So that's what four-wheelers are for

I’m a slow learner.
Maybe that’s why it took me so long to appreciate the value of 4-wheelers during hunting season.
After all, it remains illegal to drive them off-road on nearly all public land in Montana, and they’re about as welcome as brucellosis-infected buffalo on private land.
But open just about any hunting magazine on the rack and there’s a picture of a camo-clad hunter riding one. Turn on the Outdoor Channel and it’s apparent 4-wheelers have even become a necessity for duck hunters.
So what was I missing?
For years now -- decades actually -- I’ve been hunting without one and enjoyed a relatively high rate of success. At the least I’ve enjoyed the quiet.
Then it dawned on me that I rarely see one on the ground. ATVs are almost always perched in the bed of a pickup truck.
Last weekend it finally became clear, 4-wheelers are simply ballast, sandbags for the 21st century.
I was hunting breaks country an hour from my home where the common, albeit illegal, method of hunting is to drive the flats above the broken country and glass for game.
My son-in-law and I had just picked up his muley buck from a two-track where he had dragged it when we saw a truck speeding along a high ridge above us. At a distance it appeared there were hunters riding in the back, but a look through the binoculars showed a 4-wheeler, not hunters, in the bed of the truck.
Two muley does and a small buck ran across the bench a half mile in front of us and we stopped to watch the action. The pickup, bearing Montana plates and four orange-clad yahoos, went racing after the deer.
And then it all became clear.
The truck, high-tailing it off-road after the deer, wasn’t bouncing at all, despite the rough terrain. The ATV in the back was apparently providing enough weight to keep the truck on the ground at 50 mph across the short-grass prairie.
We watched as the pickup skidded to a halt and a hunter jumped out, resting his rifle on the hood. But the deer kept going and the hunter leapt back into the truck and off it roared.
Although we never did hear a shot, it was a pleasure to watch such a quality hunt unfold, especially now that I understood the meaning of it all.
One question, however, remains.
Aren’t sandbags a lot cheaper?
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

Curtain drops on another antelope season

The curtain has closed on this year’s antelope season.
The Rodney Dangerfield of Montana big game animals, pronghorn just can’t get any respect.
Most hunters pursue them as an afterthought, or, at best as something to hunt until the general big game season opens.
Chased by hunters in pickups and four-wheelers, shot en masse when they pile up at fence corners, and derogatorily referred to as “speed goats,” antelope deserve better.
Creatures of open country with eyesight far better than ours, they’re tough to stalk within range.
As dramatically marked as any big game animal in North America and related to no other critter on the continent, antelope also offer a unique hunting opportunity. Work hard, stay low, take your time. You’ll get a shot.
Miss and they’ll give you another chance because antelope don’t hide. They may run a mile or two, but won’t disappear like deer and elk. They’ll gather in the distance and watch for your approach.
Impatience does in the majority of antelope hunters. Too many hunters shoot before closing the distance. After all, through that nine-power scope they look sooo close and you just crawled through a prickly pear patch. Squeeze off a shot at 300 yards, forgetting your intended target is not much bigger than a German shepherd, and watch them all run away.
Antelope like to run.
But they’re also curious.
Walk toward them in plain sight and they’ll sometimes let you get within range. Drop into the sagebrush and they’ll sometimes come closer to see where you went.
Sometimes.
Most of the time, they’ll run.
Get one down though, and you’ll find they are far easier to pack out than deer or elk, and despite the rumors, make excellent table fare.
Someone’s always asking “How can you eat those stinky old things?”
Grilled with garlic and butter works for me.
While antelope have a unique odor, it’s in the hair and disappears once you jerk off the hide. The meat has a dense texture and mild flavor. There’s just not enough of it.
Better than whitetail or muley, antelope eats as well as the best elk.
But it doesn’t make any difference.
The bull elk that rises out of its bed in the timber and stands broadside to the hunter who kills it at 50 feet is a far more revered big game trophy.
And the loins of a swollen-necked whitetail buck draw considerably more praise around the dinner table.
Pronghorn antelope. They just can’t get any respect.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

The big buck dream always ends the same

The dream always ends the same.
Someone else shoots the buck.
He wasn’t one of those deer I had to think twice about. With tall heavy antlers spreading wider than his ears, the muley was bigger than any I’d seen in years. Maybe as big as I’d ever seen and I’ve looked at a lot of deer.
But he was out of range when I spotted him and he’d already seen me so I just sat down and watched him through the binoculars.
Although it was early in the season, he appeared to be rutting. There were half a dozen does with him and he acted more interested in them than in me. Eventually the deer moved to the top of an open ridge and one by one disappeared over the other side, the big buck at the end of the line, silhouetted for a few seconds against a pewter sky.
Instead of heading directly after them, I hiked farther up the drainage before crossing the ridge and dropped into a deep coulee on the other side to stay out of sight.
I hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps when four sharptail grouse flushed noisily and rode the current of a rising wind, cackling as they flew.
For three hours I followed the deer, or at least tried to. There were a lot of muleys feeding and moving through the snow-covered breaks that day and every time I spotted movement I stopped and glassed, but didn’t see the big buck again until I crossed two more ridges.
Below me, at the bottom of a steep slope, were a couple of bedded does. I raised the rifle and looked at them through the scope. Then I saw the antlers.
A few yards beyond the does, the big buck was bedded, only his massive rack and the top of his head visible. But he was looking directly at me and before I could punch the safety, he got to his feet and trotted off.
I slipped back over the ridge and ran parallel to the direction I guessed the deer were headed. When the ridge between us broke off at a sandstone cliff, I saw the deer moving casually down the drainage on the other side and I sat in the snow until they were out of sight.
After working around the cliff to the bottom of the drainage, I belly-crawled to the top of a low rise and saw the big buck standing like a sentinel on a bare knob, 250 yards away.
Cold, wet and uncomfortable, I leveled the rifle, found the muley in the crosshairs and squeezed off a shot. The deer took a step and I fired again, this time hearing the impact of the bullet.
By the time I got to my feet the deer had vanished and upon reaching where the buck had been standing I found only the faintest sign of blood.
But it was blood nonetheless and I started following the tracks.
Two hours later, head down, trying to find the trail on a bare, south-facing slope, I heard a snort and looked up to see the big buck racing through a cut in a steep ridge.
From behind, antlered game animals always appear bigger than they actually are and this deer looked enormous.
It was also the last look I had at him. I got to the cut as quickly as I could, but it was too late. He was nowhere in sight. Light was fading and I was miles from the truck. It was time to give up the chase.
I haven’t been back. The weather warmed the next day and melting snow made the country inaccessible.
It was only the third time in nearly 40 years of big game hunting I can remember losing a wounded animal and it haunts me, especially in my dreams.
That’s where I keep seeing the big buck.
The one I didn’t get.
The one someone else shoots.
Every time I close my eyes.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net

Hunting in 21st century takes 4-wheels

What was I thinking?
For some archaic reason I’ve been under the impression that hunting is supposed to be done on foot.
Like this is still the 20th century.
Then I saw the light. Or maybe it was the sun reflecting off the 4-wheeler that caught my eye.
But there it was, deep in the Breaks, a mile from the nearest road – an ATV traversing the same country through which I was walking.
Sure, the rider was there illegally. Off-road motorized travel is outlawed on lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management. But with 8.3 million acres of BLM land in Montana and just 10 enforcement officers to track down violators, who’s to know?
“It’s really hard to catch people,” says Mary Apple, a BLM spokeswoman in Billings.
Besides, what good is a 4-wheeler if you can’t take it places your 4-wheel drive pickup can’t already go? Isn’t that the point?
And since they don’t require a road, ATVs have redefined road-hunting.
This is, after all, the 21st century, an age in which hunters no longer have to worry about getting lost, thanks to GPS, losing touch, thanks to cell phones, or breaking a sweat, thanks to the 4-wheeler.
You can hardly pick up an outdoor magazine that isn’t filled with full-page ads for ATVs, showing them splashing through clear mountain streams or climbing rocky trails above timberline. And what cable television hunting show doesn’t feature 4-wheelers, if only to show them parked in the background?
“We’d like to thank our fine sponsors,” drawl every camo-clad host on the tube, who wouldn’t have a show were it not for Polaris, Yamaha or Honda.
Even duck hunters, it appears, need 4-wheelers to pursue their sport.
So what was I thinking, trudging up and down hill and dale on foot when I could have been seated in relative comfort, fingers warm and toasty wrapped around heated hand grips, rifle held securely in a scabbard, onboard GPS keeping track of where I’d been so I didn’t have to?
Maybe it’s time to embrace this new technology. With the money I could save on aspirin for my aching knees, an ATV might just be within my budget.
Whether it’s stubbornness of simply a case of bad vision, I seem to take longer than most to see the light. It was years before I gave up wool for fleece, I remain a bit uncomfortable with email and still think blackberries are best cooked in a pie.
Here’s hoping the sun reflecting off that 4-wheeler in the Breaks opens my eyes to hunting in the 21st century.

I don't want to press my luck

It’s beginning to look like I got out just in time.
Before moving to Malta last year I did most of my hunting in Park County. Each fall since the late 1970s found me roaming the mountains around Yellowstone National Park in search of elk. It’s hardly unusual to see bears in that part of the world, but still, in all the years I hunted there, I only saw two grizzlies.
Apparently things changed this fall. Five hunters have been mauled by bears in places I used to hunt.
Two bowhunters were attacked by grizzlies in Beattie Gulch, another hunter was attacked by a grizzly while black bear hunting in the Little Trail Creek area north of Gardiner in September and a bowhunter was attacked in Tom Miner Basin early last month.
Then a California man was badly mauled Tuesday in the same general area by a bear that took a swipe at him, knocking his eyeball from its socket and severely damaging his face.
Suddenly I don’t miss Park County elk hunting so much.
The last bull I shot was up Beattie Gulch, a drainage bordering the park in sight of Gardiner, not the kind of place you’d expect to be attacked by a grizzly. It’s surrounded by national park and private land and can be hunted in a couple of hours.
Most hunters head up the open hillside before first light and then check the timber halfway up the slope for tracks of any elk that may have wandered out of the park during the night.
Traffic on U.S. 89 can be seen and heard from most anywhere up Beattie Gulch. But Beattie, like Little Trail Creek and Tom Miner Basin, while easily accessible, borders huge tracts of wild land that harbor grizzly bears.
For that reason I may have been a better hunter down there. Knowing it was bear country kept me on my toes and made me pay attention.
Antelope hunting last week on the prairie south of town, I stepped into a covey of sage grouse that exploded around me as they rose. Had I not been daydreaming as I picked my way through the sagebrush I would have seen them.
But while close-flushing birds may scare the pants off me, they won’t maul me or eat me. And now that it’s started to cool off, there aren’t any rattlesnakes to worry about.
A friend from Gardiner who had come up to visit last week asked if I was going to make it down for an elk hunt before the season ends.
“I’d like to,” I told him. “But I think I’ll wait until the bears hibernate.”
I don’t want to press my luck.
Parker Heinlein is at pman@mtintouch.net