, I had envisioned a very different hunt. I expected a long stalk and a physical experience very much like the hunt for Scar and the other bucks during the prior night. Never did I anticipate that an antelope would set me up with such an easy shot so close to the road, and that’s what this buck seems to be doing. Although I get the sense that I am not going to have to work for very hard for this animal, the situation feels right, so I go with it.
I get out of the truck and I range the buck at about 220 yards. He looks back at me, disinterested, before turning and moving away at a slow pace. I reach back in the truck and grab my gun. I chamber a round, click off the safety, and shoulder my weapon.
My right eye takes its position behind the scope, and my left eye squints but remains open and aware of the larger horizon. Magnified, I see the buck clearly now. I settle the crosshairs just behind his left shoulder as everything gets quiet. The pronghorn stops walking and looks directly at me. I look back at him.
I feel very little adrenaline and no desire to kill this animal purely for sport as I decide to take this buck. An overriding feeling of focused calm falls over me. The sight picture framed by my scope is perfectly stable. The pronghorn still looks at me – his twisted black antlers chaotically piercing the blue sky – and he has no sign of fear. He is undisturbed by my presence.
The longer I watch him, the more I get a sensation that he carries an awareness of resignation. This impression is strong, real and very strange. If someone told me that I would sense that an animal would communicate with me that he knows his demise is imminent, and that indeed he may be welcoming his death, I wouldn’t have believed it. But on some level, I know this is true.
I squeeze the trigger.
Everything remains silent. For a millisecond, my mind becomes the void.
The first sensation I experience as the world opens again is the sound of the telltale tympanic thwock as the bullet enters the buck’s chest cavity. I re-center my scope on the buck and although I can see that he is still standing, I know he is dead.
“Reload,” Gary yells. “Reload!”
Even though I know that a second shot is unnecessary, I do as Gary tells me. Robotically, I unlock the bolt, eject the spent cartridge and load a new round into the receiver. Readied for a second shot, I center the crosshairs again onto the old buck’s shoulder.
Through the scope, I see that my first shot was a clean hit. I watch as a torrent of blood erupts from just behind his left shoulder. I click the safety on my rifle and take the crosshairs off the buck just as he takes his final few steps and collapses.
“He’s done,” I say to Gary.
We approach the pronghorn on foot and inspect his body. As expected, he is non-typical, with his right horn pointed straight back and his left horn pointed forward. Although his horns are not huge, he is unique and carries the mass of a thick neck that only comes from several seasons of life in the sagebrush.
Gary opens the animal’s mouth and inspects his teeth as a trickle of blood drips out of the pronghorn’s nose. His teeth are barely even there, as years of chewing sagebrush have worn them down to the nubs.
“This guy’s older than dirt, Brent,” Gary states flatly. “He wouldn’t have made it through the winter.”
Once the animal is field-dressed, we each take a handful of grass and place it in the body cavity of the buck.
“This is his last meal,” Gary says.
We pay our respects to the God and the animal and depart the kill site as noon approaches.
Back at the lodge, we see that our pronghorn’s jaw looks to be much older than the oldest buck that had previously been taken on the ranch. By all estimates, this antelope is at least 10 and a half years old.
It’s clear that hunting this antelope was an act of compassion. Once the fierce winter winds arrived from the north, this old buck would have endured a gradual starvation that would weaken him to the point that he would have been taken by predators. His death would have been a grizzly act of Darwinism far more gruesome than my clean shot through his vitals.
My own tag spent, I spend the next few days with my friends as they seek to fill their own elk tags. My goal for the remainder of my week is simply to be out in nature and spend time with the land and the animals, which I do.
A secondary elk rut is occurring at Deseret, and I spend hours sitting quietly and listening to the mournful bugling roll up and down the drainages that dominate the higher elevations of the ranch.
During one stalk, we watch a small group of 7 or 8 mule deer move through the brush about 20 or 30 yards from our location. Flapping like the cover of an open book is a large tear of crimson red flesh hanging from the gray coat of one of the does. No one speaks.
“Mountain lion,” our guide tells us, breaking our silence once the mule deer pass. “That will go septic soon and she’ll be finished off by predators,” he adds. My pronghorn and the morality of his death returns to my mind.
Too quickly, the days pass and my week at Deseret is over. I return home enormously relaxed, and my mind is peaceful, bright and clear. I walk in my front door, kiss my wife and son, and I feel more thankful for them both than I did a week ago.
In the trunk of my car is a cooler full of the pronghorn’s flesh. The hunt is over, but there is still one final job to be done. I take the quartered meat and the back straps out of my cooler, and for the better part of three hours I prepare and preserve the meat.
While trimming the right front leg, I find the bullet. It had passed through the buck’s chest cavity and lodged itself in the far shoulder of the animal. I feel a deep sense of reverence and connection to this animal, and I sense the distance I have traveled in my life over the past decade since I last hunted.
Today, just maybe, I am a hunter.
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