Bill's Nevada Hunt: The Real Story
Page 5
First posted November 22, 2010 Last edited November 24, 2010
The Story Part 7.0:
Friday, November 5 Last Day of Deer Season
Alarm (second use all season) at 4:20. I turned on the lantern for some heat (and light), and -oops- didn't get up until 4:40.
Replenished my lunch baggie, and augmented it with an apple and some string cheese thingies because today was to be an all-dayer.
One mouse, both other traps baitless- they're learning!
Warmed coffee on stove in vestibule. Filled an additional bottle for the day.
A comfortable, and unusual, 40 degrees outside when I left at 5:15 (15 minutes late).
Made record time to my look-out, partly out of, by now, familiarity, and partly because of the brisk temperature with less fear about sweating. I'd paced myself before, so that I wouldn't be damp when the sun fell and reality set in. Anyhoo, even though I'd started 15 minutes late I arrived with 10 minutes to spare before legal shooting light.
Everything I'd seen on the hill to date had been on the upper, farther, part (darn!), so during the morning I bounced back and forth between my main look-out and my newly discovered spots farther up the ridge where I could see the rest of the mountain. All I saw were two does in the 'cove' above where the gully originates. But that's OK- I had buck bait. So finished the morning hunt.
There was a thin streaking of cloud most of the day, so temps were pretty comfortable. For awhile I had to seek some total shade but it soon proved too much of a good thing and I switched to a spot with mottled shade. Like Goldilocks would have said, "This shade is just right!"
I spent the middle of the day lounging around: munching, reading a pocketbook, and taking artsy photos on my ridge spine:
I'll make you guess
what this is:
(Hint: you'll be wrong!)
Look at all the cones under this guy, old and new:
The last half of the last day of the 16-day deer season.
A Steller's jay kept me company for a short time, as I whiled away the day reading a pocketbook, taking pics, exploring my spine (no comment), and keeping an eye on the hillsides.
Over the course of midday, I ate two of my 'birthday cake' Swedish rye loaves (sized to fit into a sandwich baggie), three pieces of jerky, four string cheeses, four little Milky Way bars, and an apple.
After finishing the apple at two o'clock I picked up my binocs for a scan, and saw an elk on the upper edge of 'the pocket'. A bull. The same bull as two days before. Once is a happenstance, twice is a pattern! And elk season begins tomorrow!
He'd appeared to the left and below of where he'd been grazing on the skyline the other day; I figured that he was bedding in the denser forest of the southern side of the ridge and feeding on this open side.
Feeding elk in The Pocket
Here he is, a bit closer up. Got you excited?
Bill says the white stuff under the elk is snow.
He was farther down the hill than before, so closer, and I went up higher on my ridge, so closer. With this better view I downgraded my estimate of his antlers; but he was still a shooter to me. I guessed him as a 7x7, with a crown on one side and some bumps; royals 15 and 18". I had to inspect his thirds for a long time, thinking they might be broken off, but decided that they were simply short.
He grazed down that grassy triangle to the left of the pocket, through the horizontal line of trees, and I left him at dark in those trees on the right. A good bull elk. Muzzleloader elk season had ended only two days earlier, deer season was still on. And a bull elk spends an entire afternoon, from 2 o'clock onward, nosing around on an open hillside. Yougoddabekiddinme! Talk about itchy trigger finger! Who'd know? Here I had a beautiful bull elk in my sights only 13 hours before legal shootin'. But I thought myself out of thinking those kinds of thoughts.
He spent a full 20 minutes with his head up in a strange-looking pine tree, one kinda like this, as far as I could tell at that distance:
His head wasn't angled down, as if grazing; it was straight out into or behind the tree. I saw nothing moving, not antlers as if he were rubbing, and no branches. 20 minutes straight, no change of position worth noting. Here's a blow-up of it:
I think he lapped up some snow, at one point; you can see in the pic that he's on a patch of it. Otherwise, he spent the whole afternoon in a 150-yd area. And he was as alert as a lump of Play-Doh. The time he spent heads-up searching for possible danger was no longer than I spent bringing up my binocs when I first spotted him. There was more bugling down in the valley, and my bull paid not the slightest attention to it.
But this was deer season, not elk season (yet).
In my explorations I learned that from some spots higher up my ridge I could bring down the distance to the lower part of the pocket to about 350 yards. Still far, but there's a lot of barrel to a mature muley or elk.
Sometime after 4:00 a doe and fawn walked into the pocket from the right. Oh, goodie!- more buck bait! The bull was about where you see him in the first picture, and at times they were no more than 25 yards apart. With little care. They fed around for some time, the fawn lying down under a tree for spell, and then wandered up to the ridgeline.
And here I was in a pretty quandary: I've got a resident bull fat and sassy in a spot I know, with the season opener just hours away - if a muley buck walks out, do I take the shot and rip up my Free Elk coupon? I tussled with myself (and broke a fingernail doing it!) and decided that I wanted to fill my deer tag. I had two weeks of elk season coming; the future could look out for itself. And I hoped as hard as hope can hope that 'my' buck would walk out at the bottom of the ridge, as far away from the bull as possible! And that the stupid, sunbathing elk would go back over the ridge into cover until dark, like any other self-respecting bull would do!
I spent the evening bouncing between my look-out and spots higher on my ridge, checking out as much hill as I could. The bull and the two deer watched with me as the twilight faded the deer season away. That's it. No buck. Tag soup.
I was in a [light] state of shock that no buck came out. Good hill and lots of it, I'd seen three bucks on it already, there was a pair of does as inducement, with the rut coming up, and, of course, my hole card - the famous Bill Nelson Hunting Luck. It was hard to fathom that a 16-day season had passed unfulfilled. I'd been so confident that this final day would produce something, even if just a little forky. Shaking my head.
Still confused finding the Bronco, though this was the best yet; without the GPS I would have wandered for days.
Gas gauge beginning to worry me. The lower it gets, the faster it falls; the indicator on 1/4 does not mean I have left one-fourth of a tank. I had a 2.5 gal. can in the car (although I could smell it every time I drove a bumpy road, so I didn't know how much I might have lost), enough to take me 32 miles or so, but the nearest gas was 45 miles away.
Got to camp, found two mice in the traps. Corpse pile still undisturbed.
Built the fire, warmed and perked coffee, ate a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli and four small Hershey bars.
I was near the end of my book, stayed until I finished it. And it gets colder later at night! Bed at 1:30. Then had to crawl out when I remembered that I'd forgotten to take my dinner meds.
No NV bruiser buck...
Giant Pinyon Pine (I think - David)
Next: Elk Season Opens: Will the Bull Still Be There (Or: Is Bill All Bull?)