By John L. Moore
I should never have seen the buck, and I'm sure he thought he'd escaped notice. It was a beautiful late-October afternoon, a low sun casting dark shadows across blue-gray badlands buttes, as my son, Jess, and I trailed cattle up Crooked Creek.
I detected the buck out of the corner of my eye. A fleeting form following a twisting gully as fluidly as poured oil. A large mule deer hugging the banks of the coulee, its head tipped back as if consciously obscuring the antlers in shadow. Present for a second, maybe two, then gone.
The brief sighting validated two thoughts I've long held about badlands mule deer: First, they are far smarter than people give them credit for, and secondly, they are cognizant of their headgear and strive to keep their hayracks from being noticed.
I grew up on a family ranch and have lived here most of my 49 years. When I was small, I had an older sister who hunted seriously. Once married, her husband introduced her to hunting whitetails, and suddenly mule deer hunting was slumming. "White-tailed deer are really smart," she declared. "They're not like those stupid mule deer that always stop and look back as if begging to be shot."
The elders amongst these "stupid" mule deer brethren have eluded me for decades. Yes, I have taken some very good bucks, but the really monster deer know how to stay alive. Masters of anonymity, they seem to shed invisible antlers, and even in death, their carcasses are seldom found. They are wisps of the imagination, fleeing silhouettes on distant hilltops that magnify as subjects of rumor and legend, but are seldom canonized by hanging glass-eyed on living room walls.
They are shadow deer.
My first memory of such a monster takes me back to age 10, my father and I hunting horseback. Dad dismounted to open a wire gate in a shallow coulee forested with tall sagebrush. As he threw his shoulder into post and wire, a gigantic buck burst from the brush scant yards from us and bounded away.
My father could only smile. There was nothing he could really say or do.
The next one was a "crawler." I was 16 and stalking the badlands on foot when I sensed eyes on my back. I turned to see a buck crawling through the sagebrush, its head tipped back so the antlers were hidden. Feeling my stare, it leapt to its feet and bounded away. I sprinted to the top of a high butte and watched as it ran straight away for a mile before beginning a large semicircle that took it into roughs nearly behind me. I hadn't the time, light or inspiration to try to follow him.
My father-in-law, Frank, saw a big crawler. We'd split up to try to catch deer coming into a neighbor's wheat field at dusk. When we met later, he asked, "Did you see that big deer?"
I thought he meant a good 5x5 I saw in the field.
"No," he said, almost disdainfully. "Not that one. The BIG one. I watched him through binoculars from 800 yards. He crawled a quarter-mile to get to the edge of the field, then he just lay there in the shadows waiting for it to get completely dark. Somehow he scented or sensed me, and he took off and never looked back."
The buck, I learned later, was well known to several of our neighbors. One had glimpsed it as he trailed cattle and counted seven points on one antler that protruded from a dense thicket. To my knowledge the buck was never taken, nor was a carcass ever found.
My dad hunted a buck like that for years, and its antlers now adorn our bunkhouse porch. Dad was an incredible shot with his old .30-30 and had spent much of his youth chasing wild horses through most of eastern Montana. He knew the hills, and he knew deer. But that deer never fell at his hands. After a rough winter, he found the carcass tucked into a cove of thorny rosebushes, a sepulcher that would have escaped the notice of most men.
Besides crawlers, there are "peekers."
While calling coyotes recently during deer season, I heard the distinct sound of hooves on hardpan gumbo. Running to the top of a hill, I saw an aged buck disappear over the next ridge. Seconds later, antlers and ears reappeared, then the whole head as the buck looked back to see where I was. Then it was gone over the next ridge, and moments later, again, antlers and ears. It did this a third time as it played a serious game of "peek-a-boo," giving me only distant head shots that lasted as long as a cursor flash.
Last season, I came close to a shadow deer. I'd walked deep into a labyrinthine amphitheater of gumbo washes when a fair-sized 5x5 skylined 600 yards away. I squatted, glassed the buck, lasered it with my range-finder, and marveled how it watched my every move.
Minutes later I arose, bored with the game, and moved on, binoculars and range-finder hanging awkwardly from my neck. After I'd taken but a few steps, a massive muley burst from the shadows only yards from me. I had only a second to raise my carbine, but it struck the hanging optics, and that was all the time the buck needed. I sprinted around a hill hoping to get a shot from 200, maybe 250 yards. But when I saw him, he was 450 yards away and still hauling the mail.
Observing the secretive nature of these mule deer has led me to some unscientific conclusions. First, these big boys are night breeders. You never find them herding a harem of does in daylight, even during the thermal days of rut. Next, they bed where the advantages are all theirs, like on high ridges with the wind at their back and 300 degrees of landscape in front of them. They are loners. If you see a big buck in a bachelor herd, it is not one of these aged masters. In their youth, they paused and looked back to determine the predator and plan their escape. In old age, they see you before you see them and have all of this information calculated. And finally, you seldom, if ever, find their sheds.
I am on horseback in the hills a lot. When not mounted, I am there on foot, fixing fences, spraying weeds, calling coyotes or simply scaling the big buttes for exercise. In the course of this, I find many shed antlers. But I never find the large ones.
Why?
I believe the big deer drop their sheds into deep washouts or thick brush. Somehow they have discerned it is their headgear that attracts the two-legged predators, and they carefully conceal the objects of our lust.
This fall, hunters saw big deer slipping slyly over dark ridges, their antlers briefly skylining like unlit Christmas trees. Some tried to coax information from me, suspicious I knew where these trophies lived when they were dumb and unaware.
They dwell in the shadows, I wanted to tell them. In the dark holes of the badlands, within the bowels of endless miles of clay and scoria. They come out only at night, then before the first rays of light, they return to the shadows and pull the entrances in after them.
They are sealed there in mystery in a land that gives up its secrets begrudgingly. If at all.
John L. Moore
GunHunter Magazine - July 2005
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