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Deer Hunting On the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation, Part 2

December 8, 2011.

Continued from Part 1 ...

Apparently the buck had been bedded, and had finally stood to check me out as I dorked around with the does and sharptail.

He was so close that I was afraid to look straight at him, but I knew he was pretty wide, and had enough points that I immediately understood he was too good to pass on the last day.

I swung my rifle and tripod around as a single unit, then took the hard-quartering-on shot.

He jumped, then charged forward and down the hill.

This side drainage was quite steep, and it only took a few bounds for him to disappear below my line of sight.

I was flustered.

He had appeared so quick. And the shot had been so close that I had really been expecting him to drop in his tracks.

Did I rush the shot and blow it?

Doubt set in, and I got nervous.

I forced myself to wait about 15 minutes, then went over to look for blood on the snow.

There was none, although I knew I had hit him from the way he reacted to the shot. I found his fresh bed in the snow and tripled checked it. No blood, but a profoundly strong stench of rutting buck.

There were tracks everywhere, and it took me a minute to find the one I believed to be his. Still no blood.

I started tracking him down the hill, imagining the route he would have taken: down in to this side drainage, then in to the main drainage, then who knows where....

But we never got that far.

He had been hard hit, and had slid down the snowy hillside and piled up at the bottom. And, oh my, did he stink to high heaven from the rut.

He was a 4x4, a little better than 24 inches wide. He could have had more mass, and he could have had deeper forks, but this was pretty damn good for a last day buck. I was relieved, and I was happy. And I knew that I had all the rest of this beautiful sunny day to get him back to the truck, a much more pleasant situation than I had had packing out my Standing Rock whitetail just a few days earlier.

I took some pictures, then started strategizing on how to get him out. I was actually within sight of my truck, just a third of a mile away, but the drainage I had to cross represented a serious bit of hiking and climbing.

I gutted the buck, then dragged him down to the bottom of the drainage. There I quartered him, and was able to pack him uphill to my truck in a single, very heavily loaded trip. Not easy, but not too hard if taken slowly.

By 12:30, I was on my way home with my two South Dakota Sioux reservation bucks in the back of my truck.

A good trip, and a good end to my 2011 big game seasons.

Notes

Some notes on these trips:

• Both trips were fun, and I'd hunt both reservations again. The Standing Rock offers hassle-free access, a big plus. The Cheyenne River may offer more interesting country, I think, but with more access headaches. The deer I shot were medium-sized. There are bigger ones, but certainly not behind every tree.
• A .300 magnum in a very lightweight rifle is just perfect for western deer hunting. The recoil is a piece of cake after you get used to it (3 or 4 boxes of shells). It shoots flat, and it puts deer down hard to make recovery easy. I shoot 180-grain Triple Shocks out of my .300 Winchester Magnum, built by High-Tech Customs.
• A BogPod tripod is a little annoying to carry, but, wow, do they give you a solid kneeling or standing shot in open country.
• I carried a Kuiu 3000 pack on this hunt, the first time I've used one. I thought it might be too big at first (and it's definitely not small....), but it's about the right size if you're carrying a spotting scope, extra layers, etc. Really well designed pack. I can't imagine there's a better pack out there right now.
• The Dakotas don't conjure the same air of adventure as Alaska or even Colorado, but the country I was hunting in was seriously remote, with very low population density, very low hunter density, and very low traffic on the few roads that there are. If you get lost in this country, especially given the constant threat of bitter cold temperatures, you could be in big trouble. Especially if you're hunting alone like I was. A GPS, headlamp, and extra clothing are seriously important to have with you at all times.

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