Every few hours for the first several days the same buck came to the bait. It was a young, wide 10-point that would score well into the 140s. But it was early in the hunt and I knew if I shot it my chances for one of the legendary monsters of Saskatchewan would diminish to zero. As the days rolled by I found I wasn’t even picking up my binocular when the buck showed up, which is a bad sign and an indication that it was time to move.
This morning, the last of my hunt, I entered a new blind with a renewed sense of purpose.But by mid-afternoon I find myself lagging. My sandwiches were gone by 9 a.m., and I spent the rest of the morning sipping the excellent soup the cook packed in my lunch each day. I had eaten all my dried fruit, clipped my fingernails twice and counted every branch on the tree in front of me 10 times. I had twiddled my thumbs until they were raw and bleeding and explored all my mind had to offer.
My butt is numb and my knees insulted. My brain is wounded and bleeding, my mind has shut down and the little kid inside my body, exhausted from the effort, has decided to nap. I am sitting in the “zone” between consciousness and sleep that any experienced stand hunter learns to develop. My mind is turned off, but my eyes are watching. Which is a good thing, because it happens fast.
A buck suddenly appears to my right. It stops 50 yards from the bait, looks at the doe feeding there for about a second and then decides this is a very bad idea. It turns and starts out of there with that fast walk of an embarrassed buck trying to look cool after a major screw-up. I grab my rifle and get it out the window, just as I have visualized 1.7 million times in the past five days. (Counting passes the time.) The buck goes through a gap between the trees about 100 yards in front of me, which opens a small window of time to shoot. As soon as his shoulder is in the crosshairs the gun fires. I know it is a little bit high, but I don’t have time to correct. I spot the buck even farther to the right, running through another small, snow-filled opening.
I reload my rifle, slip out of the blind and quietly walk to where I last saw the buck. I find tracks in the snow, but no blood. I follow as far as I can, but the snow is patchy and I soon lose the trail. So I start making circles and what I find is amazing. Back just out of sight from the blind and downwind of the bait is one of the most amazing collections of big whitetail buck sign I have ever seen. Clearly the big fellas that have left it are smart enough to avoid the bait in daylight.
I go back to the blind and reorient myself with where the buck was when I shot. I walk directly to that spot and am greeted with a blood trail heading off in a much different direction, and I realize that the buck I saw run off was another deer. This one was on an esker ridge when I shot. He changed directions and dove down the sloping side out of my sight before I could recover from the recoil.
To say it is a blood trail is like Crocodile Dundee describing a knife. There are blood trails and then there is this blood trail. I follow on a trot, knowing the buck did not go far, and he hasn’t. Just over the crest of the next little ridge it is lying, facing back at me. So often I find these big bucks turned 180 degrees from their direction of travel and facing their back trails. Perhaps it’s their warrior’s code to die facing their enemy, perhaps something else. But it always leaves me with lingering feelings of respect and regret.
There is no way to know for sure, but I think this buck’s antlers are a bit smaller than those of the one I passed up so many times early in the hunt. His body is so massive that they look small on him.
It doesn’t matter anyway. I never have been about the inches. My trophy is the experience. I would rather have a modest buck well earned than a record-book rack handed to me like charity. I believe that any trophy animal worth taking should extract a price from the hunter. The price in Saskatchewan is the wait. I might complain and I have certainly joked here about it, but I have risen to the challenge. I am proud of this hunt and I have enjoyed every single—long—minute of it.
