The alarm went off early this morning, following a restless nights sleep. I’ve had some kind of nasty cold that’s been hanging on for a few days now that kept messing up my sleeping. Oh well, as if I would let a little thing like that stop me from hunting mule deer! The longer I hunt, the more mulies are my favourite thing to hunt, bar none. It gets me plenty of exercise, I see tons of deer, and I am usually very successful at it (success being measured as steaks in the freezer, for me).
Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, alarm going off, me dragging my sorry butt out of bead, nagging the wife to get her gear and come on, etc. Load up, and up into the mountains long before daylight, and more importantly, long before the next hunter shows up. This has usually been the trick that keeps me in mulies when other guys are hunting the same mountain and getting none. Trick didn’t work this morning, we glassed and glassed till full on daylight, and only saw one little group of does about a kilometer away.
I have to be at work by 10:00 (unless I get something), so we hoof it back to the truck. We’ve got about half an hour to kill, so we take a little short drive around to a few different spots where we can sit and glass some wide open terrain. No deer. Bummer.
Just as I am turning the truck around to head out, The Wife(tm) squeaks at me “hey, there’s a bear!”. I kill the truck and we hop out and have a look-see at yee olde bear. You know on the hunting videos when they finally find The Big One(tm)? Well, this bear looked just like that – black as the ace of spades, head like a pumpkin, and so much fat on him that he jiggles when he walks – a hog of a bear if there ever was one. I don’t pack a bear tag anymore (long story), but The Wife(tm) still does, and she’s already setting up the shooting sticks. We sit there and watch it through bino’s for a couple of minutes. 99.9999% sure this is NOT some little sow with cubs, but it won’t hurt to be sure. Nope, nothing else in that bush moving. Nope, he ain’t getting any smaller or even remotely sow-looking. Just keeps looking bigger, actually.
“Can I shoot that far?” she asks. In wide open country like this, it’s a legitimate question. It’s easy to miss the yardage guess out here – both too long and too short.
I put the bino’s down. The bear looks big as life to the naked eye, so can’t be all that far, I reckon – maybe 200 yards tops – “give’er” says I to The Wife(tm). I watch the bear intently through the binos as she sets up for the shot. 10 or 20 seconds later, the rifle barks and the bear takes off like the devil was after him. Hrummm…. not really the reaction we were hoping for, but possibly still a good sign.
I catch just a glimpse of him a time or two in between the trees as he runs the timbered ridge below us. Just about the time we loose sight of him for good, we hear “crash, crash, crash” from the other side of the ridge from about where we expect the bear was heading. “Well, that’s a little more like it”, I think to myself.
The Wife(tm) heads down-mountain on foot so she can keep her eyes glued on the point of impact, and I drive the truck around. As I’m driving around, another hunter comes driving up from the low road. He stops, and asks if we hit him. I say I think we did, and he says good luck. If I had to judge by his demeanor, I’d say he was a bit annoyed with us (and I couldn’t entirely blame him), but we had no idea he was there, so I’m not going to loose any sleep over it. I would certainly have let him have it if I’d known he was down there chasing that bear (though, in hindsight, I am only assuming that he was chasing that bear).
Anyway, flash-forward a few minutes, and we’re following where we think the bear went, creeping along as quietly as we can. The Wife(tm) is walking the ridge along the drop-off, and I’m following along about 30 yards farther in from the drop off. About 2 minutes into this exercise, The Wife(tm) hisses at me to “come here.” She’s over by where all the crashing came from, so I’m thinking maybe she’s seen the bear, I make tracks over to her. She hisses at me “Mulies, right down there, and I think one of em is a 4 point. It’s your turn!”.
Lo and behond, she ain’t kiddin! There be mulies down there about 80 yards out. Bino’s up. There’s a buck. 1 2 3 4. 1 2 3 4. Bino’s down. Oh look, a great big rock right here I can use for a rest without even having to crouch down. God is good.
Gun up.
Rest on rock.
Crosshairs on buck.
Bang!
Flop!
Whoohooo!!!!!
At that point, I sent The Wife(tm) home for the pickup truck – a bear AND a mulie in a Chevy Tracker would be a bit much. I drag the mulie down to the nearest downhill road (about 400 yards) and gut him while she makes the trip.
She gets back about an hour later with our buddy Mike for extra help, and we load up the buck and head out looking for the bear again. An hour’s searching over where we are just certain the bear had ran (and because of the terrain, we are very certain – he didn’t have a lot of options), and not a drop of blood, not a speck of hair, not nothing. About this time, I start looking back up at where the shot had come from. Man, why does that look so much farther than it did when we were looking at that bear?
I sent Mike and The Wife(tm) back up the road to where the shot was taken from. Oh. My. That must have been a BIG FAT HOG of a BEAR. The Wife(tm) looks very very tiny at that distance. The Bear did not!! Mike paced it off. Easy 400 yards, probably 450 (or maybe more like 400 if you deduct a bit for the downhill angle). Either way, a 308 Winchester sighted in for a 200 yard zero was about 2 feet low when it got to the bear. It would certainly explain why he ran off like he wasn’t hurt and why we can’t find any blood or any bear….. sigh…. oh well, I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with nasty old bear meat anyway. So, it’s all good!
I think I can now give a definitive two thumbs up to 150 grain Nosler AccuBond’s. It hit that deer like a truck, and he went down in a heap where he stood. On the post mortem, the lungs were jello, and the entrance and exit holes in the ribcage were both about twice to three times the size of a toonie. Right on!
Side question: anyone know if a bear that got the daylights scared out of him by rocks exploding at his feet is likely to show back up at the same spot tomorrow? The Wife(tm) really would like to tag that thing!
OK, OK, I’ve teased you long enough – here be some pics. He is in no way a monster mulie, but anything legal is big enough for me. And I can’t help but think – mulies are just so very much easier to locate and put lead in than elk are. That’s probably why I like hunting them so much.
