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The Circle Buck
An excerpt from "Timber N' Tailwaters" by Allen Russell
I arrived at the ranch near
The weather was unusually cold for October. The temperature was in the low teens during the day and flirting with zero at night. We woke up the first morning to snow and howling winds. Normally, antelope hunting is a pleasant fall undertaking, it’s one of my favorite big game pastimes.
This hunt however, would be far from pleasant. As the week went on, most of the hunters in camp were happy to just take the first buck they got a chance at and get back to camp. By the third day, everybody was tagged out and content to just hang around camp, drink coffee and enjoy not being out in the ever-blowing wind and snow flurries.
I have a bad habit of waiting until the last minute to fill my tag as I’ve never been very good at sitting in camp when there’s hunting to be done, and I enjoy watching my companions take their animals. At times, waiting has earned me a good animal, other times I have settled for something less than I could have killed early in the hunt.
Mule Deer will seek shelter in the coulees and canyons to get out of the wind and snow when winter really gets a grip on the plains. Antelope, on the other hand, will stand right out in the bitter cold weather, no matter how bad it gets. They will stand out in it until they freeze and fall over.
We can lose a lot of antelope in a bad winter, and the trophy bucks are the first to go. They use up a tremendous amount of energy during the breeding season and they don’t have time to gain back the weight if there’s an early or severe winter.
Antelope tend to bunch up in large herds when the weather gets really bad. Herds of two hundred head or more are not uncommon. It becomes nearly impossible to approach a herd that size with so many eyes on the lookout for danger.
During the early part of the season, Eb and some of his hunters had been seeing a good antelope buck with a unique set of horns. Instead of curling to the rear, over his back, his horns grew across the top of his head with his hooks touching at the top. When glassing him from the front, he appeared to have a solid circle of horn over his head.
They had named him, The Circle Buck. This buck was extremely wary and more than a little bit lucky. He had been hunted hard and even shot at, by several hunters who really wanted those horns, but as far as Eb knew, he was still out there somewhere, running through the sagebrush.
It was after noon on the third day of my hunt when Eb and I were in camp, eating a bowl of hot soup and trying to thaw out from a morning of deer hunting. I was the only hunter left in camp with a tag, so Eb was free to dedicate his full time and attention to me.
Now, Eb and I have hunted together for years, and we’ve never been accused of being the brightest bulbs in the box. We somehow decided that it’s better to be cold, wet, and excited, than warm, dry, and bored. It was around ten degrees outside, and dark was only a few hours away. The smart thing would be to just take a nap or watch a movie and wait for supper.
Like I said, we aren’t known for being too bright. “Let’s go get The Circle Buck,” Eb said out of the blue.
“The what?” I replied. My partner explained about the trophy antelope buck that he had been watching all season. This buck was sixteen inches or a little better, Eb estimated. That was all I needed to hear, I was ready to go after him.
The ranch we were hunting was nearly seventy thousand acres in size, and of course the Circle Buck could wander wherever he pleased. The chances of finding him in a few hours were remote at best. Now my partner and I may not be smart, but we are lucky. Eb say’s it has nothing to do with luck.
After about an hour of driving through snow drifts and slick back-country trails, we were sitting on a little hill glassing a herd of antelope. They were over a mile and a half distant and the snow made it difficult to tell much about them. “There he is,” Eb exclaimed.
“Are you sure,” I asked. “They’re a long way off.”
“It’s him, let’s go.” We abandoned the warmth and comfort of the truck and headed out into the teeth of the storm, toward the distant herd of antelope. After several hundred yards of creeping along hunched over, we found a shallow coulee running in the general direction of the antelope. We began crawling on our hands and knees through about eight inches of snow.
Patches of prickly pear cactus are fairly abundant on the plains, but you can’t see it under the snow. I was crawling along in the magnificent silence and solitude that only heavy snow can bring when I heard a string of expletives coming from my partner, somewhere behind me.
I rolled over on my side and tried not to laugh out loud at what I saw. You just have to imagine the sight of an old cowboy with his jeans down around his ankles, in his red long-johns, pulling cactus spines out of his knees, and trying to do it quietly. Actually, he wasn’t being that quiet, and it’s a good thing we didn’t have any ladies or sensitive gentlemen with us.
With tears in my eyes, I decided right then and there, that maybe everyone had been right about us after all, but it was too late to turn back now. For some unknown reason, our luck was holding and the antelope hadn’t seen or heard us, as of yet. I suppose they figured no one in their right mind would be out on a day like that. Most reasonable people would probably have agreed with them.
After Eb got his pants back up, we finally managed to crawl to a barbed-wire fence on the edge of the coulee, still more than two hundred yards from the distant antelope herd.
A couple of the older does began to stare in our direction. They had seen the lumps moving under the fence. They were still unsure what we were, but they were getting nervous. We could get no closer without spooking the whole bunch.
It was a minor miracle that we had made it this far before we were detected. It was time to shoot or forget it. I was shooting a .280 Remington Mountain Rifle with 140 grain, Winchester Supreme, Fail Safe Ammunition.
The Circle Buck was with a group of fifty or more animals. There were several lesser bucks and the rest were does and fawns. He was right in the middle of the nervous, milling animals, as if, instinctively trying to stay shielded. I hesitated to shoot, fearing a pass-through might kill another animal. “I’ve got a doe tag,” Eb whispered. “Just shoot the @#$%##!”
When I turned the bullet loose, antelope exploded into a cauldron of flying snow, flailing hooves, and fleeing animals. I had lost the sight picture with the recoil, and I didn’t see where my bullet had hit in the swirling snow. I wasn’t even sure that I had hit him.
I was looking hard at the rapidly disappearing herd, but he didn’t seem to be among them. After the antelope were gone, we got to our feet and left the coulee. When we got to the place where the herd had been, there was no sign of the buck or even any blood among the many tracks.
My heart sank, I’ve missed before, but I’d felt confident in the shot when I took up the last ounce of trigger pull. After several minutes of searching, I noticed a brown hump in the snow about forty yards from our position.
We had wandered off course when we crossed the deep gulley that had been between us and the antelope. I found the Circle Buck right where he had been standing when I shot. He’d literally dropped in his tracks.
His mounted head will always be a reminder of a great hunt with my good friend and partner, on a cold snowy day in