Dean Bortz: 2,347 miles, a blown tire, and one white-tailed buck

Just about every fall since probably 2010 or 2011 I’ve been able to hunt deer, elk, or pronghorn in South Dakota (deer and pronghorn), Wyoming (deer), and Montana (deer and elk). I did hunt the third rifle season for deer and elk in Colorado in 2005 and 2007 without much success, then shifted to the other three states once thoughts turned to western hunting again.

This past fall I again drew Montana’s nonresident big-game combo tag that offers deer and elk hunting, along with a small game license and annual fishing license. Over the past two years, my son-in-law, Chris Parish, of Eau Claire, Wis., has shown a growing interest in archery deer hunting as the grandson, Mason, started picking up the sport from yours truly. Chris is an avid fisherman, but did not grow up in a hunting family.

This spring we searched Facebook Marketplace for a used archery set-up for Chris without finding anything quite right. One day we stopped at Mouldy’s Archery and Tackle in Chippewa Falls and found a perfect used rig for a great price. Chris started shooting with Mason and me and soon found out he’s a pretty wicked shot.

All three of us applied for South Dakota Black Hills nonresident archery tags and drew. Mason attends Eau Claire North High School (can’t believe the kid’s a senior this year) and the school district always has an October break that runs from a Thursday through a Monday, so we’ve taken advantage of that the last four years to take Mason hunting out west – the first three years in the Black Hills where South Dakota offers a $10 white-tailed doe tag to kids 15 and under, then last year to Montana where kids 16 and under can get a discounted deer tag.

This fall we went back to the Black Hills – we know the area well and it’s a shorter drive for those who have less time to spend hunting.

With the return to the Black Hills, we hunted out of Deadwood again at the suggestion of longtime friend Lee Harstad, who used to work as executive director of the Deadwood Chamber of Commerce. He’s now partnered up with a friend and they rent out some pretty cool cabins in Deadwood through their First Deadwood Cottages. Harstad’s Seth Bullock Cottage made a great base camp for that trip.

We didn’t shoot anything, but came close. With this being Chris’s first season of archery deer hunting, he wanted to make sure any shot he took was going to be a good one. Chris and my daughter, Melissa, are keen on collecting or growing their own food, and while he wanted to see some venison floating in a corning brine, he also wanted a shot that would give him the best chance of killing a deer quickly.

He passed on a couple of stalks on mule deer spikes and forks, then had a great 35-minute episode with a dandy whitetail that just didn’t get into range before picking us off. I’ve done all of my South Dakota archery deer hunting from the ground and have had decent success without using a stand or blind. With Chris being new at this game, I probably should have set up a blind, but we move a lot in the Black Hills, so dedicating all of your time to one spot is difficult for me to do.

We found several spots holding a good number of deer overall, not to mention bucks. One morning we saw a whopper of a whitetail buck that would have been fair game with a rifle, but not so much with a bow.

One bonus discovery we made – the archery range south of Deadwood. We shot there several times at distances out to 80 yards. Being able to shoot at 60 and 70 yards very accurately gave Chris the confidence he needed had he been able to get shots at deer anywhere from 40 to 50 yards. That just didn’t happen. This time.

When not hunting we looked for spots where Mason could fish. The young man had a great time fishing trout in Black Hills ponds and streams and ended up spending more time fishing than hunting. I’m pretty sure he’ll be fishing the Black Hills any chance he gets the rest of his life.

MORE HUNTING FEATURES FROM OUTDOOR NEWS:

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Once they headed home, I went back to some of my old hunting spots and ended up 15 yards from a medium sized mule deer buck one late afternoon. The buck stood broadside, but his rib cage was covered up by a bushy pine bough. The buck turned, walked off slowly, then stopped at 40 yards, but offering only a Texas heart shot. I’ve seen YouTube hunters make that kind of shot on a deer, but I’ve never made a hunting video, so I passed on that. Had I been a South Dakota resident with an elk tag, I’d have had a better chance at a bull elk than a mule deer or whitetail buck.

From South Dakota, I went to eastern Montana to work on a deer tag. Once again I might have gotten a little too picky and passed up nice bucks early on so I could keep looking for that real schloppus, as Tom Bahti would say. Oh, I saw a schloppus or four, but one mule deer I didn’t shoot at, and one I shot at but missed. The other two whales were white-tailed bucks that I could have killed, but I would have had to do so with the passenger side front bumper/tire of my 2009 GMC. Boy, I’d give just about anything to have seen either of those bucks through my scope instead of the windshield.

And how could it be a Bortz hunt without something going to hell in a handbasket? I was hunting towards Miles City one day when I swerved to miss a chunk of metal on the road. Only I didn’t miss. The metal cut a rear sidewall. Luckily, I was able to reach Scott at Tire-Rama in Miles City – you’ve met Scott here before – and he had a “take-off” Cooper AT3 on hand.

“Those tires aren’t even a year old,” Scott said. He knew that because he sold me four new ones last November.

It turned out OK, though. On the last morning of hunting a medium whitetail presented himself under a brilliant Montana sky a goodly ways out there and I didn’t miss.