dan pickar here with eastmans' bowhunting journal
today we're bow hunting big mule deer bucks in the desert of idaho
right here for eastman's hunting tv
well today's opening day of idaho archery it's uh august 15th
i've been cruising around the last couple days and you know seeing some
small bucks it's been spotty i mean we're
overlooking this whole basin i've seen one doe and a fawn that's it
saw some other hunters down below so we're checking out the back
side of this big mountain and we're gonna
just kind of check basins until we find something that we can hunt
so so far it's been pretty slim pickings but
uh we'll keep covering country and see what we can find we've got a
couple weeks to be out here and kill something so
we got time on our side at least we have that
oh yeah dude they're going that one's 30 inches easy
they're going right down that little draw
well we have four bucks spotted finally good gravy
way down here in the bottom they're coming up over the ridge one's easy 30
inches i'm gonna try and get the digiscope on them but
they are a long ways away doesn't even look like he's in velvet it
looks like it's there down low hunt him one of them
looks like he's freaking 30 incher it's a big deer okay right in that cut
right there way down there there they go they're
cutting across right across to that juniper looks like
there's four bucks they're kind of low so we're just going to watch them go to
bed and heck maybe we'll have a stock it depends if they go
too deep into that brush if they bet in a bad spot we can't really do anything
well we're just covering country and checking these
pockets of cyanothis on these kind of east and south faces north faces
the bugs that we spotted this morning they ended up on private so
we just left and we're off to find new books
it's all new country in here and we're just checking pockets
as the evening goes on and we'll see we can turn up
we find something good we'll hunt it tonight or in the morning
if not we move on and we go find a other country find other deer
oh glass down that way
well we're driving down this road and just checked up some of these shaded
cliff edges and sure enough there's a big buck laying up there
the first decent buck we've seen in five days of hunting
so obviously our approach is around behind him and above him but i don't
think there's any way to get him shot from above in his bed so we're
gonna either have to bump him out of there or wait for him to
feed out this evening so that's the good news we found
something now we just gotta kill him
there's a buck up there
we got a buck spotted up the base of a cliff here
i'm gonna get the spotter on him and digiscope and see what he is
he's in a pretty good spot
all right you can see him come around here i mean use your shadow tim
and block out there can you see that right under there see him right here
you can just barely see him in the shade i think if uh we get around the backside
we can come up around behind him and get above him
got a north wind today so we might be okay he's kind of on the back side of
that hill though so who knows what the wind's going to be like
but he's in as good a spot and maybe we can
get above them there and be quiet and either slip an arrow down there or maybe
throw a rock down there and get them to blow out or we'll see what happens
but finally got a big buck spotted let's go try and get him killed
it's right around the corner we have a north wind going this way so i think
we're good we're just gonna go up by the cliff and
drop in from above
so he's right here
man
yes can you believe that happened i can't believe we did it
i can't believe we did it
he's going down he's going down
oh he hit that tree timmy at the tree
him a little high
oh he blew out some does oh he's down under the tree tim
he's down under the mushroom tree he's he's laying down
you see him yeah he laid down under the mushroom tree
holy smokes i hit him high he's gonna go through the
fence see him yeah
oh he made it over the fence oh man
here's the lowdown i hit that buck just 27 yards i had my
sight set at 20. touched one off hit him high
entered high by the back strap exited down through the front shoulder on the
far side i think i got one lung he crashed into a tree down here on his
little run then he laid down by this other mushroom
tree we're calling it and then he walked into the creek bottom
down here he went about a mile we're gonna wait for the sun to get at
our back a little bit and kind of loop around
my gut says he's probably gonna die but i've seen shots like that
and you recover them and then i've seen shots that
they just keep going they quit bleeding and they're gone
the good news is it's all open country so we saw the whole thing we saw him run
all the way down there we don't have to go track him or anything we know where
he went into the brush at there's really no other place you can go
i've been watching kind of the bottom end of the canyon for the last two and a
half hours so he saw him jump the fence down there
into private of course but luckily
i know an outfitter in here and he made a couple calls and
we got permission to go in there and recover him so that's really cool that
this land owner is going to let us go in and
get them so you know we're all official we have
permission and hopefully that we can find him in
there and hopefully he died quick so
see what we can do see what we can do
well our buck is right over here he's still alive
odds of getting another shot or really really really really low
tonight kind of boogered him a little bit
so we're just gonna glass it and look it over and
see if we can find them in there and at least
if we can keep tabs of them that'll be the hard part
and then getting another arrow into them is the even harder part
so we'll see what happens
we just had that 190 walk up the draw that's the buck we saw wiggling around
over here it's actually a different buck than the
one i shot this morning he's got a dropper
big old bladed g2 different buck our buck went in down over here
and so with all that commotion of the him running around and the does running
around
i would think it our buck that we shot is dead in there
unless he went down draw aways this is a big deer so we're trying to
have our bases covered and see if we can find him
the suspense continues good gravy
we spotted about 12 30 and we got around behind him and shot him about 1 30.
now i knew i hit one lung entrance was high he was quartering away hard
no shooting down on him and upon that arrow exiting i heard a hiss it sounded
like deflating a tire so i knew i popped that lung which i've
never really heard before as he did a mild death run down the
mountain he went a mile down to the creek we watched him go all
the way across this open country now we're kind of in a dilemma because
you got to give that buck some time but you don't want to go too early and
bump him and you don't want to go too late and have the meat spoil
it's been in the mid 90s so if that animal's probably dead for
three hours that meat's probably gonna be no good and we went down about
seven o'clock and we slipped in there and we ended up bumping him i do believe
he was on his deathbed he would have died if we would have left him that
night but that's the gamble you gotta take
if we would have left him overnight odds are he would have spoiled for sure
i hate letting those animals go to waste i hate wasting deer meat
it makes me sick um so i wanted to try and recover them that night
now a lot of times those old bucks when they're doing that they're usually going
to make a loop and come back or get back into the same
direction of where they came from they'll very
rarely just follow a crick all the way out or go on a straight line and just
cover country but what saved us here is the open
country we didn't have any blood to follow
but we could see we ended up seeing some birds on them
and that helped us find him so we lost the meat
it's unfortunate i hate when that happens but
in the end that should just be more motivation more desire
to practice practice practice take good shots
that just goes to show you how far an animal can go
on one lung this deer went about 1.7 miles
well here he is we're a day late and a dollar short
hindsight's 20 20 i don't think i would have done anything different
it took us about 48 hours to recover them and to find them
it's definitely a character building experience
and it makes those you know smooth sailing experiences that much sweeter
and that much more rewarding i don't think god intended it to be that
way to be easy every time and so thanks for watching this week's
episode and remember fair chase is the only way to hunt and take trophy big
game