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my first hunt of the year......

warning some of this is graphic, if yah dont like hunting do not read any farther than this, if yah do i WILL poke fun at your reading comprehension skills.....

due to healing up from back surgery i had the last week of Sept this past weekend was the first i was cleared to shoot and actually the first one i really felt up to being bounced around in the hills....our business partner, John, came over from Missoula to chase speed goats and look for a mule deer....he brought his neighbor, Rich, who is a retired police officer from New York who is on his second year of big game hunting and wanted to see what northeast Montana was like compared to hunting in the Bitterroot....

Rich, John and my father in law headed out to the cabin at The Pines on the northside of Fort Peck on Wednesday night while Darla and I headed up mid morning Thursday, our oldest girl was gonna be brought up by a couple of our friends on Friday night when they headed up so Kate didnt miss school....between all of us we had 3 speed goat tags, 5 deer A tags, a couple deer B tags, a cow elk tag and the usual bird licenses as well as the multiple boxes of 20 land owner coyote tags grin

Darla and i got out there, went out on the flats at Dog Creek to look over goats but all the nice black faced bucks that should have been sporting decent horns had dropped them and just had their cores sticking up and i didnt feel like putting the sneak on a couple 8's....cruised up in teh hills above Dog Creek and didnt see any mule deer bigger than a dink 3x3....Darla said she knew where some speed goats were hanging off of the Ridge Road that heads off east of the Pines road so we headed that way....

we get to The Ridge Road and head down it....find the heard of goats, a decent 12 was hanging in the bunch but given im on a 10 pound lifting limit and at that point had no clue where the other 3 guys were i left him be figuring he wasnt to spooky we can come back as i still had 3 days of hunting ahead....bout 2/3 the way through the loop i suddenly have no brakes....oh chit....get out and inspected every thing no leaks, lines intact and the reservoir is full, phucking hell gotta be the booster....we limp back to the cabin greatful as hell they didnt go out up in the Dog Creek hills...

when the guys show up about 45 minutes later we decided i would just run the truck to town in the morning, drop it off at the garage, grab the Yukon pick up Kate when she is out of school and head back up....

so Friday night we are sitting around talking.....Rich, having stalked a couple goats with John found out though the land may look flat through the binocs or spotting scope it was anything but with deep cuts scattered through out....we were explaining the intricacies of eastern montana gumbo mud and he was having a hard time believing us....mentioned that the Bone Trail boat ramp has(turns out had) a sign at the top before you go down to the campground that if yah dont have 3 days worth of provisions then dont go down cause if it rains you will not get out....we decide for the hell of it to run down to Bone Trail for the hell of it on Saturday to show Rich the country over there, turns out to be an excellent plan....

Saturday we hunt the first couple ridges near the pines than take off for Bone Trail.....hit Bone Trail bout lunch time and get very disappointed, after all the horror stories we told Rich about it it turns out they have improved it....still not where yah want to be if it rains and if it rains good you cant get out but they have widened the road quite a bit....we get to the bottom have lunch and decide the afternoons plan of attack....we decide Rich needs to see the badlands across "The Top of the World" so we head out to the Ridge Road(different Ridge Road from the one we lost our brakes on)....

we get all of 4 miles up it and Darla gets a phone call from our friends that were gonna bring out Kate and they ask where we are at....we say Just left Bone trail, headed up Ridge....to which Darla hears "Good we are stuck.." and their cell cuts out....now where we are at is a good 20 miles west of where we and our friends normally do most of our hunting...Darla gets them again and asks where they are at, stuck in a crossing on the Bone Trail end of the Harper Ridge Road....well chit thats only a few miles away....so we turn around to go rescue them....

get to the crossing and they are stuck good....between my FIL's truck and Rich's truck we find enough tow rope to pull them out and and allow us to stay on dry ground, now Rich understands why we get the hell out of the hills when it rains....apparently the stories of the baby powder clay soil turning to sticky grease damn quick arent to believe able till you see it....as i said we dont normally hunt this area and Craig and Sharon dont either and had no clue we were gonna be over there that morning, shear luck we happened to be only a few miles apart when they got stuck or they coulda been sitting there for several hours waiting for us....

so we head our separate ways with the usual promices of cases of beer and the like grin ....our group stops in an open flat up above where they got stuck to turn the dogs loose to allow them to burn off some energy as we havent really been bird hunting at all and bump into a guy out of Glendive that has a bull tag for the area so we sit and bullchit for awhile....load the dogs back up, decide there aint enough time to take Rich up to the badlands so start making our way back to the cabin since someone needs to make a run to town to fill up our spare gas tanks....

Sunday we head out and dont see much of anything for a few hours, rain clouds overhead keep us close to gravel....close to lunch we find ourselves with in 15 miles or so of Glasgow so we say phuck it and head in for lunch as rain starts to fall....it clears up while we are finishing up lunch so we head back out, sky is mostly clear and it didnt appear to have rained south towards the lake so we take head out south of the Hill Ranch....

cruising the hills, who do we happen to find again? Craig and Sharon....Craig has a big bodied fairly heavy horned 3x4 in the back of his truck and he and Sharon are looking at a smaller 3x4 out about 3/4 of a mile deciding whether they want to put a sneak on him as he is bedded down fairly close to the road.....Sharon decides not to so with an hour of light left Darla says "I'll take him" and heads out after him with Kate in tow....we watch from the hill through spotting scopes and binocs....

Darla has a 20 year plus year history of being a rabid doe serial killer with over 2 dozen to her credit and had never taken a buck.....its been her choice and not cause she has never had a shot at a buck or never had a tag as she usually puts her either sex tag on a doe so it surprised me a bit she decided without much thought to go after it....

takes Darla about 45 minutes to get to the buck.....she pops up about 75 feet from the buck......BOOM! hits the boiler room.....BOOM! though the boiler room again....buck attempts to stagger off but isnt doing well and from up on the hill through the spotting scopes we can tell the buck is dead on his feet and might make it a couple dozen steps.....Darla attempts to hit him again while he is staggering and is a tad off balance...BOOM! a clean miss....the buck stops and his course up the lil ridge actually brought him bout 25 feet closer to her....with bout 15 minutes of daylight left Darla makes the executive decision that we will not be chasing this buck after dark, drops to sitting takes careful aim and shoots the buck in the face and he drops like a ton of bricks....

meanwhile from our vantage point up on the ridge we can see the blood pouring out of the offside of the buck through the exit holes before the last shot and we know he is dead....but Darlas blood was up and she didnt give a rip bout saving horns....she just didnt want to chase the buck after dark crazy....

our buddy that we pulled out of the mud yesterday takes off in his truck down the hill before the rest of us can even get our rigs started and before we can get a trophy pic he has the damn thing gutted and is tossing him in the back of the truck.....since we had to go back to the cabin yet and he was hauling his buck to Glasgow to get it processed into sausage and stuff anyway we just sent the buck with him for the same since i have a full day today at work wasnt gonna get him butchered myself we sent our buck in with him....

follwed them to the FWP game check station at the base of the Pines road to make sure they didnt get any hassel for having a buck in the back with a tag on it that wasnt theirs ...no problems, found out these two were the biggest bucks they had seen brought in at that point which we thought was odd cause Craigs buck is slightly above average and Darlas is about what most take.....

when we hit the Fort Peck highway last night to come home we ran into the Glendive man we talked to on Saturday.....stopped to see if he needed help he said no waiting for a buddy to bring me a battery and if yah got a flash light ive got something you need to see.....

so Darla and i hop out and the guy pops the hood of his older Dodge Power Wagon.....when he was down in Timber creek the battery of his truck shook loose and fell down on his manifold and melted a fist sized hole in the side of the battery and leaked out the acid....he didnt discover it till after his truck was shut off and he smelt something burning.....not only did his truck start back up but he shut it off and started it back up 2 or 3 more times before making it back to the highway 30 some miles away.....

so now given this is Darla's first buck she wants to hang the horns up but due to the face shot it now has an adjustable rack as the skull is either broke or shattered between the horns....i give the woman kudos for doing what she has been taught in that if the animal is still on its feet keep shooting.....on the other hand she did not make my job easy in figuring out just how to mount them.....
 
wow, i was actually expecting pictures! man...but nevertheless you painted a good picture in my head. sounds like it was an awesome trip.
 
She did a great job taking it down then and there. Some good advice too ! 1- Be prepared , 2 - Be prepared and 3- See 1 & 2
 
wasnt running a camera much this weekend.....due to the back problems i didnt get to hunt last year and this was my first weekend out this year so i was spending time looking and didnt pic up a camera......do have a pic of the wifes buck, of the pretty side but its missing an eye and gray matter is out the ear......will post a pic when the horns are clean....
 
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