Chris and Kareena Watkins: Did You Know That Bambi Had a Bigger Brother??

Last year I set out on my first Utah deer hunt. I had been hunting for deer in California once before with no luck. As I hunted last year I saw why Utah is such a tough place to hunt. Everybody and their dogs hunt in Utah. There were hunters everywhere. I was so shocked. Last year I hunted with my rifle and was unsuccessful. This year I decided to mix it up a bit and was told that there are much less hunters during the muzzleloader hunt (Thanks again Lon for letting me borrow your gun!!!). For those who don't know what a muzzleloader is it's actually a single shot gun that you load like the old school civil war style shoving gun powder and a bullet down the barrel with a ram rod. You are not allowed to use a magnifying scope on these guns. Shooting them is like the good old days shooting pellet guns with open sights except a lot more bang. Your range to shoot is about 150 yards. The muzzleloader hunt is before the rifle season so there was a much greater chance of seeing bucks on this hunt. I was excited.

So Devin was kind enough to tag along for the hunt this time. We left at 3am Thursday morning for the Utah/Idaho border. 3.5 hours later we hit the mountain top and geared up for the hunt. We picked a spot and split up walkie talkie's in hand. Immediately as I started down the first ridge I saw some does. As the minutes passed I saw more and more does everywhere. As I hit the middle of the ridge I noticed a herd of deer on the other side of the bowl probably 1000+ yards away. It was difficult to see them so I studied them for a few minutes. I finally noticed two bucks in the herd of about 20 deer. I knew they were bucks because they started sparring. So I decided instead of going back up to the truck which would take a long time I would hike down to them. It took me about a half hour. I snuck up to them through the trees but caught a glimpse of them already on the move downwind from me about 300 yards. I missed my first chance. I thought about taking the shot for the heck of it but decided instead to follow them to see if I got lucky. After about an hour of following them around I was in thick trees and unable to catch glimpse of the two bucks so I started to head back to the truck. An hour later I arrived back at the truck. I was tired.

At this point we were a little under three hours into the hunt. We decided to drive around the huge bowl to the side where the deer herd went into the trees. We then planned a push where Devin would go upwind of the deer and push the hillside and hopefully scare the deer right into my sights. We split up heading to our designated starting points. Thirty seconds later I rounded the rocky hilltop and suddenly saw two deer bouncing away from me at only about 40 yards! I made out that they were two bucks! Immediately I dropped to one knee, pulled back the hammer, breathed out slowly to steady my aim, put the open sight dots right above the shoulder, and gently squeezed the trigger. Immediately the deer dropped. The other buck dashed away about 8 feet when it turned around again to see what had happened. He stared at me a full minute before prancing off. It was then that I realized the size of the antlers on the buck still alive were larger than the antlers of the buck that had dropped. Oh well, I was just happy to have bagged my first deer.

As soon as the shot went off devin called to me from the walkie talkie saying, "was that you??!!" I said, "Come see for yourself!" Devin replied, "Did you get one?" I ended the conversation with "Get over here and see for yourself!" After much unbelief he came over to see the little buck down and we began our celebration. What an exciting hunt! And we had only been hunting for about 3 hours! We were grateful to be done so early because of the school demands that met us when we arrived at home.

Enjoy the pictures!