At about 9:00 am, we walked back to his pickup and drove home to see what the plan was going to be. We were greeted at our house by pancakes, eggs, bacon, and orange juice. After our annual Saturday morning breakfast with the gang, plans started falling into place. Dad and Monte were going to bust the brush for some bucks in the sandhills and Erickson's Island. My friend Jed had drawn his first deer tag of his life that summer....a treasured mulie buck permit! It was a good thing that our pal Jeremy Heen had access to some of his dad's and neighbor's land across the river. And it turned out that he knew where to find the gray ghost on that morning.
Wes Lindvig is Jeremy's neighbor. He farms about 4 miles south of the Heen farm. Out in Western North Dakota, "neighbor" can include anyone living within 20 miles or so, depending how much you like the guy. We arrived at Wes's place just in time to see Dirk McWhorter drag his nice mulie out of the back coulee with his pack horse. Man was it nice! Wes told us about the 7 mule deer bucks that he had spotted near the home place. In the words of Ryan O'Flanagan, "We should go try the spot that the good ol' boy was talking about." This was the plan.
We arrived at the first coulee at about noon. The day was turning out to be a beautiful one indeed. The sun was shining brightly, and it was so quiet, I bet you could have heard a mouse fart. At least eighteen inches of fresh snow had blown into the coulees. Now Jed was the only one of us with a mulie tag, so we put him on stand on the top of the coulee with Jeremy. While Dirk, Ryan, and I walked the coulee to the south, they were going to glass the coulee and try to spot any movement. The 3 of us soon took off hiking through the knee-deep snow. About a half mile down into the coulee, we encountered the worst possible scenario...... Fresh people tracks!!! Gol darn it!
While tredging north back towards the pickup, the coulee branched into a "Y." The three of us had walked down through the eastern branch. On the return trip, Dirk and I decided to scout out the western wing of the coulee. We sent Ryan back to the coulee to get Jeremy and Jed. We told them to meet us on the township road that ran east and west, as we angled toward it in a northwesterly direction.
At the time, Dirk and I were unaware that the coulee we were tracking would never meet up with this township road. The coulee's direction soon twisted so that we were heading due west; parallel with the road, and about 3/4 mile south of it. That was irrelevant, because we were soon into some fresh mule deer sign. Many freshly melted beds, buck rubs, and fresh urine marks. By looking at the fresh urine marks, we could tell that there were some males up ahead of us somewhere. Our theory was soon proven correct, as 3 bucks and a couple of does escaped out of the coulee to the east, and split the gap between Dirk and me, and Jed's lookout spot. They were undetected by the mighty hunter, Jed.
But not to worry. Our good buddy Wes told us that there were seven bucks in this group, right. Well right indeed. With Dirk on the north side and myself on the south side of the coulee, it gradually meandered to the north again. As I rounded the south bend, I heard Dirk getting a little excited. We had just delivered a wake up call to four more mulie bucks and a few more does. They hopped around the next bend in the coulee and were heading for west. I figured that they would all soon be in Montana by the way they were running, but luck would be in our favor. Through our rifle scopes, we could see the small herd stop at the next tree row which was about a mile away.
