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A Brief Note on My Kansas Mule Deer Hunt

December 7, 2009.

I spent the last 5 days in Kansas hunting mule deer with a muzzleloader during the general rifle season. It's a complicated tag to draw, and pretty expensive, and both of those factors led me to put a lot of pressure on myself to get a lot out of the hunt.

It took me a day or two to figure the area out, and that got things off to a slow start. I eventually got in to the deer, and would see maybe 10 does a day. The first several bucks I saw were tiny little forked-horn yearlings, and I quickly passed on those. They weren't the reason I had come to Kansas.

By Sunday, the last day of my hunt, I had still not seen a single mature buck, although I had talked to hunters who had shot some. I was definitely discouraged, but figured taking a last-day mulie doe as my first-ever muzzleloader deer would be an outcome that I would be pleased with.

At first light on Sunday, I passed on a 2.5-year-old 2x2 at 40 yards. Around 9:00am, I passed on a pair of 1.5-year-old 2x2s at 100 yards.

There was a doe with those last two, and I noted where they bedded, planning on coming back later to try to take the doe.

There was one more spot that I hadn't checked yet, a narrow shelter belt on the edge of a cut milo field. When I glassed it, I immediately did a double-take. At 600 yards, I saw what looked like a gigantic mule deer buck.

I had forgotten my spotting scope at home, however, and couldn't verify what I was seeing. I figured it was most likely a downed tree with a couple uncut milo stalks near one end that looked like antlers. There was no way something that big could be a deer ... but I marked its location and stalked it anyway, figuring there might be some real deer along the tree line that I wasn't seeing, and that at least they would make the effort worthwhile.

By the time I reached the point where I had seen the alleged buck, I was not at all surprised that I had come up blank. I stopped to glass ahead for other deer, and a HUGE buck exploded 20 yards ahead of me, circling to my left and stopping at 60 yards.

Long story short, I had somehow stalked along an incredibly noisy milo field and gotten within 20 yards of a Boone and Crockett nontypical monster mulie, and I did not bring him home.

I can't complain too much about getting to hunt trophy deer like that, but it was a tough 5 days, and I'm tired from it. The frustration of not seeing deer, living outside for 5 straight days of below freezing temperatures, passing on chances to bring home some venison, and the heartbreak of not tagging the buck of a lifetime have left me pretty drained.

Looking forward to a break from hunting for a few weeks, time which I can use to keep kicking myself for not bringing home that buck.

After which I'm sure I'll get excited to hunt all over again when goose season heats up.

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