By Parker Heinlein
Outdoors columnist
As soon as the sun topped the breaks to the east I saw them – three mule deer bucks across the creek, their antlers flashing in the bright light.
I dropped to the frozen ground, set up my shooting sticks and rested the rifle on them. Through the crosshairs I watched the bucks go about their business, which on this late November morning was chasing does.
There must have been two dozen mulies scattered across a football field size of prairie real estate. Deer kept disappearing and reappearing as they dropped into the dry creek beds that cut through the sage.
The country looked flat and featureless until you got into it and discovered it was veined with cuts and draws and low ridges.
For a couple of years I had driven past it on my way to hunt other places, dismissing it as just another expanse of hardpan prairie lacking enough vegetation to hide a grouse let alone a buck deer. But one evening in October I climbed the breaks above the valley floor to glass for antelope and saw that the hardpan stopped at the creek bank 200 yards from where I had parked the truck on the two-track. The country beyond was broken and covered thickly with sage, and sat just enough lower than the surrounding landscape that it was hidden.
Back at the truck on flat ground the country lost its allure. Dry, spare and dotted with prickly pear, it held little appeal, but now I knew better. Like a plain girl who attracts no attention until she smiles, the forgotten piece of creekbottom had flashed a million-dollar grin at me in the fading light. I was hooked.
Two days later I was back with the dogs and found sharptails in the thicker cover on the creek bends.
But it was the deer that caught my attention. They were thick as flies, emerging out of nowhere and racing across the flats only to disappear in an instant into a hidden draw.
And now I was set up in the sage, watching antlers flash in the sun. I caught movement off to the side and saw a doe trotting my direction, a young buck, head down, following closely behind. She stopped 20 feet away and stared hard at me until the buck bumped her and she ran off.
The glinting antlers began moving and I watched through the scope as one, two, three bucks walked out of the sage and onto the flat. They were young and fat and not yet in their prime. One by one they dropped out of sight.
I stood, shouldered the rifle and turned toward the truck. It had been a good first date but I didn’t want to press my luck. I walked into the landscape and likewise disappeared.