Table of contents for August 2018 - Big Game in Bowhunter

AN ELK BUGLE rolling through the trees. The damp, cool morning air of an otherwise scorching pronghorn hunt. These are the things that I live for each year as a Western bowhunter. However, my otherwise successful bowhunting career seemed somehow incomplete, because I’d never taken a truly large mule deer. Living in Arizona, with statewide archery deer success averaging only about seven percent, I knew I’d need a good plan if I was ever going to get it done. So, I chose an area that had a solid reputation for producing some of the best public-land mule deer in North America — the Arizona Strip (the mostly uninhabited area between the famed Kaibab Plateau and Utah’s southern border). Then I patiently waited 13 years for my name to be drawn...…

I couldn’t remember the last time I had a blister during a hunt. Over 37 years of bowhunting, I’ve been immune to them, yet there it was — layer separation — on my big toe. I felt the hot spot developing as I came to the end of a 12-mile death march that was 80-percent sidehill hiking. Covering ground in the MacKenzie Mountains of the Northwest Territories was easy, at least from a terrain perspective. The green, treeless valleys surrounded by jagged shale slides and towering, rocky peaks were devoid of any cover taller than the belly of a fox. It seemed to be devoid of mountain caribou as well. For three days we had been hiking the extreme wilderness, seeing no more than a handful of caribou. In fact,…

QUESTION I’m planning my first Western hunt. My teenage daughter will be hunting with me. Any recommendations? Jim Manning, Florida ANSWER Antelope, pronghorns, speed goats — whatever you call them, you’ll find no better “starter” animal. Why? Let me count the ways. 1. The most common way to hunt antelope is from a blind at water, which is also the best way to get a clean, killing shot. That’s the number-one selling point for antelope. With a good blind setup, success is virtually guaranteed. 2. Hunting from a blind for antelope is physically easy, so you don’t burn out a new hunter — or yourself. Essentially you crawl into your blind, sit in a comfortable chair, and wait. If you can sit quietly for several hours a day and shoot…

THE GRIZZLY WAS OCCUPIED CHASING SALMON WHEN I LOOSED AN ARROW FROM MY LONGBOW. ON IMPACT THE BEAR SPUN LIKE A TORNADO, FIGHTING THE ARROW. AS I’VE DONE DOZENS OF TIMES, I SUBCONSCIOUSLY GRABBED ANOTHER ARROW FROM MY BACK QUIVER AND NOCKED IT BY FEEL. The shaft, fletched with turkey feathers, drew smoothly. My eyes locked on the flash of the chest, behind the moving shoulder, and the 56 pounds of draw weight of my ACS longbow jumped from my fingers. At under 10 yards, the arrow struck home, taking out both lungs. And my quest for the 29th species of North American big game animals with a longbow ended in a whirlwind of excitement. At 14 years of age, I went to my first archery banquet in Sturgis, Michigan, at…

THE COFFEE WAS ALMOST READY, as boat wrangler Cory Custalow threw a few eggs and some bacon in a pan. Not many words were spoken. It was dark outside, and we were all still half asleep. It had been extremely warm for mid-September, and it hadn’t slipped below freezing a single night until today. In these conditions, the moose hunting had been really slow, the rut hadn’t started yet, and the cows were still wandering around by themselves. That is really not important though, because I was in a little cabin in the middle of nowhere with my dad, having a strong cup of coffee with canned milk and talking about unimportant issues. Guide Cody Powell opened the cabin door to let some fresh air inside, and to lessen the…

1 BURRIS® ORACLE™ RANGEFINDING BOWSIGHT •Instantly calculates and displays aiming points •Riser-mounted activation button •Accommodates up to 176" drop at 100 yards Minimize movement while accurately ranging targets with the Burris Oracle Rangefinding Bowsight (starts at $799). A riser-mounted button turns on the built-in IR laser rangefinder, and the range to the target is shown along with an illuminated pin for the precise drop and angle-compensated aim point. The illuminated pins are displayed on a vertical LED bar. The bar also has a fixed 20-yard pin. If ranging is unsuccessful, standard dots in 10-yard increments will be displayed. It has locking micro-adjust knobs, 2nd and 3rd axis adjustability, and an optional rear sight system. Contact: Burris Company, 1-888-440-0244, burrisoptics.com. 2 CUDDEBACK® H20 LONG RANGE IR •Super fast trigger speed •Time…

I WAS 11 YEARS OLD when I talked my parents into buying me my first bow. It was a Shakespeare recurve. At the age of 12, I bowhunted big game for the first time. That would have been in 1967, and I was immediately hooked. Two years later, at the age of 14, I killed my first big-game animal with the Shakespeare — a whitetail doe. Fast-forward 50 years and many big game animals later to 2017. I’m relocated to Alaska and still hooked on bow-hunting at 62 years of age. But my 50th year bowhunting didn’t begin in Alaska. Like many old codgers (by the way, Larry D. Jones won’t let me into his exclusive “Old Codgers Club,” which seems to have a moving admittance age), I do the…

It didn’t take long before we started seeing what we had come there for. Black dots littered the distant sidehills shortly past Galbraith Lake,and many of them appeared to be bulls! From the time I was old enough to read, I can recall perusing my father’s hunting magazines and dreaming about hunting exciting places outside of Wisconsin. One magazine in particular that I remember well had a giant caribou on the cover, and since that day I’ve always wanted to hunt them. At the time, it was a farfetched idea one likely to never transpire. I did not know then that 20 years later I’d be living in Alaska, with seemingly endless opportunities to hunt these nomadic, giant-antlered critters. While there are arguably better locations in Alaska to hunt caribou…