So, I have been on a hunting bender and have not had time to post part 3 for some time. Here you go enjoy. I have a lot of new hunting experiences since this antelope post, and some new twists to throw at you guys with my most recent trip to deer camp in Southern Indiana A.K.A. Manville.
Monday 9-26
Sunny and I over sleep and this time it is Michael and Chet calling to wake us up…the tables are turned… We talk with Brain again at the gate. He says if we want to shoot does we need to climb up to the tree line. It is about a 2 hour hike up there. I guess everyone on the property knows this as we all start the hike up there. There are hunters everywhere so I decide to bail due to so many people up there. Sunny and Chet make it up there and are into animals, but getting close would prove difficult.
Michael and I decide to head down hill and hunt a wide open plateau area. We hunt there for a while and don’t see much. We deicide a move is in order. Michael and I talk and decide we should go hunt another ranch we saw while scouting on Saturday, before we get to the ranch we see a doe and I think it is on a huntable area. According to the maps we can hunt there, but across the street we can’t. I can tell Michael is a little worried about this spot because it is pretty close to the road. I assure him it is fine, but we abort the mission anyway. As soon as we get almost back to the truck here comes Brian the Worden and he says there is a doe just down the road and we should go after her…. It was the same doe we saw from the truck. And with Brian’s approval we go after her again. By the time we get to the general area we saw her, she is gone. We decide the only way she could have gone was up into some rocks. Sure as shit… we find her with 3-5 other lopes. Michael and I surmise the ‘lopes are using his area as a short-cut between the alfalfa field on one side of the street and the large open basin on the other side. Michael and I get up there and find a whole family up there. We both shoot does at under 40 yards. We probably could have taken one or more of them with archery gear.
Mike with his doe antelope. More meat for the freezer.
Me with my doe antelope
While Michael and I are messing around with our does, Sunny was busy killing a doe of his own. Apparently, after Chet missed some more ‘lopes and not being able to kill some very close due to some miss communication between them, Sunny decides to take a very long shot. The shot was so long in fact his rangefinder would not take an accurate reading. The best reading he could get was 360 yards and that was at a minimum of 40 yards in front of the doe he was eyeballing. So you get it… Sunny shoots the doe with one bullet to the neck at 400+. At first Chet didn’t see that Sunny had dropped the doe. They finally saw the doe kicking her feet above the sage brush nearly a quarter mile away. Now that the doe was down Sunny had to get it back to the truck, he was about 2 miles away. He had his new pack…so he guts and skins the beast and puts the whole thing into his backpack whole. He got the whole thing off the hill and to the truck about the same time Michael and I pull into the parking area, with our does.
Sunny with his whole doe in his backpack.
So it was only the second day and Michael, Sunny and I each had a buck and doe each. Chet was another matter all together. By Monday afternoon he had shot 7-9 times and had yet to kill. An executive decision was made to give him Sunny’s gun to shoot, as we knew it was shooting straight. We decided to go back to the spot where Michael and I had shot does, since we had just seen 50 animals in the general area. The Chet is a relatively new to the hunting world and during this trip he developed the worst case of antelope fever I have ever seen. Getting him to calm down aim the gun was very difficult. He must have had a terrible case of the shakes, or maybe he was closing his eyes while shooting...I’m still not sure what was going on in the Indian brain of his, but it is fun to watch. He was pretty freaked out. It is still kind of funny that a bunch of white guys are the ones teaching an Indian how to hunt. The rest of us are now tagged out and we’re on a mission to get Chet an antelope, come hell or high water we were not leaving Wyoming without a ‘lope for The Chet.
All of us follow Chet into the woods where Michael and I had killed our does a few hours ago. That where by now already in the meat locker…. Michael sends Chet ahead of us. We hunt around the wooded area for about 20 min and then hear a shot. Chet missed! Boom we hear another shot. Missed it twice! By this time the rest of us were right behind him looking at a doe antelope just 30 yards ahead of him closing the distance…. Finally, Chet gets a clear shot at about 25 yards. He smokes the doe… He had the worst case of buck fever I have ever seen, major mental break down. After he finally dropped the doe, the look of relief on his face was very telling. We were all glad he got his doe and there were congratulations all around for Chet’s first big game animal. He did it and we were all happy and relieved. I think the Chet will eventually overcome his fever and pull it together, but it was fun to watch. Chet, it does get easier… I shot at tons of deer before I actually got one. One time when I was about 12 I think I shot 8 times at one whitetail, and never hit it.
Chet shoots and scores finally.
We hit up Monday night football at the Fireside Bar and Drive through the place with .25 wings. We order 40 wings, drink a lot of beers, and re-live the last two epic days of hunting. Somehow our tap is almost 100 bucks. We get back to the hotel and I can finally sleep. My head hits the pillow and I’m out. Mike and Chet keep drinking and decide another frozen burrito with cheese curds melted all over it is in order about midnight. Sometime, after drinking most of the evening, they decided it would be a good idea to climb on top of a huge bronze statue of a bull and a cowboy that says welcome to Casper, Wyoming on it.
Tuesday 27th
Tuesday we all decided it was a good idea to sleep in after the night before. We don’t get going until after 10 am. Sunny, Michael and I have all tagged out and Chet has one more doe tag. We all roll out, but Chet is the only one to bring a gun. We hunt the same place we did the day before in the trees where Chet, mike and I all scored. We find that another hunter beat us to the spot earlier in the AM. We find a trail where an animal had been dragged out. Oh well, there are lots of other spots. We head to an area where we can see some good spots from the road. We drop off Chet for the Hat 6 death walk. He starts along his route and a few moments in he is into the ‘lopes again. He gets a few long shots, but does not connect on any. He ends up walking 4-5 miles and Sunny, Michael and I meet him on top of the ranch near a water tower. He tells us about the missed shots and we decided to set up an impromptu target. Sunny shoots Chester’s gun at the target to make sure the gun is still zeroed. It is still the same… It is confirmed Chet suffers from buck fever.
Hotel bound we decided to cook out in the parking lot again and party because it is our last night in Casper. Sunny makes fresh mozzarella cheese in the parking lot and we eat it with tomatoes from Michael’s garden. Sunny also makes us his deer-camp chili, and throws in the tenderloins from the doe antelope he shot. It is awesome. We drink and have a good ol’ time.
Sunny makes hand pulled cheese in the parking lot of the Super 8.
Wednesday 9-29
Time to hit the road, we wake up pretty early. Michael and Chet have to get up earlier to clean the truck and return it to Dave Blackwell’s pops in Cheyenne. This is 2 plus hours out of the way…add time to visit you are talking about a day unto itself. The plan is for Sunny and I to meet up with Michael and Chet in Rawlins and caravan it back to Sacramento. Not knowing how long it would take Michael and Chet in Cheyenne Sunny and I are early to Rawlins. Rawlins is full of strange people. Sunny and I befriend some locals in Tico’s bar. Tico’s bar is run by Indians, and has cold cheap beer and burgers. Sunny and I talk to the locals about the mayor and how corrupt he is and how some of the judges are also now under investigation. Sunny ponders running for mayor of Rawlins, Wyoming… I write a bunch of post cards to people and mail them.
The locals in Tico’s bar tell us we have to go to the Rifleman Bar just down the main drag. They were right it was sweet, so after Michael and Chet show up about 2 pm we head to the Rifleman. The place is full of mounts and even has a two headed cow. We decided we need to import the Rifleman to Sacramento and rename it the Midtown Riflemen. It was the ultimate MHC lair.
After spending way too little time at the Rifleman we need to hit the road…it is already 3 pm and we have not even made it out of Wyoming yet. Sometime somewhere in Utah we stop and eat the remains of the chili sunny made the night before…it was still awesome. We drive as far as we can before sleep makes us stop.
Thursday 9-30
We wake up somewhere in Nevada, and start driving. We get home about 10:30 am. What a trip. I would recommend this trip to anyone wanting to go.
Stay tuned for my next posts about Manville, Indiana and possibily about adventures with the in-laws in Wisconsin.
