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Deer Hunting On the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, Part 1

December 8, 2011.

With the whitetail I had taken on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation frozen solid in the back of my truck, I set about trying to figure out how to hunt my Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe (CRST) reservation tag.

Although the two reservations are right next to each other, the management of their hunting programs is quite different.

In terms of getting a tag, Standing Rock is first-come first-served, while Cheyenne River is on a draw. And while the Standing Rock tag is good for either a whitetail or mulie, with the CRST you have to choose to apply for a mulie tag or a whitetail tag. The tag I had drawn was for mulies only.

In terms of available hunting land, when you pull a tag on the Standing Rock, you get a tag and access to all tribal lands on the reservation. When you draw a tag on the Cheyenne River, you get a tag and a list of phone numbers.

The CRST lands are managed by individual tribe members as working ranches. If you want to hunt on one of these ranches, you need to track down the member who has the ranching rights and ask their permission.

Permission is typically easy enough to get — if you can track down the member to ask them. As ranchers, they're not near their phones that often.

In fairness, I had not adequately done my homework for this hunt. I only realized I drew the tag a couple weeks before the season opener, and I was not aggressive enough about finding land to hunt before I got up there.

Now, on the reservation with a mule deer tag in one hand and a rifle in the other, I found myself with no place to hunt.

I scouted a bit on my first day on the reservation, looking over a lot of country in my truck, and identified areas where I wanted to hunt. But either I was refused permission due to the number of tribal members who had already been given access to a given ranch, or I couldn't get hold of the ranchers whose land I was interested in hunting.

Finally, with precious time wasting, I got access to a decent-sized ranch with some good looking habitat.

My first afternoon on the ranch was fairly productive. There was about 6 inches of snow on the ground — so tracks revealed deer patterns and the deer themselves were easy to spot.

I was able to validate that the ranch I was hunting was indeed in the middle of mulie country, and I was even able to get within about 60 yards of a big 2x2. Mature bucks, however, remained elusive on that day.

The next day, Tuesday, was unfortunately my last. The week I had allotted for this trip had been burned up by my Standing Rock hunt and a day or two of marginally productive scouting and dialing-for-access. I had all day Tuesday to hunt, but needed Wednesday to drive back to Denver to be home in time for Thanksgiving on Thursday.

Nothing like a little time pressure to make things interesting.

I choose to spend the first hour of that final morning in the truck. There was a lot of country on that ranch to look over, and I figured my best bet was to stay mobile and glass from as many different vantage points as possible.

I saw some does, then spotted a lone deer moving aggressively across a series of small drainages. The deer disappeared before I could get a spotting scope on it, but something about the way the deer moved convinced me it was a cruising buck.

I used the truck to get about a mile closer to where I had seen it, and was able to relocate it with my spotting scope.

A buck, sure enough, but a whitetail. I had strayed a little too close to the river bottom and back in to whitetail country.

I drove back higher up in to the river breaks, and was pretty quickly looking over a small 4x4 mulie in the spotting scope.

Hiking around the night before, I had learned that this river breaks country was fairly rough, and the drainages were quite deep. It would be all too easy to shoot a deer that would be very difficult to recover in the expanse of roadless drainages and side drainages.

The 4x4 I was looking over was not big, but it was very close to the road — a very attractive prospect on this last day of my hunt.

But I quickly got hung up on the "not big" part, and elected to pass on this deer, conveniently located though he was.

The sun had been up half an hour when I parked my truck near a haystack and got ready to start walking.

I had seen quite a few mulies from the truck, but figured I'd have to get down in the drainages and try to kick a buck out of the cedar thickets, assuming there were decent bucks to be had.

I took one last inventory of the groups of does I could see from the truck, then headed down and across the main drainage on this part of the ranch.

Once on the other side, I change course 90 degrees and started working through the side drainages.

As I came through the first one, I kicked up the big 2x2 from the previous afternoon. He offered me a half-dozen more opportunities to shoot him, then jumped a fence and left the ranch.

The next side drainage was empty.

The one after that held some of the does I had inventoried from the truck. The 3 of them stayed bedded as I entered the drainage, and I dropped to one knee to watch them. I put my rifle over my BogPod tripod and let myself feel a little miserable that no rutting buck was bedded with them.

I watched them for a while, until they had had enough and got up and left the ranch, just like the 2x2.

A sharptail then landed in a tree about 50 yards in front of me, and I calculated the odds of whether or not I could take its head off cleanly enough with my .300 Winchester.

I didn't attempt the shot, which would have been illegal on a couple of counts, and got ready to start walking again.

Still on my knees, I took one last look around.

When I turned around, to my great surprise, I immediately looked right in to the eyes of a buck, only about 40 yards from me.

Continued in Part 2 ...

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