Emily’s one hunt for the year

 Emily was the only one to draw a buck antelope tag in ‘24, in fact, this was her only hunt this year. I had put her in for a unit next to home so that we could find random hours, after work, to run out and look over antelope throughout the fall.

I enjoyed this hunt with her because it turned into date nights. We would run out for a couple hours look over a handful of bucks and these date nights always ended with the same result. Much like Goldilocks, the bucks were either too thin, too short, nothing seemed just right. The last night we scheduled to hunt,  right before dark, we had found a beautiful 78 inch buck with long sweeping horns and solid prongs..

It seemed like forever, Emily stared at it through her binoculars at this pronghorn and finally made the decision. This wasn’t the Buck she wanted to kill. I ain’t gonna lie, I was a little deflated. We went home thinking her hunt was over but we had a great time with plenty of opportunity.

The second week of November, I came home from a couple out of state hunts with just a few days left of antelope season. The problem was, pronghorn drop their horns early to mid-November and we were right in the middle of it. We decided to make a loop around the unit and see if more bucks had moved in and whether they were packing horns or not! We laughed as we rolled into one large herd where 90% of the bucks had dropped already.

We knew it would be slim pickings  But we were enjoying ourselves. We rolled into a new valley, and out across the valley we could see a buck packing both sides and appeared to have a very mature body profile. At this point, I was done with any words of encouragement or talking her into anything, she knew what she wanted. You could’ve blown me over with the feather when she said “that’s the one!”

As we got into distance, she laid prone with the 6.5 PRC.  The Buck knew we were there, but wasn’t too agitated at 450 yards. I had set up the spotting scope with my phone as Emily was setting up for the shot. I heard the safety click and quickly pushed record on my phone to barely capture her quick shot, which was perfectly placed into the boiler room.

Emily and I are at an age where this sort of hunt is comfortable, the excitement is there , but we’ve learned how to tame it and work together as a team. This buck is special, although his horns aren’t overly long, nor do his prongs swoop out very far, but his horse-like head and missing teeth, shows his age. The buck was down to his last year of surviving this open landscape and I couldn’t be more proud of Emily and her choice of antelope.